Newest Literature Essays

Thomas More’s Utopia involves circumlocutory ways of distanciating the author’s self from Hythlodaeus’s delineation of the exemplary city. More wanted not only to obfuscate his agency as the author, but also lend a unique credibility to the...

Through the overcoming of past obstacles, a journey may be a catalyst towards the broadening of one’s understanding of the world. Gwen Harwood’s poem Father and Child explore new understandings of mortality engendered by a transformed perspective,...

“Live or die, but don’t poison everything”. These words were said by Anne Sexton, a 20th century poet, whose poems dealt with the complexities of her tragic personal life, including the dysfunctional and often disturbing relationships with her...

The MaddAddam series by Margaret Atwood can best be described as a commentary on every aspect of society. One of the most prevalent themes in Atwood’s series is religion, which is apparent in the names she assigns to different aspects of her...

Charlotte Smith’s late poem ‘Ode to Death’, published in 1797 in her collection of Elegiac Sonnets, draws on the idea of accepting death as a ‘friend’ (l.1) rather than fearing it. The ode carries a deep sense of desperation and sorrow, as it...

Judith Plaskow is one of the leading scholars of feminist theology. Her book, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, was the first book of Jewish feminist theology ever written.[1] She has also written an additional book, a...

The Tin Flute by Gabriel Roy is a Canadian fiction set up in the early 1940’s during the Second World War when Canada was going through the great depression. The book revolves around characters who strive to find romance, alleviate poverty and...

Tennessee Williams’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire, illustrates the struggle of power between economic classes and the changes taking place in America at that time, regarding social status. The constant tension between Blanche and Stanley...

The genre of the detective story is one of the most remarkable categories of short fiction. The Sherlock Holmes stories are genuine masterpieces created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the usage of the detective stories elements has contributed to...

Throughout the novel Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, Paton uses suffering and the quest for the son together to add to the tragic framework of the novel. Paton uses suffering, an element derived from Greek tragedy in which the main...

Perhaps the most iconic scene in Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) begins at 11:38. When Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) and going to meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) to spend the evening together, and Catherine excites the scene...

Upon entering the United States, the Statue of Liberty welcomes incomers with “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, / Send these, the homeless, tempest tost...

The graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is a bildungsroman, a novel that deals with the coming-of-age of the protagonist which happens to be the author herself. Marjane develops from an ignorant child to a mature adult as she struggles...

In Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, navigating the American establishment as an African immigrant is a constant struggle for Ifemelu and others like her. Ifemelu soon starts to experience that the power in America is held not by the few,...

In Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, the blank white space occupies more area than all of the black text and pictures combined. As a relatively short American Lyric, one must assume that this half of the book – the parts where nothing is said – has great...

Pope Francis said, “He -Jesus- does not stand a safe distance and does not act by delegating, but places himself in direct contact with out contagion”. In this quote, Pope Francis notes how Jesus selflessly gets directly involved in the earthly...

Aravind Adiga adopts an epistolary form in The White Tiger, depicting the plight of a low caste servant, trying to escape the physical and mental chains that forge his destiny. Adiga initially presents a protagonist in Balram, who is engaging,...

For characters in The Great Gatsby, rendering delusive illusions of one’s self may be fundamental to climbing social hierarchy, but compromising the tension between their painted picture and concealed canvas may be internally agonizing. From the...

The transparent eyeball is a philosophical metaphor introduced by Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The transparent eyeball represents an eye that serves only to be observant rather than reflective. Therefore it teaches us to take in all...

Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche is caught between the contradictions of her own character and the society surrounding her. She persistently fights to conceal the truth of her personality and past, failing to comprehend the changing...

In The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga initially presents a protagonist in Balram, who is engaging, despite confessing to horrific crimes. His language, thoughts, and deeds convey his initially good nature. However, by the end of the novel, immorality...

The supernatural elements and events involving them are an important facet of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. Many mythological creatures are referenced, and omens are used as symbols throughout the novel, making up some of the instances where...

The opening words of the story “MS. Found in a Bottle” by Edgar Allan Poe are a quote from the French opera Atys, “Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivre N’a plus rien a dissimuler” (Poe 1). This translates roughly to the idea that a man who is dying...

Texts continue to be valued long after their composition by virtue of their exploration of contextually pertinent universal concerns. The timelessness of Orson Welles’ 1941 feature film Citizen Kane lies in its treatment of enduring human flaws,...