Newest Literature Essays

Arthur Miller confronts the “weight of truth," "weight of authority," and the "weight of law" in The Crucible. This play expresses the different complications that come along with having to bear each "weight." Many characters in the play conform...

“If I decide to be indecisive, that’s my decision,” is a famous quote from one of the most prominent poets of the Mersey Sound era, Roger McGough. Since the vast majority of the poets from this era were very close friends and performed their works...

For the Ancient Greeks, the concept of love was divided into six different categories: in particular, eros represented the idea of sexual passion and desire. While current societies tend to glorify this variety of romantic love, Greek culture...

Prozac Nation chronicles a bright 19-year-old woman’s struggle with depression. Elizabeth “Lizzie” Wurtzel is an aspiring writer and freshman at Harvard University. With a childhood plagued by divorce and abandonment, Lizzie has a history of...

The poem “A City’s Death by Fire” by Derek Walcott is a semi-autobiographical poem, a recollection of the Great Fire of 1948 in Central Castries (the capital and largest city of St. Lucia). The Great Fire attacked three quarters of the town and...

As conceptualized by Luce Irigaray, notions of self-affective touch are present in, and in fact are immensely important to, Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. Irigaray conceives of touch as necessarily constituting tact, which calls...

Many people believe that total equality for any race, sex, or religion is worth the effort. Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” focuses on individuals’ greatest qualities and the altering of them to exceed the average standard. For...

Reading a Dostoevsky book doesn’t give us any insight into the mind of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky almost never makes a blanket statement in his books, and, in general, very few opinions voiced by characters in his novels can be traced back to...

Through his work, A Mad World, My Masters, Thomas Middleton challenges the viewer’s perspectives on adultery by portraying it as comical, rather than starkly reproachable. During the first four acts of A Mad World, My Masters, the play seems to...

One of the most universally acknowledged beliefs states that there is no bond as strong, forgiving, and irreplaceable as a mother’s love for her child. On the contrary, poet Seamus Heaney challenges this conviction throughout his poem “Bye-Child”...

Of the consequences of maintaining an obsessive nature, its ability to cloud rational judgements and encourage humanity to surrender to his darkest, innermost impulses serves as one of its most tragic aspects. Robert Browning explores this concept...

Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner claim, is a newly invented field of study that address the unexpected questions that others fail to explore. As a result, their book discusses and relates a variety of strange yet important topics,...

To a certain extent, Orwell harnesses Winston and Julia’s romantic relationship as the antidote to their oppression. Not only is it the ultimate transgression due to the fact they care about one another more than the state and for a brief time...

The most dreaded lesson in the eyes of a child is the concept of “no.” While most children eventually realize that not everything in the world is available for their taking, the select few who neglect to recognize their limitations inevitably grow...

In Mississippi Trial, 1955 by Chris Crowe, the author tells a story about a boy named Hiram who comes back to Greenwood, Mississippi to visit his Grandfather. When he revisits and goes down memory lane, he discovers that a lot of things have...

Sadly, in today’s world, we do not trust many people but ourselves; with the influences of social media and celebrity culture, we think that we are worth more than others. In The Hunger Games, however, without trusting others you won’t survive....

Widely celebrated as a cornerstone text of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing is concerned with its titular subject in more ways than one. While racial passing undoubtedly constitutes the text’s thematic center, Larsen’s...

In Plato’s The Symposium, Plato details the events of a dinner party, a symposium for which the work derives its namesake, comprised of a group of seemingly well-educated individuals. Plato tells the story of the symposium and the dialogue of the...

The conflict between good and evil is a prevalent theme in literature. Graham Greene incorporates the conflict throughout the text of his novel Brighton Rock. In order to do this he uses two prominent characters, Ida Arnold and Pinkie Brown. Ida...

The act of revisiting the past is akin to responding to the texts that exist there in a particular culture. Since this culture is ever evolving, so is the understanding of the text. The socio-cultural changes that are brought with time lead one to...

Despite the varying contexts with which they wrote their work, as well as the vastly different tone and content, both Chaucer in ‘The Merchants Tale’ and Webster through ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ explore the theme of forbidden love- or forbidden...

Thomas Keneally’s 1987 novel The Playmaker follows the career and personal life of Ralph Clark, a British lieutenant (and prospective playmaker) recently relocated to penal Australia. The storyline is based loosely on true events of the late...

George Farquhar’s 1706 play The Recruiting Officer delves into the careers and personal antics of a male ensemble cast in Restoration era Shropshire. Among these men are the two competing officers Plume and Brazen, the tough Sergeant Kite, and the...

The critical necessity for mutability as part of the human condition, and the risks associated with lack of comprehension of it are exhibited and scrutinized closely in George Orwell’s novel Coming Up For Air, his ante-penultimate novel, and Of...