Literary
Essays

Alessandro Manzoni's only novel The Betrothed is a national institution in Italy and second in popularity in this history of Italian literature only to Dante's Divine Comedy. He was a liberal nationalist from an aristocratic family and a leading supporter of the reunification (Risorgimento) of Italy. His novel is set in Lombardy in 1628-31 and was in fact a call for liberation from foreign rule, which was still the norm in the fragmented Italy of the 1820s. Manzoni had been an unbeliever as a young man, but later rejoined the church and became very devout, which is why he took Dante seriously and incorporated themes and images from his work into The Betrothed. He believed in sin, salvation and damnation, and the power of conversion experiences that both he and the characters in his story underwent. Dante was also from the aristocracy and his family opposed the imperial party in Florence that was allied with the Holy Roman emperors, although he was not a liberal or nationalist in the modern sense.

Writers who place their tales in exotic locations may have visited those locations or they may be imagining them on the basis of an image they have of the site. They may also derive what they believe about distant…

Death of a Salesman, playwright Arthur Miller places emphasis on the major theme of reality vs. illusion to better demonstrate that the Loman family generally cannot distinguish between the two concepts, and that…

Introduction Postmodernism is, according to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), a reaction to the "assumed certainty of scientific, or objective efforts to explain reality." The real understanding of life, according to postmodernism, is what one's mind – in its own personal reality – tries to figure out and decipher about life. Moreover, postmodernism is very suspicious of explanations that "claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races" and instead it focuses on the truth each individual discovers (PBS). Additionally, it is important to note that postmodernism relies on "concrete experience over abstract principles," and the postmodernist person knows the outcomes of life's experiences will likely and necessarily be "fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal" (PBS).

The modern world is a complex world, despite its many luxuries and ease that have been created by the introduction of the Internet. We are more and more becoming a Global village, with endless possibilities of…

Stephen Crane: A Great Writer of American Naturalist Fiction and Non-Fiction, and of Local Color

The idea of expansion to the Western United States has always been a subject of great interest to the colonials of the 1800s. Even past presidents -- including Thomas Jefferson -- were particularly keen on a westward…

In the case of Right to Read Defense Committee v. School Committee of Chelsea, 454 F. Supp. 703 (D. Mass. 1978), a citizen's group filed a civil rights suit, pursuant to 42 U.S.C.S.

Plea to Remember the Children -- a rhetorical analysis of an essay on alcoholism

The American Family in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying