Newest Literature Essays

The works of Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Junot Diaz have featured communities that are formed around a shared sexual identity: one that is either chosen to be empowering or one that is forced upon the community members. In some cases, these...

Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem, "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child," is a beautiful poem written to a young girl. The narrator of the poem notices the girl's youthful innocence, and cannot help but think of the future pains and heartaches she will...

Of the two modern critical objections to Uncle Tom’s Cabin – sentimentality and intrusive narrator – the first one is accurate while the latter objection is disingenuous; however, both criticisms belie the overtly political nature of the book. In...

In both “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, evil is something that the characters carry with them throughout the stories. The revelation of their personal evil is a journey that begins with the ostensible picture of faith and good...

The notion of love is something that evades language, yet has been a staple theme in literary works all over the world. Writers have struggled to express this abstract feeling in language and accord it with a definition so that it can finally be...

Winston Churchill, former British Prime Minister, argues that instead of having a definitive end, every journey “will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path.” When a journey qualifies as “completed,” there...

The nature of evolution is change, continuous instances of reaction to what has come before. Therefore, literary history is defined by change as well. The great authors are those who questioned the accepted conventions of their time and altered...

Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop focuses on the efforts of a priest and a Catholic Bishop to start a diocese in the New Mexico Terrain covering themes of religion, violence, hypocrisy, and race. The novel entails two intriguing...

Inspired by the 1927 Giorgio De Chirico painting of the same name, Sylvia Plath’s 1956 poem, Conversation Among The Ruins, is an ekphrastic sonnet structured as a story about author’s own failed relationship. The original painting, done in the...

A cymbal crashes in a room full of people. Everyone immediately turns and stares in interest. The incident starts and ends in a heartbeat, but the sound attracts an incredible amount of attention - one that can rarely be overtaken by anything...

Many have lamented the tragic story of a Japanese wife abandoned by her American husband in Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera, Madame Butterfly, which was adapted from John Luther Long’s novella, Madame Butterfly. In the opera, Cio-cio san (Butterfly),...

Ambrose Bierce’s “The Coup de Grâce” is a work of Civil War fiction that, along with his other short stories on war, thematically opposes those texts of his time whose patriotism seemed “aimed at popularizing the “martial spirit” of the age”...

WoMan: The Inescapable Patriarchy

Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes and Rupi Kaur’s poetry and prose collection, Milk and Honey, may cover vastly different topics, but both works have one thing in common – a female narrator. While The Book of...

Cultural Cacophony: Conrad and Sembène on African Culture

Literature has always served as a window into the souls of cultures. However, the perspective from which one looks through that window can substantially shift one’s view of the culture in...

Both Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia (Buddha) and Rawi Hage’s Cockroach are situated within the diaspora writing that proliferates Canadian literature as a whole. Diaspora is a Greek word, a combination of the prefix dia- (meaning “through”)...

Often horror movies can tell more about a culture than the movies chosen as classics. The Friday the 13th series reflected the prudish “return to family values” of the 1980s where teenagers who engage in premarital sex are killed. The last decade...

The genre classifications of J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy anthology have always been an interesting discussion topic for both scholars and casual readers alike. Not many compendiums can claim they range in style from children’s book, to modern...

Arguably the most iconic scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is the reveal of what exactly he has been writing during his time at The Overlook. As a terrified Wendy flips through pages and pages filled with only the phrase “All work and no play...

The Maltese Falcon is a work of detective fiction by Dashiell Hammett that follows a private investigator, Sam Spade, as he tries to piece together the truth surrounding an ancient statue of a falcon. Spade embodies 1930’s American masculinity –...

Through the first line of Sula, Toni Morrison gives a sense of place, community, and culture. By starting the novel after all the events of Sulahave taken place, she is able to give the reader the notion that every single detail is responsible for...

How has the timeless story of King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, and Sir Lancelot changed over the years to reflect the time period(s) that they are recreated in? From the Medieval period to the 1960’s, the legend of Camelot has been repurposed to push...

Power struggles are a defining feature in many of William Shakespeare’s stories. Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and Julius Caesar are three prominent examples of such stories, each depicting a powerful protagonist and their conflicts with others...

There are many overarching themes that can be applied to the different genres of literature. People can relate to these themes, and they can be applied to short fiction, poetry and drama. The theme of fate is something that can be applied to all...

In the novel The Monk, author Matthew Gregory Lewis’ portrayal of women is often blatantly fused with patriarchal stereotypes. While not surprising in a piece of literature from this period, the weak development and cliche characteristics of many...