Newest Literature Essays

Women and Roses by Robert Browning explores the idea of dreams concerning love, in particular sexual love. The speaker imagines the three women of time as roses: the past, present, and future. Though this poem appeared within the repressive...

Queen Herod is taken from Duffy’s The World’s Wife, a collection which inverts gender roles to celebrate female characters and display the injustice of men’s generalizations. This poem inverts the gender roles in the biblical story of the arrival...

Hawthorne’s science fiction short stories, such as ‘The Birthmark’ and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ are set in the seventeenth century. His novels, however, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, are set in the nineteenth century,...

Henry James had written The Turn of the Screw in such a way that some Marxist critics have argued that it reflects the controversies and anxieties of the extra-textual world. However, while in an epoch in which upward mobility was very difficult,...

British novelist Ian McEwan’s masterpiece Atonement can be appropriately compared to American writer Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men with the common denominating theme of intense experience—its opportunities and its ramifications....

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a difficult text, one so littered with ambiguity that the lack of clarity between characters becomes a significant plot element. The governess works to dissolve this ambiguity and does everything she can to...

Guilt, like a disease of the mind, has the power to consume one's sanity, govern one's emotions and demolish one's life. In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare and in the novel Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, guilt dominates the lives of...

By looking at Emily Dickinson’s poem 666 “I cross till I am weary,” we can see the poet’s connections between the nature of life or spirituality and the subtleties of rhyme as well as meter; this link is important because it sets a tone for the...

In the seventeenth century, genuine scientific breakthroughs were ideals of the future. The reality was alchemy, an extremely basic science in which procedures were practically guesswork. It is this sense of the unknown that induces both fear and...

In tough times, it seems that many people turn to their faith. In moments of weakness, when it seems that everything is lost, many people find that a certain hope remains in God. Others turn to God for a "why"; a reason that circumstances are the...

Philosophers have waxed long and eloquent on the ideal government and therefore the ideal sovereign; this short essay will serve to compare two works on the subject, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Machiavelli’s The Prince. This paper will analyze...

Written in 1893, Anton Chekhov's short story "The Black Monk" is one of the most potent and revealing works of the writer. It reflects the profound philosophy of the author, as well as the feelings of worry and anxiety which, according to the...

American Pastoral is narrated by Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, a friend and admirer of the Levovs, in particular of Seymour “The Swede” Levov. Zuckerman tells the story of The Swede’s tragic fall from youthful perfection due to his daughter’s...

Terror in the soul of an individual was one of the main topics in the work of 19th century American writer, poet, journalist and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe. Inspired by the English Gothic novel, he tried to depict the horrors and fears in...

In Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, a quote by psychologist Karl Menninger appears in the dedication. It goes, “When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins a fight which results in struggles and...

In today's society, movies in all genres thrive on romantic plots and subplots. There is often a form of "Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back" or a variation of that, wherein the guy's decisions are all centered around securing a...

Wertenbaker wrote Our Country’s Good in order to depict a developmental process for the characters. Through the Howardian theory of redemption, by learning from each other, and by acting in their production of The Recruiting Officer, they...

Arthur Miller wrote A View from the Bridge, a work set in the late 1940s, as he became interested in the Italian immigration at the Brooklyn docks. Fascinated by the life of Pete Panto, a longshoreman who challenged the work of the Mafia, Miller...

Steinbeck makes the confrontation between Crooks and Curley's wife a shocking moment in Of Mice and Men by showing how prejudices produce strong reactions in characters: they can encourage loyalty in the face of adversity, or resentment and...

Specifically from a literary perspective, the Harlem Renaissance—also known as the New Negro Movement—is often held up as one of the most artistically prolific, localized movements in Western literature, producing writers such as Gwendolyn...

In Uzodinma Iweala’s novel Beasts of No Nation, Agu’s diction immediately sticks out. While foreign at first, Agu’s narration quickly becomes easy to understand. The voice Iweala has created for Agu, though critical in order to convey the...

In Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God, tragedy is the driving force of the plot and the development of Ezeulu’s character. Contrary to the popular saying “that which does not kill you makes you stronger,” the successive and increasingly personal...

The movie Citizen Kane depicts the life of the successful businessman Charles Foster Kane through a series of flashbacks derived from interviews of his acquaintances. Through these interviews, Thompson, a newspaper reporter, attempts to solve the...

Humankind has a tendency to inject their values and cultural beliefs into whatever they create or come into contact with; this explains partially why America left the flag on the moon and why there is such a conflict between western democracies...