Newest Literature Essays

Notes from Underground, completed in 1864, is considered one of Dostoevsky’s most deviously insightful works, famous for its gloomy description of not only the dark historical period but also the dark environment in which the protagonist lives....

In many parts of the world, child exploitation is an everyday activity that causes many children to be taken away from their families and friends. Child exploitation occurs mostly in areas such as Asia and Africa, but modern authors have described...

It is absolutely no coincidence whatsoever that Mother Earth is portrayed as a woman rather than a man. After all, a large part of the human existence has been spent taking advantage of Mother Earth’s resources. In the same way, many of history’s...

The Victorian Period of British Literature involved many changes in British culture; one of the defining qualities of Queen Victoria’s reign was a loss of faith in the Church. A number of social changes caused an increasing number of people to...

Spanning an elemental and violent family conflict, The Oresteia by Aeschylus is a trilogy containing the plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. As a whole, the trilogy deals with Agamemnon’s murder at the hands of his wife...

Depicting a world where the struggle to survive is elemental, two incisive narratives emerged to describe what life was like during the Dust Bowl. Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time comprises a non-fiction description of life following actual...

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood addresses the laws and ethics of 20th Century America. Laws and ethics may seem to correlate, but Wise Blood shows that such is not always the case. Laws may claim to have ethical origins and serve ethical purposes,...

Joe Christmas is a walking contradiction in the Southern society in which he resides. Throughout Light in August, central character Joe Christmas experiences many factors that contribute to his inability to form substantial relationships with...

Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain" tells of the events that lead up to the sinking of the Titanic through its collision with an iceberg, while on a deeper meaning, highlighting the tragic consequences of the hubris of mankind. Through...

In its creation and consumption, literature involves an inherent contract between reader and author. The parameters of this contract are often set by the work’s genre, and help the reader to determine whether the text should be interpreted as...

While Edmund first shows himself to be compassionate and morally grounded as a character, he also shows that these qualities, as well as his own perceptions, are capable of being corrupted, mainly due to his romantic attachment to Miss Crawford in...

For thousands of years, people have believed devoutly in an omnipotent spirit who watched over them, cared for them, loved them, protected them. A homely priest sheltered from the world in the rural South African countryside comes face to face...

Human government and military seldom see eye to eye, no matter how vital each is to the other. Homer’s Iliad illustrates such a struggle quite well in its capture of the tension between political authority and military force, most notably the...

In the government of any civilization, virtue is not only a preferable characteristic of the ruler or rulers, but a necessary one. Of the virtues, perhaps the two most intrinsically necessary for political decisions are justice and clemency. These...

Language is the basis of all human communication; one could even say language is the basis of humanity itself. In the essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell explains the significance of proper and effective language. He examines...

Human history is rife with episodes of mass purgings, genocides, and tyrannies, driven by an ideal for purity that transcends all else. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, a dystopian society re-establishes itself in the...

While it may be easy to underestimate the importance of scenic descriptions, setting plays an important role in most literature - including character-driven fantasy. Setting can be written to represent conflicting forces or ideals, and to help...

Within The Namesake, Lahiri presents the relationship between men and women as heavily shaped by their environment, heritage and socio-economic background. The relationship between the Ratliffs, Maxine’s parents, Gerald and Lydia, is directly...

“The Island At Noon” by Julio Cortazar follows main character Marini, who works as a flight attendant flying over the Aegean sea and wishes to travel to an island he observes out the window. However, when he makes it to the island, while he finds...

Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wild fell Hall is a novel in which the plights of the female protagonist overlap with the issues faced by the majority of women in the Victorian Era of England. The book raises questions of the Brontës’ family’s sisters...

Throughout the opening scenes of Priestley's An Inspector Calls, Eric is portrayed as little more than a drunken child ('only a boy', as his Mother would have put it). If the work is considered to be a morality play, then Eric is perhaps guilty of...

Cultural divides are difficult to overcome in storytelling, because readers must both re-orient their largest cultural assumptions and understand the ideas of specific, unique characters. However, in The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan effectively makes...

World War II had a profound impact on American culture. Essentially every person in the country was affected in some way, but the war’s impact of African Americans was unique. Although African Americans were indeed Americans they were often...

In Socrates’ Oedipus the King, the character of Jocasta plays a pivotal role in the plot. How one views Jocasta, the mother, and later, unknowingly, wife of Oedipus, is integral to progression of the story and to how one judges the various...