Newest Literature Essays

In apartheid South Africa, competing attitudes in the black community regarding how to defeat the oppressive system made accomplishing that change difficult to achieve. In Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa! , Mr. M’s goal of ending apartheid...

Many authors use different types of form in order to inform content, enhance their stories, and stress the messages that they are trying to get across. Yiyun Li effectively uses this technique in her short story collection, A Thousand Years of...

Both Thomas Hardy's tragic novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, set in impecunious rural England, and Emily Bronte's gothic novel Wuthering Heights, established at two adjacent houses in the Yorkshire moors, question whether the imperfect male...

Many scholars have scrutinized the idea of going “beyond Black and White” in relation to the construction of the Asian American identity. Many arguments have been put forward to explain the possible factors that eventually lead to the perpetuation...

Claude McKay’s “The Harlem Dancer” is a poem immersed in the rich cultural aesthetic of a cultural renaissance that is unable to conceal its somber song of oppression, even in an atmosphere trying relentlessly to exorcise those sour notes. The...

It is rightly said that what a man thinks, he becomes. In light of this, Herman Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf deals with Harry Haller, the protagonist who thinks himself to be divided between his human nature and an animalistic one, considering...

“To an anomalous species of terror, I found him a bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their...

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence [1] and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple [2] both paint a portrait American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This culture appears to be male, with no room for the female as any...

The middle class of America is slowly disappearing. Over the past few decades, the ability of the average American to afford a living wage has been deteriorating, with many citizens being forced to hold two or even three jobs at a time just to...

Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of short stories that explores the continuing Native American struggles in the modern era. The product of more than 500 years of oppression and persecution, the world...

In its own haunting and mysterious way, the line between sanity and insanity can be incredibly blurry at times. Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust, is filled with this mysterious case of insanity. In this first part of Goethe’s great work, the embittered...

Solomon Northup’s book Twelve Year’s a Slave covered the story of Northup himself as he was kidnapped and forced into slavery. He worked as a slave for 12 years before the government was able to locate and free him. Solomon Northup’s story was...

Written by master realist Anton Chekhov, "Misery" is the story of an old man’s grief for having lost his son. He keeps looking for somebody with whom to talk about the death of his child. Throughout, the use of the old man's narrative perspective...

In John Webster’s tragic play The Duchess of Malfi, the titular character is undoubtedly subjected to great degrees of suffering, both physical and mental. However, it is less clear whether or not she can be viewed simply as an innocent victim....

Throughout Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, the themes of sin, damnation and redemption are presented somewhat ambiguously. The key focus of this ambiguity, is the identification of Faustus’ point of no return with regards to the damnation of his...

While Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, chivalric romance by Pearl Poet, might seem as no more than a tale about heroic quest of the noble knight, an observant reader would notice a number of deeper issues discussed in this work. Perhaps the most...

The choices manufactured on a day-to-day basis effect every choice and action in the future. Unfortunately, these choices can be based off different constrictions and outside forces. Throughout the years ones gender could play a extensive part in...

Some months after the ignominious treatment of the English Lord Protector’s newly surfaced corpse marked the English commonwealth’s official demise, one of the Royalists who bayed for the spilling of John Milton’s blood flicked his satirical ink...

Born on the day of the invasion of the Spanish Armada, Thomas Hobbes said himself that he was born a twin with fear. Living with the turmoil of the ongoing English civil war, Hobbes lived in fear and uncertainty. When he became convinced that the...

Man is a deleterious being, a poison to itself and enervates the very foundation of the world it calls home. Forsaken to bear the weight our sins, we humans cannot veer from this obstinate track, a byproduct of our mulish actions. Mary Shelly...

In Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the author revels in tales of past penal methods involving brutal torture of the convicted criminal as a popular public spectacle. He subtly denounces the rigid yet humane...

Toni Morrison’s Sula celebrates liberation from society’s constraints on individuality and self-discovery, and illustrates the negative impact of conformity. The novel follows the lives of several members of The Bottom’s community who refuse to...

Before the revelations of modern medicine, illness of any kind was a highly mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon that was accompanied by little hope for a solution to ease or eliminate the ailment. During this time when no one knew the origin of...