Newest Literature Essays

If different kinds of motivation were to be viewed on a spectrum, there would be quite a distance between instinct and reason. While instinct denotes an animalistic impulse, reason implies careful deliberation, a process that involves employing...

During the early twentieth century, the idea of women having as much power as men was foreign: men were not only better educated, but were also the primary breadwinners for the family. Though individuals do not have the ability to immediately...

Throughout the Gothic novel Dracula, Stoker uses symbology and imagery to reveal social anxieties and fears of the late Victorian era, for example the use of animalistic description and blood. Wilde, in his own Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian...

A play of epic proportions, Tony Kushner’s magnum opus Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia On National Themes presents a portrait of America that is at first sight devastating, yet ultimately optimistic and profound in its analysis of humanity’s...

Human beings do not thrive in solitude. Every hero has a supporting team, and every protagonist must maintain a close group of allies in order to ever truly succeed. George Eliot's Silas Marner furthers this idea that, although there is evil in...

The Sufi musical tradition, or Sama’, has been used as a way to connect with the divine for hundreds of years by incorporating poetry, song, and dance to praise God. For many mystics, this blend is the single most powerful link to God, and is...

Hunger, written by Lan Samantha Chang, is a novella that shares the story of a family troubled with a desire for a better life. The story is told from Min’s perspective - the mother - and it is she who recollects the everyday life of the family....

In James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, David is a heterosexual man with homosexual desires. This desire to be with men leads him desensitized to how he actually feels when he is with all four of his lovers - male and female. Each and every...

Beauty, in every form and aspect, is regarded by the general population as the eighth deadly sin. This becomes strikingly evident throughout the examination of Hester’s plight. Hester Prynne, a radiant example of elegance, begins to find...

Throughout Jane Eyre, the themes of love and marriage are presented in contrasting ways. In the Lowood education system, Brocklehurst preaches the evangelically tainted message of ‘mortify[ing]… the lusts of the flesh’ in preparation for the...

In Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, the struggle between the Romantic, religious, and at times over-emotional intent of characters and their reasonable nature creates the complexities faced on the Pequod, the ship captained by Ahab. This competition...

In the Gothic novel Dracula, Bram Stoker largely presents good and evil in stark contrast in a very simple manner. This perhaps mirrors Victorian views of good and evil as opposed yet inextricable, a strict view of right and wrong in a religious...

In the short story, The Dead from the novel Dubliners by James Joyce, readers are led through a bustling, yet monotonous, dinner party by the protagonist Gabriel Conroy, an intelligent, impersonal, “cold-air” introvert who is constantly found...

In the comedy The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare deconstructs common adages regarding the essentials of building a healthy relationship. He does so through the unconventional pairing of Katharina, an “ill-seeming” shrew whose disobedience and...

The universal themes of ambition, power, and greed make William Shakespeare’s Macbeth remarkably applicable to countless other times, places, and people. It is with this mindset that directors Akira Kurosawa and Billy Morrisette approached their...

When analyzing two film adaptations of William Shakespeare’s 1610 play The Tempest, it becomes clear that the word “adaptation” is merely a broad term that barely describes the translations and deviations evidenced by the films themselves. Fred M....

In lieu of an action-packed or scandalous plot line, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway takes a more subtle and psychological mode to ensnare its reader, one of course meant to depart from the strict Victorian and Edwardian novels that preceded it....

Henrik Ibsen was born in 1828 to a merchant family in the small Norwegian town of Skien. After his family fell into poverty, he was forced out of his education and, at 15, worked as an apprentice in a pharmacy. It was here that he began writing...

In The City of God, Augustine goes to great lengths to explain the distinction between living according to God and living according to man using an analogy of two cities. With this distinction, he shows that living according to God is superior...

Willa Cather’s 1913 novel O Pioneers! is very much a work of its time, providing social commentary regarding a number of significant issues of the nineteenth into early twentieth century. This commentary presents a variety of frameworks for...

Carol Ann Duffy wrote 'The World's Wife' in order to scrutinize the representation of both men and women, inspired by her strong feminist views -- reconstructing, for example, many of the 'voiceless women' from throughout history. As Duffy...