Modern Literature Essays

  • Justice in Ancient and Modern Literature

    1227 Words  | 3 Pages

    tribe, a payment for a misdeed, and his life was theirs to do with as they pleased. Justice is something that all of us have a notion of. However we differ in our implementation of it, we all know when it’s been violated. Many of the seeds of our modern idea of justice have existed for millennia. Those seeds comprise two basic forms based on Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian thought – Should justice be rooted on a higher ideal or is justice primarily something established by us in the here and

  • Literature In Modern Times

    2198 Words  | 5 Pages

    CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.0 Presentation From the very beginning of human species, literature existed side by side. Human life, in the form of human passions, feelings, loves, sufferings, and human history existed in the literatures. Human legends started with the very stone age, recorded in the stone scripts. It was a human need to communicate the past to the future generations. Poetry, as an art form, has been for many centuries praised, contemplated and has continued to affect man. Man has used

  • T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land - The Most Influential Work in Modern Literature

    1254 Words  | 3 Pages

    T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" - The Most Influential Work in Modern Literature T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" is considered by many to be the most influential work in modern literature. First published in 1922, it captures the feelings and sentiments of modern culture after World War I. Line thirty of "The Waste Land," "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," is often viewed as a symbol of mankind’s fear of death and resulting love of life. Eliot’s masterpiece—with its revolutionary ideas—inspired

  • Fahrenheit 451 and A Clockwork Orange: Does Modern Literature Stay Modern?

    1210 Words  | 3 Pages

    considering the transient quality of literature, novels must contain relatable and human protagonists, intemporal morals and an overwhelming sense of reality; such that a reader can imagine that the events of the novel could happen in their society or in the present day. ‘Modern’ itself is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as ‘relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past.” and is one literary genre in particular who’s books have been branded ‘modern’ time and time again. Dystopian

  • The Beauty of Art, Music and Literature in Modern Education

    852 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Beauty of Art, Music and Literature in Modern Education Art is the beauty of everyday life. Music is what makes us smile. Literature can keep us up all night. So why is it, that there are so much criticism of these three wonders, in education today? In today's society, literature is what is used regularly. In every subject, in science and in language, literature is used in varieties of writing, both in fiction and prose. We write in every subject, although it is not always the same genre. It

  • Uniqueness vs Creativity: A Critique of Modern Literature

    1726 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the realm of modern literature, a multitude of texts have produced a “thicket of information”(Goldsmith, “Uncreative writing” 1). In this “thicket”, all works seemingly blend together into one jumbled-up, problematic mess. To cut through this jungle of mundaneness, writers aspire to fabricate what they perceive as “creative” literature. There are even guides to doing this; though most are filled with cliché terms and phrases such as: explorer, ground-breaker, and going where no one has gone before(8)

  • Modernism In Modern Literature

    3071 Words  | 7 Pages

    the art and literature in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries and took us beyond familiar reality. While it is believed to have started with the movements like Imagism and Symbolism, its end is disputed about. Frank Kermode uses the term “neo-modernism” to suggest its continuity in the post-war art. The modernist literature is, in most critical usage, reckoned to be the literature of what Harold Hasenburg calls “the tradition of the new”. The task of such literature is its own self-realisation

  • Frustration and Denial in Morrison's Sula

    760 Words  | 2 Pages

    Frustration and Denial in Morrison's Sula A book which is most celebrated for its tale about friendship is found to have a more important theme and role in literature. "In Search of Self: Frustration and Denial in Toni Morrison's Sula," the author Maria Nigro believes Sula has much more important themes in modern literature. "Sula celebrates many lives: It is the story of the friendship of two African American women; but most of all, it is the story of community" (1). And it's not just any

  • T.s. Eliot And Society

    1467 Words  | 3 Pages

    playwrights of his time and his works are said to have promoted to “reshape modern literature” (World Book). He was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri and studied at Harvard and Oxford. It was at Harvard where he met his guide and mentor Ezra Pound, a well-known modernist poet. Pound encouraged Eliot to expand his writing abilities and publish his work. Eliot became an England citizen in 1925 and received the Nobel Peace Prize for literature in 1948. Eliot connected most of his earlier works to French Symbolists

  • Elizabethan Theater

    1311 Words  | 3 Pages

    Elizabethan Theater Drama changed literature and theater into what it is today. I. History of Elizabethan Theater a. forming of theater 1. medieval church 2. mystery and morality b. actors 1. rogues and thieves 2. acting guilds II. Influences and people a. commanding actors 1. Shakespeare 2. Burbage b. other 1. wars of the roses (other historical influences) 2. laws restricting theater III. The theaters a. prices 1. seating 2. stage b. the theater and the globe 1. locations and characteristics 2

  • Exploring Fear in Howl, Basketball Diaries, and Cat's Cradle

    2112 Words  | 5 Pages

    "yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars" (Ginsberg 11). Like many authors of the modern literature movement, Allen Ginsberg explores the bomb's psychological affects on many Americans during the 1960s. Modern literature describes the chaos of the 1960s, caused by increasing societal problems and fear of the new atomic bomb. Writings such as The Basketball Diaries, "Howl" and Cat's Cradle express concepts

  • Prejudice and Racism in The Jewel in the Crown and Heart of Darkness

    1353 Words  | 3 Pages

    Racism in The Jewel in the Crown and Heart of Darkness The effects of British colonialism are reflected in literature from both early modernism and post colonialism. Racial discrimination tainted both eras portrayed in the British morale of white supremacy over non-European counties unfolded. Heart of Darkness exemplifies early modernism in the British explorers viewed African natives of the Congo as incapable of human equality due to perceived uncivilized savagery. Personal interaction between

  • Comparing Incest in Vanity Fair, Lolita and Annabel Lee

    1998 Words  | 4 Pages

    Incest in Vanity Fair, Lolita and Annabel Lee In modern literature there are many examples of incest. Incest is presented in the plots of many books. Of course it is not in its classical form as it is in Oedipus legend. The form is changed but incest as such can be recognized . Here are two excerpts to display the latter. One is from Nabokov's Lolita, the other is from Thackeray's Vanity Fair. " I had thought that months, perhaps years, would escape before I dared to reveal myself to

  • Modern Misogyny in Literature

    2142 Words  | 5 Pages

    One bad habit our society has passed down for centuries is the thought that men are better than women and that women have a lesser place/value in this world. We see it in the media, in paychecks, and in jobs across the world. We even see it in literature. In Shakespeare’s Othello and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace both men become violently obsessed with the women because they are both inherently misogynistic. Before delving into the worlds of Othello and David Laurie, we have to define misogyny first.

  • Romeo And Juliet - The Role Of Love

    1192 Words  | 3 Pages

    The modern literature community recognizes Shakespeare as one of the most brilliant minds in the history of dramatic theatre. His unmatched ability to represent human behavior and emotion makes the love in Romeo and Juliet the driving force behind the play's success. Shakespeare incorporated many different types of love in order to capture the hearts of the Elizabeth Era. Juliet's nurse shows amazing concern for the young girl's well being. She, in some ways, takes the place of her natural mother

  • Feminism in Sophocles' Antigone and Shakespeare's Othello

    2412 Words  | 5 Pages

    important forces in shaping our modern-day society. Thanks to the women's rights movement, females today enjoy rights and freedoms that are unprecedented in the history of Western civilization. However, it was not always this way. Whereas modern literature that contains feminist messages barely gets a second thought, readers in our time are intrigued and impressed by feminist works coming from a decidedly male-biased past. Two of the greatest works of Western literature, Antigone and Othello, written

  • A Comparison of Hamlet and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

    2485 Words  | 5 Pages

    Shakespeare's Hamlet, and McMurphy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest It is suggested that in modern literature, the true element of tragedy is not captured because the protagonist is often of the same social status as the audience, and therefor, his downfall is not tragic.  This opinion, I find, takes little consideration of the times in which we live.  Indeed, most modern plays and literature are not about monarchs and the main character is often equal to the common person; this, however

  • The Life and Literary Works of Shirley Jackson

    4279 Words  | 9 Pages

    brother moved from San Francisco to Burlingame, California, about thirty miles away. "According to her mother, Shirley began to compose verse almost as soon as she could write it" (Friedman, 18). As a child, Shirley was interested in sports and literature. In 1930, a year before she attended Burlingame High School, Shirley began writing poetry and short stories. Jackson enrolled in the liberal arts program at the University of Rochester in 1934. But after periods of unhappiness and questioning the

  • Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded as Grunge Writing

    1085 Words  | 3 Pages

    hyperrealism, urban realism, gay fiction or it just wouldn’t be published in the mainstream. It is possible it got labeled grunge in the descriptive context of being dirty because it has descriptions of harsh issues that are not in the norm of modern literature. Drug references, homosexuality, anonymous homosexual encounters, trans gender characters, cultural/sexual identity, a father’s sexual abuse towards his cross dressing son, place, and swearing are the elements in Loaded, besides the swearing

  • Canterbury Tales Interpretive Essay

    628 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Evil Side of Human Nature Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales became one of the first ever works that began to approach the standards of modern literature. It was probably one of the first books to offer the readers entertainment, and not just another set of boring morals. However, the morals, cleverly disguised, are present in almost every story. Besides, the book offers the descriptions of the most common aspects of the human nature. The books points out both the good and the bad qualities