Newest Literature Essays

William Shakespeare’s The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice depicts an odd juxtaposition of love in the romantic sense with wealth in the monetary sense. The characters in the text acknowledge both senses as valuable virtues, yet...

Chinese culture and traditions are well known, on the basis of modern writing, for their originality and peculiarity. The book Spring Moon by Bette Bao Lord offers a rigorous explanation of this kind of lifestyle through the story of a Chinese...

The journey from childhood to maturity is guided primarily by the search for meaning. In All the Pretty Horses, protagonist John Grady Cole leaves home to find the place where he belongs in the world. Throughout the novel, John Grady chased the...

Piercing screams, angry chants, and heartfelt tears: that is the climate of change. Compare this to the placid clicking of keyboards, the casual transmission of emoticons; it is evident which situation will go down in history. This is Malcolm...

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll tells the story of a young girl's journey through a world of fantasy, imagination, and inner transformation. Alice begins as a seven-year-old girl who falls down a...

774 million adults around the world are illiterate. In many places, people are not provided the opportunity to get education. In Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Amir is lucky enough to learn how to read and write, while many people in his...

Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, exemplifies classic, African-American literature that raises serious questions about how deeply racial oppression damages Blacks. Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism exposes how racism subjects Blacks to the...

The American Dream: An idea that every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative (OED). Anyone willing to put in the work can achieve their dreams, but what if...

Ogai Mori, one of Japan’s most highly respected writers, was the author of the novel “The Wild Geese”. One of the primary characteristics of Mori’s work is its examination on problems that arise in people’s lives, specifically when their desires...

At the peak of the Civil War Movement in America on April 12th, 1963, eight Alabama clergymen made a public statement announcing that Dr. Martin Luther King’s protests in the streets should end because they promote “hatred and violence” (par. 5)....

Although the feminist movement began to make a solid appearance in the United States in the mid 19th century, successful results did not show until the early 20th century. In the 1800s, women held little importance in society and had little to no...

The Victorian Era is defined by the societal alterations that developed over the time period. This is particularly true when concerning wives, mothers, domesticity, and the like. Throughout portions of Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall the...

One of Benjamin Franklin’s most memorable aphorisms in The Way to Wealth is the phrase “There are no gains, without pains” (2). This phrase has entered the American lexicon and become an established aphorism that represents the American work ethic...

Plato’s theory of love is one of the great thinkers' most whimsical and inspiring dialogues. In his discussion regarding love, Plato theorizes that love is ‘neither beautiful nor good.’ Love represents the desire of the human individual to attain...

For Wordsworth, it is the human imagination and potential to not just observe, but comprehend, nature that ascribes the sublime meaning. Without human cognizance, the objects and elements of the sublime are just physical tokens. Man’s finite...

The theme of love is omnipresent in literature; no matter what nook or cranny you search in a library, it is there. However, this theme conveys more than just kisses, heartbreak, and rampant sexual tension. It describes a culture through their...

Civil Disobedience in the Mind of Socrates

Civil disobedience is a practice that has been studied and exhibited for thousands of years. This practice is defined as “the refusal to obey certain laws or governmental demands for the purpose of...

In The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro exemplifies English identity from the perspective of the butler of a prominent estate, Mr. Stevens of Darlington Hall. Ishiguro uses Mr. Stevens’s account to establish English identity, allowing Mr....

Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth depicts the relationship between love and marriage in a manner that contrasts from Western expectations. Set in the United Kingdom, the story primarily follows the relationship of Archibald and Clara as compared...

In Garcia Marquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the different roles of men and women in this 1950’s Latin American society are prominently displayed by various characters. The named perpetrator of a young bride is murdered to save the...

In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, World Controller Mustapha Mond has to reconcile imposing the suppressive values of the world state with his powerful knowledge from a past world. This very knowledge is what keeps him in control of the world of...

Cinematic depictions of American-fought wars in Asia usually focus on the physical aspects of action - the momentous violence and fighting. Once in a while, a film will come along to challenge the glorification of such violence; however, both...

Reasons for seeking out the relative comfort of the United States of America are many; some do so in order to utilize its economic advantages, others yearn to flee oppressive governmental regimes, and so on. However, one overarching motivation...

Charles Simic’s poetry specializes in illustrating the profound within the mundane. Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938 (Ford). He is of Serbian descent. Naturally, his early life was dominated by the Nazi period. While of much Simic’s...