Newest Literature Essays

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in reaction to her own epiphany concerning the immorality of slavery, which accompanied the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law. Indeed, she developed a novel worthy of protest literature. With each...

In American Pastoral and A View From the Bridge, Philip Roth and Arthur Miller respectively present family life as a tense realm of activity where relationship ties are easily stretched and broken. By setting their novels in Rimrock, New Jersey,...

The late Ed Koch once said that “stereotypes lose their power when the world is found to be more complex than the stereotype would suggest. When we learn that individuals do not fit the group stereotype, then it begins to fall apart.” In Marjane...

In "A Report to an Academy," the marvelous transformation of the fictional ape Rotpeter offers striking insight into human adaptive behavior, and blurs and then elucidates the differences between man and ape. The short story, written as a letter...

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and Passing by Nella Larsen both feature black females as their main characters. Hurston’s novel follows a woman named Janie through her life, while Larsen’s follows Clare, a black woman who...

Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes embodied the subtle status of African-American culture during his career as a novelist, poet, and scholar. Hughes was a unique poet, in that he sought to communicate the voices of black America and...

Some people do not realize what is really happening in front of them, no matter how obvious it seems to other people. In the case of H.H. Holmes, he is able to lie and charm his way into making people trust him so that he can get away with murder....

In superstitions, a mirror is thought to be a reflection of one’s soul; this is why shattering a mirror was and still is considered bad luck. In Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the concept of the reflected soul is used as an important...

In Luce Irigaray’s “Women on the Market,” she argues that, in patriarchal societies, women are essentially reduced from human beings to commodities whose exchange is controlled by men. According to Irigaray, this exploitation of women is so...

In some novels, even the most minuscule ordinary objects are subjects of great importance and symbolism; after all, symbolism which adds meaning to the text that cannot be overlooked. In the work The Stranger by Albert Camus, outerwear holds a...

If one were under a small tree and were hit by an apple that dropped off a branch, the main conclusion one would reach might be that the event was slightly annoying and random. One would then stop thinking about it and go back to doing whatever...

At the beginning of the novel Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag is a fireman, a man who burns books, who doesn’t truly acknowledge how much he destroys. He seems to be content to burning things, finding pleasure in seeing houses in flames, smiling...

The human mind is so active that an individual experiences approximately 70,000 thoughts each day. These thoughts are often conflicting in their nature, as the stream of consciousness does not readily divide thoughts into categories, and thoughts...

“I’ll tell you one thing, Fred, darling. I’d marry you for your money in a minute. Would you marry me for my money?” Holly Golightly (played by the delightful Audrey Hepburn) drawls to Paul Varjack (George Peppard) as they banter in the tiny...

When are “we” and “I” of the same importance and have the same meaning? Is it possible not to distinguish these two from each other? The dystopian work We by Yevgeny Zamyatin explores a society in which these two words have been merged in order to...

In The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima conveys the loss of traditional values in Japan due to Westernization in after the Second World War. Through powerful symbols and juxtaposition, Mishima effectively expresses his anger towards the devastating...

W.E.B. DuBois and Zora Neal Hurston, undoubtedly, had two distinct ways of writing, one through an analytical form of storytelling with interwoven fragments of moralistic and ethical themes and one through short fiction that exemplified the...

Phillis Wheatley is one of the most influential poets in American history, notably for paving the way from African American poets as well as female poets. Her rare, and arguably liberated, upbringing allowed her to relay her messages of freedom,...

Thrusting into the world of Tokyo in the 1960’s, Norwegian Wood is a novel by Haruki Murakami, which was published in 1987. At first seeming very foreign and obscure, Norwegian Wood proves that even over a span of nearly five decades, not much...

Aristotle believed that in order for a tragedy to be truly fulfilled, there must be a tragic villain who is completely aware of their evil but takes little pleasure from acting evil. In Jean Anouilh’s Antigone that character is Creon from the...

Rings are to medieval lords and retainers as medals are to athletes: a reward that is earned through hard work and dedication to a cause that makes them feel both empowered and worthwhile, while at the same time reminding them to work harder and...

The short story, “The Withered Arm” explores the role of women in society, their submission to men as well as their independence while at all times retaining an understanding of their struggles. The author, Thomas Hardy reflects on the view of...

Lucy Snowe, the narrator in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, delivers a narrative that is very much the story that she wants the reader to hear. She explicitly details some facets of her life and leaves others drenched in opaque clouds of metaphor....

The verse of Alexander Pope often succeeds in conveying far more meaning than its words, taken at face value, might suggest. In The Rape of the Lock particularly, what at first seems like a light-hearted ribbing of upper class preoccupations, soon...