Newest Literature Essays

Gwendolyn Brooks's poem “The Bean Eaters" highlights the loneliness and poverty of an old couple, people who have been forgotten by pretty much everyone. They have been forgotten by their kids who have grown up and moved out; they have been...

Within any genre the individual gears and cogs of a film may vary in degrees, but the film still ascribes to a set of rules preordained by the genre’s progenitors. Like a meme, genre films such as the Western will warp and intentionally borrow...

In Arthur Miller’s 1945 novel Focus, there are many prejudicial attitudes that manifest themselves throughout the action; Miller clearly takes a stance that all of these anti-Semitic views are irrational. The setting of the novel is in mid-1940’s...

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner depicts the lives of two Afghan boys who grow up in the turmoil of invasion, heartbreak and war. Amir, the protagonist and narrator of the story, is Pashtun and Hassan, a Hazara boy, is Amir’s servant with a cleft...

‘I may assert eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.’

(Book I, II. 25-26, p. 4)

It would be strange for any reader not to see that John Milton’s most famous work, Paradise Lost, is a deeply religious text, simply by glancing at...

That Virginia Woolf’s epic essay “A Room of One’s Own” would be greeted unenthusiastically by its 20th-century male critics goes without saying. That it has managed to become a foundation of modern feminist thought since its publication is also...

Poverty is one of the most important themes of The Visit, and serves as the foundation for the entire plot. If the town of Guellen had not fallen into deep poverty, Claire Zachanassian would have never had to visit the town and present the...

In his seminal work Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison depicts the dramatic and enlightening account of the life of the novel’s main character as he grows in understanding of himself and the reality of the world he inhabits. This unnamed narrator, a...

In the novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, the character of Mrs Danvers is presented as a foil to the narrator: a character who provides a contrast to the narrator in order to highlight her attributes. Mrs Danvers is the housekeeper at Mannerly...

Jonathan Edwards straddled two definitive eras in American history: the hardline beliefs of the Puritans he was raised by in the Connecticut Valley and the freethinking, logical reasonability of the Age of Enlightenment (Norton Anthology 396)....

“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is one of the most anthologized, widely-read, beloved, and analyzed poems in the American canon. A short poem consisting of four stanzas of five lines each composed of simple direct language constructed...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a tale in which one simple action leads to a tumbling of catastrophic events. When the Mariner shoots the Albatross, a bird who has brought him and his sailors good fortune, he does so...

What we watch on screen in the course of a film is the culmination of the skills of artists: writers, directors, animators, actors. When a book is made into a film, screenwriters may use aspects of literary design, which have the ability to alter...

People tend to hide their true personality from the exterior. Some individuals do it to keep their weaknesses or flaws hidden while others are reluctant to show their true self to prevent any harm that might externally or internally attack them by...

Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was the first gothic novel, and thus was the originator of many of the distinctive features that have pertained throughout the history of the genre. Early gothic was characterized by the rejection of enlightenment...

First performed in 1728, The Beggar’s Opera is exceptional for its focus on the lower classes. The playwright, John Gay, used this focus for a particular social and political reason: to criticize the lower and upper classes in order to elevate the...

Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s book Guantanamo Diary is a work that deals heavily in complex themes. Questions of morality, accusations of terrorism, and descriptions of torture abound in his story, but it is the subtle undercurrent of death throughout...

Shriver uses the page (455) itself as an opportunity for Eva’s character to justify the actions and the, apparent, true intentions and thoughts of her son, Kevin. As we do not hear this from Kevin himself, due to the affectionless psychopathy he...

First performed in 1677, The Rover captures and explores the Libertine philosophy through the words and actions of Cavalier characters. The playwright, Aphra Behn, seems to hold contradicting vindications in this work: a rewarding look at the...

Stride Toward Freedom by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a civil rights era memoir detailing the importance of love in revolution, and the necessity to revolt non-violently and with understanding towards others that are in different cages than your...

The title of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a reference to a famous Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Conan Arthur Doyle. Baker Street’s most famous resident deduces who committed the crime in this particular story...

In the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, an experienced and insightful man shares a compelling life philosophy with a younger, less refined man. This transmission of ideas opens the interpretation of how art and society influence...

Dr. James Knoll, a forensic psychiatrist, says, “The paranoia exists on a spectrum of severity. ... Many perpetrators are in the middle, gray zone where psychiatrists will disagree about the relative contributions of moral failure versus mental...

In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, spend the entire duration of the text waiting for the illusive Godot, leaving the two in a cyclic and repetitive course of events as they wait for him to...