Newest Literature Essays

When a person is referred to as ‘mature’, it does not necessarily mean that he/she must be an adult. In Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, maturity is a recurring theme. Yet, the main characters are mainly comprised of children. This brings forth...

Jean Rhys novel Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the most important post-colonial works that examines the effect of colonialism on Jamaica. Part of this examination is the exploration of how the aftermath of slavery affects Antoinette’s relations with...

Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark features a variety of references to Oedipus Rex in its plot and characterizations. Several critics have discussed these similarities in psychoanalytic interpretations of the novel, but the Oedipus parallels serve...

Rife with opportunity, urban centers often allow the diverse groups of people drawn to them to realize their dreams and achieve their goals; however, the challenges that come with a bustling city life are not suited for everyone. One excerpt from...

The core of the American Dream, for many, entails liberty, a value historically represented through New York’s famed amusement park Coney Island. Millions of spectators visited the park as a place of leisure to escape social prescriptions as well...

How does civilization progress? How do the ideals and standards of a society change over time and adapt to technological advances? Throughout the majority of recorded history, progress and change in this sense is the result of an antithesis, or an...

With the increasing emphasis on cultural exchange in recent literature, writers have attempted to point out how difficult it was for the people to maintain their ethnic identity besides their national identity. Assimilation into the mainstream...

Greek theatre, portrayed in Medea, emphasizes the characters and the plot through the structure of Greek theatre as well as bringing about a new moral and social portrayal of Greece. Originated in Athens around the 5th century BC, Greek theater,...

Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” describes the events leading up to the sinking of the Titanic as well as the aftermath; however, on a deeper level, the work explores the theme of the conflict between man and nature. These opposing...

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is such a symbolically and philosophically dense novel that anything short of volumes dedicated solely towards its analysis would not do McCarthy’s work justice. However, it may still prove beneficial to hone in on...

Winston Churchill said that ‘the truth is incontrovertible’. This statement construes ‘truth’ as an absolute concept, where there is only one truth, and anything else is by definition a non-truth. Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Thackeray’s ‘Going to...

J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur has been praised for defining the American way of life. In one of his works, Letters From an American Farmer, he attempts to answer the question “What is an American?” In an excerpt from that work, On the...

Author Philip K. Dick once said, “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” The theme of the source of madness is explored in all three stories that form Paul Auster's novel The New York Trilogy. The three relatively short...

In the futuristic world depicted in Feed by M.T. Anderson, nobody thinks for themselves – the feed thinks for them. Everyone is dependent on the feed and bored with their everyday lives. Because of this, the character Violet stands out. Violet’s...

Double consciousness is a term that was coined by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. According to Du Bois, double consciousness is a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of...

In Fast Food Nation, Erik Schlosser addresses the fast food business and the revolutionary impact it has had on the American food industry in the past few decades. Schlosser discusses how fast food was integrated into American society to such an...

Theater and acting fundamentally allow people to become something else- to transcend the bounds of their identities and present, or be presented with, a different reality. The process of writing, a theme particularly prominent in ‘Atonement’, is...

Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist explores the life of Changez in the United States as a young Pakistani man. Throughout the novel, the author switches between two distinctive cultural settings: the United States and a tea shop in Lahore,...

The proviso scenes in Restoration dramas depict a legal negotiation or “bargain” that takes place between the hero and the heroine of the play. In William Congreve’s comedy, The Way of the World, scene V of Act IV plays a significant role but “...

Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter depicts the life of a newly widowed Ramatoulaye who writes a letter to her childhood best friend Aissatou, describing her life as a co-wife and an oppressed woman in the Senegalese culture and tradition. By writing...

Forbidden love is a prominent theme in both The Guide and The God of Small Things. While R.K. Narayan utilizes Raju’s affair as a plot device, Arundhati Roy displays several sexual taboos as part of a broader theme to challenge societal...

In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy clearly values characteristics such as spontaneity, honesty, vitality, and liveliness. He makes this obvious to the reader through narratives that indicate that he values forms of naturalness over forms of...

Elias Curran-Moore

Freudian Explanation for Purpose of the Narrator's dreams in “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress”

Various theories of why we dream range from practical applications like facilitating encoding memories for long term storage...

Each person, wherever and whenever he or she lives, experiences his or her own here and now. Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being explores this idea by following three main characters who are all separated by time and space. Despite the fact...