Newest Literature Essays

Life, in essence, is a search for belonging, purpose, and meaning. However, humans often do not possess enough wisdom to determine what is of worthy pursuit in life. While double-digit years of life experience may appear a period of time long...

Both the speakers in “The Gift” by Li-Young Lee and “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke look up to their fathers with wide-eyed admiration. In comparing the two poems, what stands out the most is the similar theme; that is, each boy has received...

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself” - Friedrich Nietzsche....

Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, Macbeth, eloquently displays the wildness of human imagination and the consequences of rapid action. The play's plot is written by the ominous whispers of Macbeth's conscience, which lead to avaricious and selfish...

Both vicious and highly intelligent at once, wolves and leopards are often compared to the most venerated hunters and warriors of Homeric poetry. Though the role of predator and prey are switched in each of these pregnant pauses, the skill and...

Carol Ann Duffy’s love poems are often riddled with oxymoronic statements, which affirm the changing nature of love and how it is perceived in different relationships and in different periods of time and life. "Valentine" and "Havisham" are two...

Edith Wharton published an enticing tale of two older women looking back on their pasts titled “Roman Fever” in 1936, only a year prior to her own death. The short story took place in Rome with both women looking out onto what is called “Memento...

Linda Pastan’s 1988 poem, “To a Daughter Leaving Home”, concerns the idea of children growing up and leaving, whether it be for college or simply riding a bike for the first time. The speaker of the poem starts out with a nostalgic feel,...

Virginia Woolf grants us an access to a new concept of time in “Mrs. Dalloway”, through which temporality-moment is investigated in two contradictory ways: one is continuous, deadly, dissolving while the other is placid, immortal, infinite; hence...

Mama Kaide and Pa Mowi, the two protagonists in the novel, were born in the village of Imperi, Sierra Leone, but moved elsewhere after their adolescence. The two main characters assert the necessity to return to their native village to see family...

“Your soul is the whole world” (Hesse 7). While the value of a soul is something that cannot be understated, the belief that it is the whole world does not leave room for many other people. In Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha the titular character...

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”, published in 1844, proves to be a cautionary tale of the repression of guilt. The story is told through the perspective of Montresor, a man who is deeply insulted by his ‘friend’ Fortunato. Montresor...

One of humanity's greatest fears is of the unknown. Not only for what may be there but how it could change the person that chooses to venture inside. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a classic novel that details that very fear. One man,...

Charles Dodgson was a logical and analytical thinker, a man who liked finding and applying patterns both in his career and in his writing under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. One example of this tendency is how Carroll wrote the poems in Alice in...

‘How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it…’

Virginia Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall suggests a number of ways of considering the mundane in...

‘Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer.’

The ‘dead’ are important to Ben Okri’s The Famished Road in a number of ways. His narrator Azuro is ‘Abiku’; the ‘spirit’ child of Yoruba mythology, predestined to an early death and...

The film Friday Night Lights by director Peter Berg depicts high school football players from Odessa, Texas on their journey to the state championship. Patriarchy is a major theme in this movie and there are several father-son relationships that...

The miscegenation and racism which Kate Chopin’s short story "Désirée’s Baby" centers upon resulted in a daring piece of work by a female writer in the 19th century. These central themes are also linked to the story’s setting, symbolism, and...

In "Wild with All Regrets," Wilfred Owen effectively conveys the emotions of a hopeless soldier through the development and progression of thoughts. The poet uses various parallel trains of thought simultaneously, such as the past, present and...

When exploring the challenges and toils of survival, we can easily make a series of comparisons between the design of Francis Lawrence’s and Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic worlds in I Am Legend and The Road, respectively. Both plots involve...

Jim Sheridan and Peter Carey, director of the film In the Name of the Father and author of the novel Amnesia, respectively, have both lived through many world events surrounding an abuse of power that have a major effect on the central characters...

In the film Lantana, Ray Lawrence builds both internal and external conflict between characters using various film techniques; in turn, such conflict acts as a catalyst for many characters in reaching a turning point for change. Major conflict is...

Published in 1904, Edith Wharton’s "The Other Two" explores the infancy of divorce within New York’s middle-class society by utilizing the concept of the futile struggle to escape social forces that are out of one’s control. In addition to that,...

Mary Rowlandson faced what would be many people’s worst nightmare, when she witnessed the slaughtering of her family and neighbors as described in her autobiography, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Rowlandson. As if that...