... of a rejected foreign wife, who was to kill her husband's new wife, the bride's father, and finally her own children, must have made the audience which saw it for the first time in 431 B.C.E a bit uneasy. Heroes, it was well known, were violent beings and since they lived and died by the simple code ... "help your friends and hurt your enemies- it was only to be expected that their revenges, when they felt themselves unjustly treated, would be huge and deadly. The epic poems [i.e., Homer's Iliad and Odyssey] do not really question Achilles' right to bring destruction on the Greek army to...

• Word Count: 1681
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School

... •e harbors the torturing memory of an enormous, nameless guilt that drives him toward an inevitable doom. He is in his isolation absolutely self-reliant, pursuing his own ends according to his self-generated moral code against any opposition, human or supernatural. And he exerts an ... attraction on other characters that is more compelling because it involves their terror at his obliviousness to ordinary human concerns and values. •Norton, 522). Heathcliff and Rochester fit slightly different molds of the Byronic ... Heathcliff catches Hareton from a fall "by a natural impulse •...

• Word Count: 1508
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School