Newest Literature Essays

Metaphysical poets were concerned with grappling with original and unusual intellectual concepts, and none more so than John Donne, who amalgamates sacred and profane imagery in his verse in order to shock a deeply religious Jacobean audience. In...

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and August: Osage County by Tracy Letts are two emotionally-charged plays about dysfunctional families in the 20th century. While the plays take place in very different settings and time periods, both...

The Sexuality and Population debate is conspicuous in the plot of the novel The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy. As the novel expands, the story remains mostly in relation to the main components of the debate, as outlined by Grant Allen and Havelock...

Allusions occur around us everyday. Neighbors make jokes about the most recent episode of The Voice, your best friend responds to your texts using only Taylor Swift lyrics, and your mom quotes Mean Girls nonstop. These allusions add depth to daily...

Oftentimes, the best representation of a nation can be found within literature. Such is through for Michael Gow’s 1986 play Away, which offers a distinct depiction of Australian society in 1968, a time when crises such as the Great Depression and...

Marya Hornbacher’s memoir Wasted was published when she was only twenty one years old, and describes her struggle with eating disorders throughout her adolescence. Her experience is greatly influenced by the fact that she is a woman in a...

What do people really want, and how far would they be willing to go to get that something? Is it always worth it - to get what one most desires, but not to be happy? These are the very questions that Kurt Vonnegut explores in his satirical novel ...

Analytical lenses allow for readers to gain a deeper insight into a literary work, but since there are many, it can be easy to focus on a single lens and miss critical aspects of a story that only another lens would bring to light. Guy de...

To consider the different aspects of motherhood as written by Morrison in her 1987 novel Beloved, inspired by the story of an African-American slave, Margaret Garner; we must first examine the assumptions made in the figure of an ‘ideal mother’ in...

In Thérèse Raquin, Zola creates bodies criss-crossed by tension through contrasting his characters’ temperaments (the “natural” self) with their outward surroundings and circumstances (social norms, family expectations). It is the stark contrast...

Although the moral ambiguity (and subsequent confusion related to Laclos’ social instruction) is the overarching obscurity within the text, it is the subtleties of the language and stylistic features of Les liaisons dangereuses that ensure this...

The early modern period brought with it a reshaping of European culture, and in particular, the derogatory perception of women, rooted in a traditionally male view of the female as inferior in both mind and body[1]. This view pervaded the...

Readers of Frantz Fanon’s work The Wretched of the Earth often find themselves conflicted regarding the message he conveys concerning the use of violence as a means of achieving liberation from a colonizer. His inherent requirement of violent...

Throughout his illustrious career, E.E. Cummings produced some of the finest poems, plays, and paintings the world has ever seen. While many are masterpieces, few are as unique as his leaf-style poems. Perhaps his most famous – and arguably his...

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams presents desire as an overwhelmingly destructive and negative force. All of the characters grapple with their desires: both Blanche and Mitch desire companionship, Stella desires to upkeep her life with...

There are a copious of characters that play some vital role in Chronicle of a Death Foretold – minor or major – that individually pose as an example or symbol for a theme or idea. Consider the bishop, who only appears momentarily in the beginning...

The French philosopher Jacques Rousseau had a great influence upon Romantic writers with his radical yet traditional views on education; where he believed that women’s education was considerably different to that of a man. He famously said; ‘the...

Sylvia Plath, the author of The Bell Jar, once said, “Is there no way out of the mind?” (Sylvia). Like her protagonist, Esther Greenwood, Plath struggled with depression and mental illness. This aspect of her life became a very prominent theme in...

As is suggested in Armfield’s 1986 version of Twelfth Night, Orsino is certainly in love with the idea of love, at least at the beginning of the play, as his opening soliloquy is spoken as a performance to the party guests, suggesting that his...

A same story can be perceived differently depending on who reads it. Indeed, depending on our cultural background and the historical period in which we live a story can take on different meanings. Similarly, our perception of a story may change...

“Antigone”, by Jean Anouilh, is a political allegory written during the Nazi occupation of France in the early 1940’s. The play served as a way for Anouilh to subtly persuade the people of France to rebel against the Nazi regime and state power....

The American identity in James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and Ralph Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game” is depicted by the respective protagonists’ visions of individualism in contrast to the concept of fate. In both texts, Thurber...

In the dystopic society of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report,” prophetic data regarding potential crime is obtained by Precognitive beings, or “Precogs,” in an effort to abolish the ineffectual post-punitive justice system initially in place....

In the anonymously written, late 14th century Middle English Arthurian poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, human instinct intersects with chivalrous codes in Gawain’s conflicting tests of integrity. While the narrative promotes chivalrous...