Newest Literature Essays

Childhood Trauma in the MaddAddam Trilogy

Memories of youth and adolescence are an integral aspect of one’s maturation. The consequences of traumatizing childhoods can affect children throughout the remainder of their lives, as those who fail to...

Feminism is the advocacy of equality between men and women socially, politically, and economically. In Dai Sijie’s novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, the narrator and his friend, Luo, are set on civilizing a young village girl who...

William Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew is set in Padua, where Katherine, the stubborn “shrew” the title refers to, is pursued by a bachelor named Petruchio who is in search of a wealthy wife. Katherine is known as the most ill-tempered...

In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Shug Avery introduces the novel’s protagonist, Celie, to the concept of religious embodiment. Critic Anne-Janine Morey, in her book Religion and Sexuality in American Literature, defines embodiment as “the...

Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” reflects on an author’s feelings to her book after it is published and critiqued as an unfinished product. The poem uses the controlling metaphor of an author and her book to the relationship of a loving...

The romances Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Marie Borroff, and Le Morte d’Arthur, written by Sir Thomas Malory, tell of the heroic adventures and chivalrous deeds of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Through...

Alexander Portnoy, the narcissistic, sex-obsessed protagonist of Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint is a classic example of Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal Complex in action. The Oedipus Complex, as theorized by Freud, refers to a young boy’s...

Japanese culture differs significantly from culture in the Western world. In Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being, these differences are prevalent as Nao visits bathhouses, discovers manga, and witnesses the significance of suicide in her...

In The Creative Process, James Baldwin describes the purpose of the artist – “to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the...

All people go through change over the course of their lives, some fast, some slow, for better or for worse. Often events in one’s youth can be traced to be the origin of such change in direction. In many cases teenage years are the catalyst for...

Each person has a unique worldview, which is largely shaped by one’s environment, knowledge, beliefs, and more. Those who identify similarly are largely grouped with others who may have the same background. Both Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie...

During the early 1900s, an emergence of new forms of music such as blues and jazz brought a host of new musicians, many of them female. These female performers, even when wildly successful, were constantly subjected to unfair scrutiny and...

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman and “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell have plots of very different naturesin one, a mentally disturbed woman is taken to a reclusive house to recuperate while in the other, a woman is accused of...

Jesmyn Ward’s autobiography, Men We Reaped, tells of Ward’s life as it relates to five men that she knew, all of whom died atrociously and unfairly. Throughout her memoir, Ward uses several methods to differentiate herself from her community....

If asked, most people would say women are strong, passionate, loving, but not all of these positive traits truly define who they are. Their nature is deemed the most difficult to define because they have negative aspects that contribute to their...

Florizel and Perdita are depicted in The Winter’s Tale as the epitome of young love. Whilst the majority of the play is surrounded by heartache, pessimism and paranoia, Florizel and Perdita’s relationship serves as a reminder of hope and happiness...

The short story “Letters from My Father”, written by Robert Olen Butler, and the poem “The Writer”, written by Richard Wilbur, both depict family struggles. “Letters from My Father” is about a Vietnamese girl who grew up without a father because...

The tradition of black autobiography has held “a position of priority” (Gates, 1) in the African American community for centuries, beginning with traditions of oral storytelling and continuing with more contemporary voices such as Maya Angelou and...

The word “faith” in reference to religion emphasizes the uncertain nature of religion. By definition, if one is religious, they must trust and take a leap of faith to come to a conclusion about their gods, spirits, or idols. Faith is predicated...

Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise" can be understood as the narrative of a woman who was discarded and hampered by the world and its cruel definition of beauty and success. You can discern the story of a young girl who once felt ashamed to appear in...

In Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Hoban portrays a post-apocalyptic society ravaged by a nuclear war. While he masterfully crafts the story to warn readers about the dangers of technology, the real achievement is in the strange language, called...

Haruki Murakami, Japanese author of The Wind Up Bird Chronicles, has many characters who all have influential aspects on the protagonist Toru Okada. But one particular character, May Kasahara, is one minor character who has a critical effect on...

As easy as it is to take advantage of simplicity, some authors understand the depths of the complex world enough to transcend boundaries and speak to both the fruitful guiltlessness of youth and the world’s seeds, hardest to swallow. In 1990,...

George Orwell, most reputable for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) uses his signature transparent writing style to record a personal anecdote of ‘A Hanging’ conducted in a Burmese prison camp where he worked during the...