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Throughout the Golden Age of Spain, art and literature were used to express the events of this transitional period in European history. Love is a centralized theme that often conveys subliminal messages about moral, social, and historical issues throughout a plotline. Within pieces of literature such as Fuenteovejuna, the definition of love is questioned in each of their own different contexts. How love is defined as either selfish or selfless in Fuenteovejuna determines what message Lope de Vega is presenting to the audience.
Lope de Vega was an incredible and rebellious writer for the Golden Age time period. In this period of peace, prosperity, and overall well-being, many people of Spain found his writing techniques to be revolutionary. Contrary to the typical rules of playwriting, aspects of his plays included numerous plot lines, time gaps, and the use of more than one setting. Fuenteovejuna is a great example of the newly recognized tragicomedy genre during the Golden Age of Spain. Lope de Vega presented current events throughout his works displaying his personal opinions and components of his own life that made him a revolutionary writer. His work inspired other writers to step outside the social norms of writing and produce other revolutionary pieces throughout history.
The Golden Age population believed that love was godly and a strong mechanical force driving the universe in a continuous circle. This idea is clearly evident in Lope’s tragicomedy Fuenteovejuna. He uses this and other beliefs to persuade and justify to the reader a sense that love is responsible for the order in the world. Lope de Vega portrays events relating to greed, envy, and ambition. The outcomes of these events bring disharmony, represented as s...
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...due to his elite background, but proves that he lacks honor compared to the townspeople due to the way he improperly uses his power.
To conclude, Lope de Vega uses specific events to display the cyclic transition from selfish to unselfish love. The havoc from killing the Comendador is resolved from the town’s joint efforts of selfless acts out of love for Fuenteovejuna. In this play Lope de Vega demonstrates how characters handle these two types of love in context in order to reach out to bigger issues. The author’s revolutionary style of writing shows the use of a theme in order to address the larger picture. Fuenteovejuna is a perfect example of multiple events coming together through the connection of love. The writing style of the play expresses Lope de Vega’s feelings of love related to moral, social, and historical issues throughout the Golden Age of Spain.
When we think about the force that holds the world together and what makes humans different from animals, one answer comes to our minds - that humans can love. Love is a state of mind that cannot be defined easily but can be experienced by everyone. Love is very complicated. In fact it is so complicated that a person in love may be misunderstood to be acting in an extremely foolish manner by other people. The complexity of love is displayed in Rostand’s masterpiece drama Cyrano de Bergerac. This is accomplished by two characters that love the same woman and in the course neither one achieves love in utter perfection.
Love is heavily intertwined with being human. Indeed, everyone doubtlessly experiences some form of love in their life, be it towards objects or people. This love is organized into three types; eros, philos, and agape. Eros, likely the most common kind of love in western culture, denotes sexual desire, or lust. Philos covers love among friends, or love for the purpose to gain something. Agape, the rarest of all, encapsulates selfless love, or the willingness to die for another. All forms are present within the three works, Voltaire’s Candide, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, albeit in differing levels.
From the beginning of fiction, authors have constantly exploited the one topic that is sure to secure an audience: love. From the tragic romance of Tristan and Isolde to the satirical misadventures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, literature seems obsessed with deciphering the mysteries of affection. The concept most debated is the question of where the line falls between lust and love and what occurs when the two are combined, and few portray it more clearly than Edmund Rostand in his French drama Cyrano de Bergerac. The influence of fickle physical attraction and deep romantic love on each other are explored by the interactions of the four main characters: De Guiche, Christian, Roxane, and Cyrano.
...cruelty. Although love sometimes disguises itself, it always finds a way to survive even in the darkest of places. Valjean and Manette turned their lives around, through the love of others. Lucy and Bienvenu served as saving graces for many by loving people when nobody else id. Consequently the true meaning of love surfaces most prominently in the lives of the unfortunate, hence all the characters within the novels depict love. The thriving of charity presents itself through simple acts, but ultimately in the giving up one’s life for another. For love lives in the hearts of the people, but reveals itself their actions. Thus in acting out of love, one defines love, and displays it for the world to see.
Romantic literature of the Middle Ages have strong themes of love. In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” courtly love, amongst many other types of loves, can be analyzed linear to the main character’s struggles and accomplishments. The story has an idealization of romanticism and the following paper will determine whether spiritual, courtly, and erotic types of love are considered a suffering or an ennoblement towards the main character.
The Lais of Marie de France is a compilation of short stories that delineate situations where love is just. Love is presented as a complex emotion and is portrayed as positive, while at other times, it is portrayed as negative. The author varies on whether or not love is favorable as is expressed by the outcomes of the characters in the story, such as lovers dying or being banished from the city. To demonstrate, the author weaves stories that exhibit binaries of love. Two distinct types of love are described: selfish and selfless. Love is selfish when a person leaves their current partner for another due to covetous reasons. Contrarily, selfless love occurs when a lover leaves to be in a superior relationship. The stark contrast between the types of love can be analyzed to derive a universal truth about love.
Love is often misconstrued as an overwhelming force that characters have very little control over, but only because it is often mistaken for the sum of infatuation and greed. Love and greed tread a blurred line, with grey areas such as lust. In simplest terms, love is selfless and greed is selfish. From the agglomeration of mythological tales, people deduce that love overpowers characters, even that it drives them mad. However, they would be wrong as they would not have analyzed the instances in depth to discern whether or not the said instance revolves around true love. Alone, true love help characters to act with sound reasoning and logic, as shown by the tales of Zeus with his lovers Io and Europa in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.
“The Knight’s Tale”, for example, uses the concept of a knight not only to parody the concept of the hero, but also to question the well-established courtly love convention. This last concept refers to a set of ideas about love that was enormously influential on the literature and culture of the medieval times for it gave men the chance to feel freely. Also, it gave women the opportunity to be an important element in the story – not only decorative. However, when scrutinizing the tale, the readers can realise that all the aspects of a knight’s love are exaggerated and conveyed throu...
Fuente Ovejuna is a play written by the Spanish playwright, Lope de Vega. It was first published Madrid in 1619 as a reincarnation of an actual historical event that took place in the actual city of Fuente Ovejuna. The University of Houston’s theatre department put on a production of Fuente Ovejuna, successfully recreating the play’s story and theme with the use of superb acting, enveloping set pieces, and convincing costumes.
Love and hate are powerful and contradicting emotions. Love and hate are also the subjects under examination for several centuries yet even to the present day; it remains to be a mystery. For the past centuries, writers and poets have written about love showing that the stories of love can never fade way. For this essay, I will discuss three English literature sources that talk about the theme of love and hate. These are the poem Olds "Sex without Love”, the poem Kennel "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps and the story by Hemingway "Hills like White Elephants. I will use the poems to compare the traditional stance of sex that are within the parameters of marriage and love versus the belief that love is in itself an act of pleasure
The tales of King Arthur and many of their numerous characters are well known in literature. The Arthurian world is one of the great myths of modern times. Those great pieces of literature have many common themes, one of them being courtly love “L’amour Courtois”. This paper talks of courtly love as seen in King Arthur’s world especially examining “Yvain or the Knight with the Lion” and “Lancelot: or the Knight of the Cart”. Furthermore, one of the goals is to show how that courtly love could be seen in today in our world.
José Maria Eça de Queirós, though not worldly renowned, is arguably the greatest Portuguese novelist of his time. In 1877, he wrote a novel titled “The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers” (“The Tragedy”); however, it was not published until many years following his death. The novel is a tragic love story about a cocotte (prostitute) named Genoveva de Molineux and a lawyer named Vítor da Silva. The story follows the love between these two individuals which ultimately leads to the death of Genoveva. When first appearing in the orchestra audience in Lisbon, every man was attached to her beauty and wanted to know her. Vítor falls in love with Genoveva at first sight without previous knowledge that she is a high-class prostitute. However, the tragedy begins when Genoveva is told by Vítor’s uncle, Timóteo, that Vítor is her son. Unable to cope with what she had just learned, Genoveva commits suicide; neither herself nor Timóteo disclose the truth to Vítor. When asked about the novel, Eça had stated that it is a cruel story, one of the best he had yet written (at that time) and “a real literary and moral bombshell” (Queiroz, preface, ¶ 3-4). “...nineteenth century writers knew that incest in Greek Tragedy represented the protagonist’s hopeless fight against fate. Finding a close correspondence with contemporary Lisbon society, aimlessly debating political, economic and social problems, unable to control the nation’s destiny, does not require a great stretch of the imagination” (Ponte 79).
The Knight’s Tale, for example, uses the concept of a knight not only to parody the concept of the hero, but also to question the well-established courtly love convention. This concept refers to a set of ideas about love that was enormously influential on the literature and culture of the medieval times for it gave men the chance to feel freely; and women, the opportunity to be an important element in the story – not only decora...
In classic and modern literature alike, the romanticisation of love is a very common theme. From “Romeo and Juliet”, to coffee shop poetry, love seems to be the basis of everybody's lives. However, love isn’t always as it seems. In literature and in the real world, love ends tragically, and breaks people down from their true potential, therefore, should not be idealized. Love in literature is cruelty romanticized, and these romanticized thoughts are brought over to the real world, where people begin to believe these things.
Love has been expressed since the beginning of time; since Adam and Eve. Each culture expresses its love in its own special way. Though out history, though, it’s aspect has always been the same. Love has been a major characteristic of literature also. One of the most famous works in literary history is, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. This story deals with the love of a man and a woman who’s families have been sworn enemies. There love surpassed the hatred in which the families endured for generations. In the end they both ended up killing their selves, for one could not live without the other. This story is a perfect example of true love.