Newest Literature Essays

In the middle of the Civil War in Alabama, Peyton Farquhar, a wealthy farmer, awaits death upon Owl Creek Bridge. With a noose around his neck, Union soldiers watch as the gentleman collects his thoughts in his last moments before he is hanged for...

An individual’s actions and thoughts are often products of one’s nurture and experiences. These can provide a path to one’s destiny. In his novel The Wars, Timothy Findley explores the origin of Robert Ross’s incentives and investigates his...

"You can walk in another’s shoes, the saying goes, but you cannot walk in his skin.” -Tracey Mishkin

Lucille Clifton is an author whose work brings forth attention to “forms of oppression such as the exploitation of women, people of colour, and...

When some audiences read The Awakening by Kate Chopin, they perceive a feminist piece ahead of its time, or search for hidden metaphors and allusions. Some readers would be content to simply ponder the significance of the title. However, although...

As French writer Luc de Clapiers said, “The art of pleasing is the art of deception.” William Shakespeare, an artist of words, employed deceit and trickery in his stories to make them complex and engrossing. Deceit is a subject not often spoken...

Both White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James are Gothic tales that share some traits in common with supernatural superstitions that remain popular today—ghosts, legends, and, of course, haunted houses....

From their introductions in Emma, Jane Austen sets the characters of Frank Churchill and Mr. Knightley apart, with Mr. Knightley immediately being described as "a sensible man" while Frank Churchill is described as "very good-looking" and in...

Throughout an examination of Plath’s poetry, a reader will witness prominent themes of inadequacy and mental anguish. The poet’s lack of self-belief is primarily evident in ‘Mirror’, as the poet struggles to overcome her insecurities. Furthermore,...

"What do you sell?” asks Delmar, leaning in to the one-eyed salesman. “The word of God, which, let me tell you, there is damn good money in during these times of woe and want.” The Bible has been misused, misquoted, and misrepresented by history’s...

In A.M. Homes’ novel Music for Torching, married couple Paul and Elaine find their relationship to be as static and boring as the Westchester County suburb in which they live. Unsatisfied with their marriage and fearful of a lifeless future, they...

Matigari, a novel by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, alludes to the effects of post-colonialism in an African society. In the novel, the main character, Matigari, in a search for truth and justice, stumbles upon several instances of these effects. In many ways...

“The gulls in the alchemist do not deserve wealth so much as a perfected image of themselves.”

There are two groups of gulls in The Alchemist; on the evidence of Jonson’s commentary on his own work, he presented the image that the gulled...

The dominating theme of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief is an ironic one. Here is a novel where a main character is nothing less than the symbol of mortality itself, Death, yet the story continually celebrates the life spirit that is contained...

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser are two extremely different books about the same topic: the American food industry. Paired excerpts explore the behind-the-scenes work that goes into processed food and how the...

The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 represented a triumphant moment of success for the city of Chicago as well as for the entire nation. Yet, the grandeur of the fair was paralleled with an equally great amount of corruption and abuse. During this...

A sense of identity is what defines the human being, what sets each person apart from the next, is the constitution of an individual. In the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the author uses information from...

Chapter 17 sees all members of the Ramsay family and their guests at dinner. The interaction of these characters in this chapter allows for themes such as challenging expectations and, more importantly, the theme of communication to be explored....

The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers discusses the life of a 12 year old girl, Frankie, who is transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Frankie feels disconnected from the rest of the world, having lost her mother when she was born,...

The first president of the United States, George Washington, famously stated, “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter” (Washington). Often an uneducated working class is exploited for...

Growing up in a multiracial family can be confusing, especially if one’s family history has been kept a secret for years. This is the problem for James McBride, whose lifelong struggle of self-identity kept him from truly understanding and...

In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas argues that true human fulfillment stems from one’s closeness to God. Worldly pursuits, like fame or glory, fall short in comparison to the happiness that comes from arriving at a vision of the divine...

In the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, the human race is characterized by a constant desire to achieve immortality. For the scientists at the CorpSeCorps, this means creating the Anooyoo Spa and the genetically mutated pigoons—symbols of...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that explores what is universally thought to be one of the most bewitching and relatable themes present in literature: love and longing. There is something about the notion of love or romance that has the power...

Margaret Atwood, renowned author of many novels, crafts the beautiful Maddaddam trilogy, consisting of Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood, and Maddaddam. The series is portrayed as a work of feminism, environmental activism, and even...