Shakespeare is one of those poets who are considered to be extremely meaningful in everything he creates. His profoundness and insightfulness are obvious in all his works, especially sonnets. In fact, in sonnets, which are not very long, the mastery of the author is revealed to the fullest extent, for only the very talented and intelligent person can add deep meaning to the several phrases, making the ordinary poem a true masterpiece. One of such masterpieces is, certainly, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 121.

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In “A Dream Within a Dream” Edgar Poe uses different methods and themes to create a message of the poem. Poe depicts deep personal feelings through the themes of life, love, a dream and desperation. All the themes are hidden and expressed though symbols and metaphors. The theme of a dream has a double meaning. On the one hand, the theme of a “dream” helps Poe to recreate his past and symbolizes realization of his fantasies. A dream symbolizes something which a person cannot possess, for this reason it becomes so desirable and attractive. Poe uses the theme of a dream to depict his past which has also gone: “That my days have been a dream”.

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In “Candide” Voltaire aimed at criticizing a wide range of ‘evils’, such as corruption, war, natural disasters, greed, hypocrisy of church. Therefore the novel contains plenty of major and minor characters used by Voltaire in the depiction of those problems. The protagonist of the novel Candidade came across most extreme optimistic and pessimistic philosophical views by his travel companions. Candidate and his companions did a great job and dealing with chaotic situations and bringing an end to the story by moulding extreme philosophical viewpoint with proper balance between optimistic and pessimistic philology.

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There exist different approaches to the story analysis of the book. However, the most interesting one is probably offered us by Joseph Campbell and it is often referred to as the concept of monomyth. Campbell himself is famous for his adherence to mythology. Yet, in his book “A Hero with a thousand faces” he proposes absolutely new approach, in which a hero has to undergo three stages – separation, initiation, and return. This basic approach could be successfully utilized in the analysis of “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy.

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In their works, Murasaki and Po Chu-I (Bo Ju-Ji) bring up questions concerning the role of genders in society through themes of love, lust and longing. Murasaki and Po Chu-I represent different countries and epochs but both of them depict s imilar themes of lust and love. “The Tale of Genji” was written in 11th century in Japan and “Song of the Lute” represents Chinese tradition of 9th century (815 A.D.). For Murasaki and Po Chu-I lust and longing are the main things in human’s life. Both writers examine deep personal feelings of their heroes and their striving to love.

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Drama plays are usually evaluated on the basis of their applicability to the real life. It means that if you watch the play and it makes you feel something deep like you would feel in you real life, than this work of art is worth something. Elaborate viewers do not miss any significant thing, which makes the author work even harder trying to satisfy its audience. The latter is the case of Milcha Sanchez-Scott, who put, it seems, much effort to make the play “The Cuban Swimmer” vital, exciting and provoking compassion, sympathy and mere interest in those who read it. Its significance lies in its close interconnectedness with realities of life no matter how hard it is.

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Written in 1879, the play “A Doll’s House” refers to the time when “new drama” appears in Europe, together with August Strindberg he is an author of “Scandinavian school”. The play was highly controversial, as it criticizes sharply “Victorian marriage norms”. Before that time there was a reign of romanticism in the theatre, when theatre depicted “unreal situations, involving royal characters in heroic tragedies, written in rhymed verse.”

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One important way to identify or understand Othello’s characters and to recognize their complexity is to look for parallels and contrasts between various roles, behaviors, and relationships.

Othello, for example, would seem to be the central character in the play as the title suggests, but Iago’s actions appear more influential as he successfully preys on other characters and draws much attention toward himself in his intimacy with the audience. By comparison, then, Othello provides the play’s emotional focus as a man of stature who rises and falls from greatness, while Iago is the intellectual focus as the manipulator who convinces his victims to act and respond in certain ways.

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Nora Helmer is presented as a female protagonist, often portrayed like a doll in the story called A Doll House. Her husband Torvald always shows his dominance in their relationships by calling her “little lark” or “little squirrel” or his “song bird”. He also makes her seem inferior by making parallels to weak diminutive birds and she. They have been married for eight years and have three children. Torvald has recently been hired as manager of the mutual bank and receives a big salary. The Helmers are wealthy. Later on in the first act, we are shown that Nora is not really as helpless as she is first revealed.

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The story “Clean Well Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway was published in 1933, and depicts totally economically ruined world. Everyone and everything is submitted to economic crisis and the Great Depression outcomes. The irony is that many people, like the old waiter and the old man depicted in the story, tried to escape form the instability and to maintain strict control over their terrors sitting under the roof of the “well-lighted place”, which, in fact, also was influenced by the economic crisis.

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All the postclassical Yiddish literature centres around the Holocaust and its causes, falling into two general categories, positive and cynical, depending upon the author’s views and experience of the antedating and subsequent Holocaust events. The positive literature concentrates on the survival of the Jewish people, the acceptance of the occurrences whatever they were, and the barest necessity to live further. At the same time it is pierced with the theme of remembrance and grief and understanding God if possible.

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Compare/Contrast Between Stephen Crane’s “War is Kind” and W.D. Howell’s “Editha”

The main similarity of the poems is female characters, with the help of which the authors interpreted war effects. In his poem, Crane shows that impact of war on women belonging to different age groups. He underlines the grief of women whose father, son and lover was killed. The same technique is used by Howell who depicts the sufferings of a mother and a girl. For both authors, common sense is considered as a rational choice, which includes aims, alternatives, consequences and choice. If the army has made an action, it should have the purposes because common sense is caused by: corresponding values and tasks, alternative rates of actions estimated by it, estimations of various consequences.

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The story of Cleofilas is disturbing with its blunt reality. The first steps of this journey begin with leaving what she knows best, family, friends and location. Cleofilas must start from zero; she does not even know or understand really what is going to happen the night of her wedding. A girl child in a family of clumsy boys and her poor father. She has no mother figure or female friend to tell her about married life. She does not really understand all that being a wife and mother will mean to her.

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Many times in life, people are faced with troubling situations which they react to in many different ways. Some people face their problems in order to overcome them while others try to convince themselves that the problems do not really exist. When reality is ignored, people often become unable to grow and develop normally because in order to grow, internal and external problems must be confronted and dealt with. If reality is ignored, problems are ignored and therefore go unsolved and even unacknowledged.

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Edmund Spenser in his epic romance, The Faerie Queene, invents and depicts a wide array of female figures. Some of these women, such as Una and Caelia, are generally shown as faithful, virtuous and overall lovely creatures. Other feminine characters, such as Errour, Pride, and Duessa are false, lecherous and evil. This might seem to be the end of Spenser’s categorization of women; that they are either good or bad. Yet upon closer examination one finds that Spenser seems to be struggling to portray women more honestly, to depict the “complex reality of woman”.

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