American Literature

In his play Pygmalion Bernard Shaw examines the affordability of middle class morality from a variety of perspectives and asserts that middle class morality is selfish, egoistic, restrictive and even hypocritical and hence not really affordable. Alfred Doolittle, who is the writers voice in the play, states unequivocally that he cannot afford middle class morality as it constrains his free roaming spirit and prevents him from living his life fully. When he is declared to be the most original moralist...

Death of the salesman is one the most renowned play by Arthur Miller and is considered to be a milestone in English literature. The play had been published in the year 1949 after the Second World War. The play is based upon the journey of an individual in the pursuit of achieving fulfillment of American dream. The main theme of the play is to understand the crucial path that leads to success. The author Arthur Miller has written the play on the basis of certain assumptions including dignity is worthless...

Then current president of the United States of America, president Barrack Obama argues that through the reformation of the health care, the American economy will strengthen. I do concur with him on the matter. Rising costs of healthcare are stifling Americas small businesses, and the president believes that by reforming the health care system, these businesses and the economy in general will be strengthened. It is clear that these small businesses are the ones creating half of the new jobs in the...

Thesis and Outline Richard Connells The Most Dangerous Game and Thomas Wolfes The Child by Tiger are two stories which represent the fact that human beings are susceptible to evil even though individuals strive to achieve goodness, evil lurks everywhere in various forms. However, even though both books carry the miserable truth that man cannot avoid evil, both books still give hope that man can avoid the evil which follows him. The Most Dangerous Game is a story about what it is like to hunt...

Nathaniel Hawthornes short story, Young Goodman Brown, portrays a different side to Puritan society.  The most decorated and highly revered citizens of Salem are really of the devil and are in the midst of worshipping him.  This behavior is definitely against Puritan ideals.  Puritans considered themselves very religious people, and their whole lives surrounded God.  Everything they read, sang, or wrote had to be about God, so seeing them worship the devil breaks Goodman Brown....

The popular saying, all is fair in love and war, goes to say that anything and everything done in the name of love and war is perfectly justified.  It does not matter whether the act is morally good or not, as long as it is done for the sake of these two causes.  With this in mind, a person is reduced to doing anything in order to get what he wants the love of his life or the prize of winning in the battlefield.  Using this context holds that no one can be punished for his actions...

In Kate Chopin s The Awakening, the central character Edna Pontellier comes to represent the feminist struggle for self-actualization and individual freedom from the norms and rules of the governing 19th century Creole society in which she finds herself. However, in examining Edna s  awakening  to feminism and her death as a result of the incompatibility with her desires with the world around her, the majority of the women who create the sphere of Edna s life are too often forgotten or...

The advent of the modern digital telecommunications era has made it easy for information to spread quickly from one corner of the society to another. As a result, the media, particularly television and radio broadcast media, newspapers and online sources of information are playing an increasingly bigger role in shaping public opinion (Carilli  Kamalipour, 1998). It is therefore inevitable that cultural beliefs and practices have been impacted upon by the media both on a global scale and here...

Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper and Susan Glaspells Trifles both reflect the sufferings of women in a strongly patriarchal late 19th century and the early 20th century America. The two works also present strong feminist statements about equality as well as demonstrate Freudian psychoanalysis on the subject of repression. The first is a story of a woman who is locked up in a room to recover from a sort of a mental illness, while the second story is about a woman who is accused of the...

The writings of Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg represent two aspectsof tensions  which were ongoing in American Literature. Barakas (also known as LeRoi Jones)writings are a reflection of racial tension, and Ginsbergs response tends to border on nostalgia.In supportof the two previous statements concerning Baraka and Ginsberg one can examine the poem In Memory of Radio, by Amiri Baraka, which pokes fun at  popular white personalities represented in the media. His reason for this is to asserthis...

This is my letter to the world, That never wrote to me, Emily Dickinson Writing a comparison between these two poets is a hard task. Both are considered prolific poets and masters in their own turn and rights. Both of them had great contributions to literature at large and greatly enriched the treasure trove of sterling literary pieces. It is without a doubt a daunting task and a page would not suffice such a discussion. To start with, the most obvious similarity between the two writers is their...

Homosexuality was never a major concern for me, neither at the personal nor at the social level. Although I was and am aware that there are people who prefer their same sex over the other, the whole concept of homosexuality did not play an important role in my life. Nor do I feel it should, for by understanding homosexuality, one can lose any possible fear one might have of it and see beyond one aspect of the human being to the entire person beyond. As children, one does hear about those that...

Man is a social being and with this lay the very foundations of the formation of a society based on how man views his needs as catered by the world around him. Man moves according to the responses made the social factors which he interacts with. Long before the world has learned to look beyond physical appearance and orientation racism, heterosexism and black sexuality has made a large barrier over social functions and meanings. Gender and race affected the allocation of rights, roles and privileges...

In Arthur Millers play Death of a Salesman, audiences view the final day of Willy Lomans life.  Willy is a failed salesman who is crushed by the economic realities of his failures to perform, and takes those concerns out on his wife and two children by lashing out at them.  On top of this, Lomannow 63 years oldis experiencing the blurring of his past life with his present one, providing him (as well as audiences) a heartbreaking look at a family whose lives were once full of potential....

The Roles of Women in Eudora Weltys  The Petrified Man Written mainly in the form of dialogue, Eudora Weltys  The Petrified Man,  is  the gossip of two women, Leota and Mrs. Fletcher, during the early 1940s. Concentrated on the fragility and, at times, underlying pettiness of the casual relationships between the women of Leota and Mrs. Fletchers small world, the story illustrates the closed off world of women and the beginning changes to their roles in society. In the rise...