Newest Literature Essays

In his play Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov uses many writing techniques to convey a sense of breakdown in communication. While his play has elements of humor in it, making it seem almost farcical at times, Chekhov was truly concerned about the lack of...

Anthony Doerr’s remarkable novel, “All the Light We Cannot See,” is a literary piece that moves briskly, efficiently, and beautifully in precise and pristine sentences. Every sentence is a lyrical poetry that the author carefully structured. The...

In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Offred, the main character lives in Gilead, a dystopia where fertile women are solely used to reproduce children. Known as handmaids, these women are confined into prison-like centers and forced to...

Indubitably, Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' is largely reminiscent of the archetypal Grecian tragedy; evoking an overwhelming sense of pity/catharsis for the female protagonist. However, the constituents of said 'tragedy'; though in...

John Donne's 'A Valediction Forbidding Mourning' opens with an acknowledgement of 'virtuous men' passing away. The concept of death, as grounded in the first line, is an extremely striking way to begin a poem. This striking opening is a typical...

‘The Table’ is a poem in the ‘Birthday Letters’ collection, which contains eight-eight poems detailing the life Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had together before Plath’s untimely death. In particular, ‘The Table’ is a poem about the writing desk Ted...

Language is one of the most important things that human beings use to communicate. Even before there were written words, people communicated through gestures and images in order to explain important things in their lives. Language helps us track...

"This above all- to thine own self be true, /And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (Hamlet, 1.3.154-56). As Shakespeare so eloquently wrote, finding oneself is the key to truth. This idea is a...

The winds of war strike all, and just as spring blossoms are blown from the trees falling white to the ground, young men are killed in their prime by war before they are able to bear the fruit of knowledge. Herman Melville observed the pre-war...

Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go allows for glimpses into some hidden dimension of a dystopian reality through the eyes of the protagonists life; Kathy H. The anecdotal, narrative form of the novel permits Ishiguro to present the protagonists...

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is a novel dominated by the struggle of powerful personalities. The Bildungsroman style of novel explores the coming of age of Margaret Hale, the nineteen year old protagonist, and the ‘struggles’ she faces and...

North and South is a condition of England novel which, like Gaskell’s earlier work Mary Barton, sought to give a voice to the working class and expose the middle and upper classes to their suffering through the medium of literature. Published in...

Light and music are two elements of drama that can become significant in developing the plot and characters. Certain playwrights may further incorporate stage lighting including directional lighting and setting lighting in order to not only divert...

Despite the termination of slavery following the civil war in America, oppression continued to exist through prejudice without any necessary halt. In Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, a black man in his youth stumbles upon the troublesome...

“How will you like being made exactly like other people?” is a question that echoes through Antoinette’s mind early within Jean Rhys’s responsive and revisionist text, Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys 22). Constructing her protagonist from Charlotte Brontë...

Henry James digs deep into the nuances of insanity and prompts the reader to see his protagonist’s madness with a “discerning Eye” in his novella The Turn of the Screw. Insanity, though shunned and often feared by the world, must be attempted to...

Beyond the realms of imagination stands a dark stained door, gleaming with light between the hinges. Tree-Ear, a young boy in the book A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park, in some ways leads the representative life of a poor individual in 12th...

Charles Dickens’ novel Dombey and Son displays the patriarch Mr. Dombey in his obvious and complete disappointment in his daughter. Florence, as the only surviving heir to Mr. Dombey, has no worth to him, which he outwardly acknowledges, yet...

Loneliness and isolation are themes explored in various differing ways throughout Tennessee William’s play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1947) and Colm Toibin’s novel ‘Brooklyn’ (2009), mainly through the way their protagonists are presented and...

As an Absurdist, Albee believed that a life of illusion was wrong as in consideration it created a false content for life, it is therefore not surprising that the theme of ‘truth and illusion’ throughout Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf plays a...

An extensive bureaucracy is one of the identifying features of the modern nation state. Distributed government administration allows for those factors which drive the state to function smoothly; without it, enforcing legal codes and economic...

Sometimes the application of a critical response can limit rather than expand our understanding and appreciation of a film.

‘Talk to Her’ is a 2002 Spanish film that is written and directed by Pedro Almodovar. When studying Almodovar, I...

As Benedict Anderson makes evident in Imagined Communities, literature and the nation are often intertwined in a multitude of ways. In the case of Goethe’s Faust, a single work of literature became so meaningful to the German people that they made...

Though written primarily for a young audience, C.S. Lewis’s fiction overflows with Biblical allusion and religious imagery. A Lewis narrative, indeed, becomes a vessel through which he is able to infuse his writing with his own complex theological...