Newest Literature Essays

In his “Areopagitica,” John Milton claims “He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I...

The life and times of Joyce Carol Oates dynamically impact the short story, “Where You Are Going; Where Have You Been” in which music, myth and mores shape the social text corresponding with the 1960s. The 1965 rock song, “It’s All Over Now Baby...

Charles Darwin put forward the idea that nature showed prevalent consistency in a pattern of “survival of the fittest.” In the classic realist novel The Jungle, this concept is also present throughout the entirety of the story. The narrative of a...

Book VII and Book IX of Homer’s Iliad present opposing views on the significance of material wealth in relation to the heroic code, contrasting Hector and Achilles consecutively, who have already been established by the poet as polar in character....

The Conjure Woman by Charles Chestnutt is a frame narrative, retelling a story within a story and incorporating valuable information about the traditional African fetishism practiced by the slaves against their slave masters. Fetishism or Voodoun...

In a country where many are free to learn what they please, express themselves and feel a vast range of emotions, it is an outlandish thought to have these simple freedoms restricted or even relinquished. Lois Lowry’s The Giver follows Jonas, a...

From even the beginning of civilization, social hierarchy molded the formation and development of society. Whether it be the power of a single monarch or that of a democratic board of officials, authority always induces change in both the lives of...

One’s life is shaped and modified as we grow through the relationships one makes, however little, even daily encounters can drastically change the course of life as a whole. In the blink of an eye, something happens, or rather someone happens to...

For all the stereotypes and characterizations that modernism and its literary masters bear, any kind of overwhelming optimism is seldom cited among the accusations. Often summarized as a movement conceived in the wake of the horrors of the first...

In Wyatt's "They Flee from Me," the speaker considers all his previous sexual conquests (with a particular emphasis on one "special" partner), and then wonders why these women are no longer interested in him. Usually in love poetry, the man plays...

Antithesis is a rhetorical device in which two contrasting words or concepts are juxtaposed within a parallel grammatical structure (literarydevices.com). In this case, the repeated use of this literary convention and the balanced structure it...

The nature of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a controversial subject. Mildred Tonge suggests in her essay Black Magic and Miracles in Macbeth that the witches represent women that serve a dark power, most likely Satan, or even that...

In the despairing modernist world in which Ernest Hemingway’s characters exist, Romantic conventions are incompatible with the demoralized state of the world. Therefore, traditional ideals such as the “true hero” must be radically redefined in...

In the poetry collection Gardening in the Tropics, Olive Senior instructs readers in the traditions of the Caribbean, like the traditional uses of Annatto and Guinep in her poem ‘Annatto and Guinep’ and the traditions of immigrants in her poem ‘...

The zeitgeist of Romanticism, while notoriously broad in its philosophy, had definite universal views upon the concepts of the individual, nature and imagination; which constitutes the basis of what today are known as the main aspects of the...

Through the writing and reception of her play Topdog/Underdog, Suzan Lori Parks sheds light on the notion that norms may either challenge the individual to surpass expectation, or they may limit one’s perceived identity to fit what is considered a...

Novelist Ray Bradbury once said, “I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?” (“Ray Bradbury Quotes”). While speaking from a comical...

When love is apparent in a relationship, individuals are willing to make sacrifices for their loved ones. While no relationship is perfect, some are inherently grounded in an unwillingness to make sacrifices for each other; in this regard,...

Yoko Ono once described the 1960’s as an era of release from the conventional bonds of society. To understand fully the rejection of society in the 1960’s, one must also evaluate society of the 1950’s. Truman Capote not only captures the essence...

Magical realism is the art of infusing the supernatural in the mundane. Many Latin American authors exploit the power of magical realism in their novels, in which characters have regular encounters with the spiritual world. This capacity equips...

As a historical novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet[1] alludes to many occurrences, people, places, government acts, and organizations confirming the novel’s veracity by employing history. The book covers the period 1941-1986, a period...

Prison, in its most basic interpretation, is an institution or building made for individuals who broke the law and committed crime. It serves as a punishment or penalty by isolating them from the rest of the “free” world and confining them within...

In most novels, the issue of passionate desire is examined and experimented as characters undergo various stages in their lives – either as the feverish seducer or the object of desire. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Streetcar Named...

Jane Austen’s Lady Susan novel is one of her most decadent Victorian novels which challenges mainstream morality through its protagonist Lady Susan herself. As the epistolary novel proceeds, the written exchanges among the character demonstrate...