Newest Literature Essays

In order to rationalize the south’s peculiar institution of slavery, the southern plantation novel surfaced. It idealized the plantation lifestyle by creating and romanticizing characters that otherwise would be viewed upon as evil by blacks—the...

The portrayal of women in classical Greek literature is varied but points towards underlying attitudes regarding their status. Within The Odyssey there are countless representations of women with different motives and personalities, but these...

Despite her violent transgressions, Euripedes paints Medea as a victim from the start to the end of the play. Even Medea’s most violent act, the murder of her own children, is made complicated by Euripides’ appeal to the reader’s sympathy for her...

Throughout the course of The Year of the Flood we see how Toby’s character has developed into the level-headed and capable adult surviving after the waterless flood. What is particular to Toby’s character is the presence of these valuable traits...

The gender dynamic constructed in the Restoration and early eighteenth century British literature manifested itself around the conceptual binary of man and woman. The debate that appears in literature of this time roots itself in societal...

The principle of d’harma that appears throughout Ramayana is one that calls for a specific kind of righteousness. D’harma is a difficult concept to pin down, but it essentially translates as the individual’s proper place and role in the cosmic...

Devastation through Segregation

Did you know that the state of Mississippi did not officially abolish slavery until February 7th, 2013? Although slaves have not worked the fields of Mississippi since the Civil War ended, evidence of racial...

Fear is Something to be Feared

The word "fear" can be defined as: a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger or pain. In his play The Crucible, Arthur Miller addresses the fear embedded within Puritan society. According to the Public...

Nella Larsen’s renowned novel Passing was written shortly after a period of significant breakthroughs in psychological research and in how we view human behavior. Sigmund Freud was the man who introduced these novel and revolutionary ideas,...

In his short story “The Devil is a Busy Man,” David Foster Wallace asserts that Americans are obsessed with maintaining a facade of sincerity; ironically, this desire to appear sincere is the tragic root of the country’s widespread insincerity....

John Okada’s No-No Boy illustrates the racial conflicts between the Japanese-American community and American popular culture as well as differing views on assimilation among Japanese-Americans themselves. Kenji, who suffers from a fatal wound...

In no other part of The Divine Comedy does Dante present his vision of the Church Militant, or the body of living believers who must struggle against sin and reach for virtue, than in Purgatorio. Striking parallels exist between the experiences of...

In both Journey’s End and "Exposure," war is generally presented in a gloomy light as Owen and R.C. Sheriff, respectively, focus on the attitude of the soldiers throughout their experience on the frontline. Whilst Owen draws more attention to the...

In Love Visions, Chaucer uses the medieval tradition of dream exposition to comment on the societal draw toward the love idealized in a subset of medieval literature. Throughout the first three poems, Chaucer deftly parodies societal norms: his...

March 20th, 1852 was an important day for the United States of America. Harriet Beecher Stowe finally published her much debated story, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on this exact date. Recent stringent changes in fugitive slave laws had inspired the...

The works of Euripides differ largely from those of the arguably more iconic Sophocles, nominally in the regard that they lack individual Aristotelian tragic heroes. Instead, despite having a central and typically eponymous figure, each play tends...

Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential theologians of his time, deals with many hotly contested topics regarding the nature of God and God's dealings with mankind in Summa Theologica. In the fifth question of Part IIIa, Aquinas discusses...

Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet depicts characters who naturally challenge the conventional perceptions of race, gender, identity, and other socially constructed aspects of humanity. The text is set in the United Kingdom in the early to mid twentieth...

The differing treatments of knowledge in the early stages of the Book of Genesis and in the tragedy Oedipus Rex reveal a fundamental difference in the representative traditions of Hebraism and Hellenism. Hebraic obedience to divine authority is...

Early European settlers did not understand that, as the original inhabitants of Australia, the Aboriginal people were entitled to the land, yet they did not claim ownership of it for their possession. However, the Aboriginal people belonged to...

The Romantic Era was a period in which poets and intellectuals challenged the emphasis on reason and science espoused by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Lord Byron, or George Gordon Byron, was a leading romantic poet who lived...

William Shakespeare’s usage of the trope of courtly love in The Tempest is not what it seems. In The Tempest, a man trained in the art of magic, Prospero, causes a shipwreck on his island. On this ship is his brother, Antonio, who usurped...

The poems "Marriage" by Marianne Moore and "Home Burial" by Robert Frost demonstrate a clear separation between men and women. Equality between genders is a controversial issue today, but truly began to arise during the late 1800’s and early 1900’...