Newest Literature Essays

The Anton Chekhov short story titled "A Joke" is an interesting read for the inquisitive readers. Very carefully written, the story allows the readers a chance to dive deeper into the unconscious of the characters and dig out layers of meaning...

The Comedy of Errors, written by William Shakespeare, is mirrored to a major extent by Plautus’s play The Brothers Manaechmus, both of which deal with the issue of separated twins who find themselves in the same town and are mistaken for each...

This essay will look at both the polarity and unity within the mental suffering of characters and voices from Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire (‘Streetcar’) and Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, focusing specifically on the extent to...

Humans possess the innate need to simplify and categorize the complexities of human identity. For the purposes of this paper, fingerprinting, DNA typing and gene mapping are modern day manifestations of the idea that identity is located on the...

People will always revert to what is most comfortable, reliant on their natural state. In Celeste Ng’s coming of age short story, “Girls, At Play”, the debate of nurture versus nature lies in the struggles between four girls. The theme of “Girls,...

The 1994 movie Shawshank Redemption directed by Frank Darabont tells the familiar tale of Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, a successful investment banker turned convicted felon who must spend the rest of his days at Shawshank Prison for...

In her novel Ceremony Leslie Silko overtly breaks from the conventional “Western” narrative. The narrative form that she utilises is broken, merging prose where time is fluid with poetry and stories based in Laguna culture. What she creates is a...

Ireland has, through the arts and its cultural heritage, often been perceived as a fantasy country; fantasy in the sense that it is often depicted in a simplified, romanticized fashion. This can be seen in William Butler Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s...

Russian formalism, as a movement, arose to prominence in a time of great artistic change, where experimentation and the avant-garde rose to the forefront of literature, and introduced new narrative structures and styles. Russian formalism can...

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. -Simone de Beauvoir Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre

This paper seeks to examine and...

The Wanderer is a staple of Anglo-Saxon storytelling and has been recited over countless centuries to new audiences. The poem follows the story of a former warrior who is currently living a life of solitude. After the loss of his lord and kinsmen,...

In Federalist 10, James Madison posits that the greatest threat to government and to the public good lies in the oppression committed by majority factions. Madison defines a faction as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or...

, but of their soul; this is counter-intuitive to the human spirit. D.H. Lawrence presents, in his short story “The Horse-dealer’s Daughter,” two primary examples of persons who have been living in a death-in-life state and then experience a...

In Spies by Michael Frayn, the description of Keith as Stephen’s ‘best friend’ does not suit him nearly as much as the ‘officer corps in [their] two man army. Keith is very obviously depicted as pushy, bossy, dominant and a bully on some...

The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama is a book about a young man, Stephen, who is faced with tuberculosis changing the course of his life by taking him to a small peaceful village, Tarumi. When he first arrives at Tarumi, he meets Matsu, Sachi,...

The most puzzling circle of hell in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno is also one of the first. It is here, in the second circle, where the lustful spend eternity. Canto V is filled with contradictions, puzzlements, and curious word choices. At first...

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” deconstructs misogynist rhetoric proposed in texts such as Valerie, Theofraste, and Against Jovinian (Chaucer 673-83). Respectively, Valerie and Theofraste instruct husbands...

Passing by Nella Larsen tells the story of Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two light-skinned women with contrasting lives during the Harlem Renaissance. As a Harlem resident, Irene Redfield prides herself on her dedication to African American...

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is without a doubt considered to be a lyrical masterpiece and a cornerstone in Coleridge’s writing career. The epic seven part poem was originally published in 1798 as a part of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical...

Joseph Conrad’s work is an apparent staple of the 20th century British canon. Few literature students manage to weave their way toward a degree without being exposed to his iconic novella Heart of Darkness. While it is undeniably a powerful piece...

The Comedy of Errors, written by William Shakespeare and first performed by 1594, largely deals with the concept of identity, from the farcical mistaken identities of twins Antipholus and Dromio, to the roles of the women around them. In an...

Throughout the course of Leo Tolstoy’s iconic tragedy Anna Karenina, the presence of trains is essential both in terms of symbolic resonance and as a way to communicate social commentary and setting. Tolstoy employs train imagery as a way to talk...

Within Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Joe Gargery is presented as the epitome of human compassion and kindness, the moral center of the novel. He is a strange mixture of wisdom, stupidity and generosity, being the most human of all the...

In the early twentieth century, many writers began to give a more complex, nuanced, and realistic portrayal of the issues that surround gender. Virginia Woolf, often heralded as one of the most important voices in feminist literature,[1] wrote...