Newest Literature Essays

Tennyson's The Lotos-Eaters is a poem which can be interpreted as having several meanings. While it can be understood as a lament for masculinity in peril, it can also be interpreted as expressing regret for the mariners' indulgence in forbidden...

The Land of Green Plums, by Herta Müller, is a novel arguably as defined by its language as its content. There are many interpretations of Müller's literary style, and one of the most cogent is that it serves to show the reader how indirect, and...

In “Sweat” and the accounts of Zora Neale Hurston in, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”, there are many elements of the modernist period in play. The most important being the welfare state of African Americans in America at that point in time....

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde is a novel which is arguably entirely about duality. The most obvious example is of course that of the contrast between Jekyll and Hyde themselves, but underneath that is a...

“I am writing a woman out of legend. I am thinking how new it is – this story. How hard it will be to tell” (Eavan Boland). Much of twentieth-century Irish literature engages in issues relating to gender. Although stereotypical representations of...

Throughout The Poisonwood Bible, author Barbara Kingsolver uses Nathan Price as a representation of the dangers of the combination of religious fervor and power in the wrong hands. This is not meaning to state that religion on its own is bad...

With the advent of both modernism and post-modernism, the twentieth century was a time in which poetic expression was extremely diverse. Especially in the aftermath of World War Two, poets sought to widen the scope of their craft; they...

In Yukio Mishima’s classic twentieth century novel, The Sound of Waves, one might initially hold some misconceptions towards the message of the story. It’s simple enough easily spot certain seemingly-sexist elements and immediately make the...

Everyone has dealt with troubled times, which can accurately be described as ‘dark times’ or ‘internal storms.’ In the poem “Storm Warnings”, Adrienne Rich organizes the poem’s main statement in the middle of the poem in order to mimic the buildup...

The works of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf represent the eve of first-wave feminism, where traditional Victorian principles have been challenged by controversy in the Royal Family, the more assertive role that women played in the First World War...

Victorian literature, like almost all literature, speaks inherently of the social, philosophical and religious issues which molded the people of the time. The Romantic ideals of the singling-out and celebration of the self are often challenged by...

Young Adult Literature is shadowed by misunderstandings and biases. The genera is seen as a negative influence upon young adults or it is seen as a stepping stone in which teens use to work their way up to the “classics.” The stories in YA novels...

Can a man living in society be content? In the essay, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, author Jean-Jacques Rousseau addresses this very question. Man first originated in the state of nature, where he was alone and only dependent on himself....

Ernest Hemingway is widely regarded as one of the finest modernist literary minds, and his first novel The Sun Also Rises (also known as Fiesta) is held in as high regard. It is based on real events in Hemingway's life, ones which he novelized...

When looking at A Streetcar Named Desire – a tragedy, after all – it is traditionally required that there should be a selected antagonist, a ‘villain’ so to speak. Stanley Kowalski, you could argue, is that ‘villain’. It is evident that throughout...

Both The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley are novels that introduce dangers in the form of an ‘enemy’ – the details of which enemy are largely unknown by the reader. Wells and Shelley, though dealing with enemies...

A national ethos of the United States, the American Dream, is the ideal that all U.S. citizens should have an equal opportunity to achieve prosperity and success through persistence, determination, and hard work. There are countless stories,...

Lewis Carroll’s depiction of a fantasy world in the novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) captures the attention of the reader via the incorporation of talking animals, “curiouser and curiouser” (Carroll 2012 [1865], p.12) events and the...

“There are times when even the tiger sleeps.” This Chinese proverb is essential in understanding the character of Lindo Jong, mother of Waverly Jong, in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. The book, written as a series of interwoven vignettes, delves...

Propelling subjects into action, inciting inanimate objects into movement; verbs meet and surpass these functions. Without verbs a sentence would fail to be such, a clause would fall in rank down to a phrase or a simple phrase. There are three,...

According to Plato, true knowledge originates in the realm of the Forms, or universal, eternal, constant, and absolute truths that only the mind can access, such as the Form of the Good or the Form of the Just. Forms are not part of the visible...