Literary
Essays

"No one attacks me with impunity," is the motto of the Montressor coat of arms -- at least, that is what Montressor, the narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado," confesses to Fortunato.

In recent years, two related and overlapping schools of literary theory have emerged that have offered competing responses to the relationship between Renaissance drama and the political power of Tudor and Stuart…

¶ … roles of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, with particular focus on the gender identity of Hero. For all that Much Ado About Nothing is a cheery play, it has more to do with gender…

Humanism and the Renaissance: An Overview of the Revival

Giovanni Boccaccio's masterpiece the Decameron, is one of the greatest literary works that follows the tradition of the frame narrative. Some of the one hundred stories that Boccaccio gathered in his work originate in…

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, in the Deep South-East of the United States in 1925. Her adolescence was marked by the death of her father, from whom she later inherited the disease, deadly enemy with whom she…

¶ … True Story of Ah Q" and "Diary of a Madman"

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her Father forty- one At one point or another, every schoolchild typically hears this small rhyme scheme, whether to accompany a hot-scotch match or as a joke towards the macabre. The Lizzie Borden case, however, was one of America's most famous trials – like the Salem Witch Trials, The Scopes ‘Monkey' Trial, and even O.J. Simpson. All of these become iconic, yet reflect somewhat of a mirror of society and American culture of the time. Looking at these trials, we can dissect some of the social mores and cultural trends of the time, learning much about society and the very real assumptions underlying the bias and dominant cultural schemes of the time. Of course, we have the trial transcripts – quite usually far less intriguing than the books, articles, and now movies about the subject. However, we also have the unconscious testimony – what is not said or what is said in certain ways that reflect the issues that are really in context (e.g. budding adolescents in a Puritanical society in Salem, etc.).

Theatrical performance, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through the twentieth and into our current era, has been at the forefront of social and political change. This has been arguably true of the art…