Newest Literature Essays

Sex and sexuality as historical constructs acquired new meanings in the Restoration, with them becoming the essential components of the economy of exchange. Situated amidst the popular libertine culture, the ideals of love, virtue and more...

Milton’s construction of Eve in Paradise Lost is beset with dithering ambiguity, with her identity being defined and redefined within. The text has been construed during the Restoration, on the backdrop of the libertine culture and the...

‘The heroes in the ancient romances have nothing in them that is natural; all is unlimited in their character’[1]. Haywood’s amatory fiction withdraws from traditional romances in introducing human limitation, and accepting vice and virtue as one....

As a poem that presents tragedy within love as inevitable, in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer also explores the forces that control this downfall: Fortune, the planets and free will. These can be separated in to two categories, those that exist in...

‘Those who go below the surface do so at their own peril’. If the aesthetic exterior of a person is the ‘surface’, it is assumed that below this surface is sensibility and emotion. Wilde warns against probing too deeply, or at all, the conscience;...

In considering how Stowe represents gender, it must be foregrounded that men and women inhabited different sectors within nineteenth century American society. Males belonged almost exclusively to a public world of work, whilst females were...

From being labeled “crazy” and denied help, to “ill” with an overflowing amount of support, mental health has always been a difficult topic to understand. Living in North America today, where fewer people are excluded from society due to an...

Michel de Montaigne’s Essays are hailed as profound modern, and their style original. This type of personal essay writing is still found in many places, including today’s commonplace blogs. These pieces are political, they are social, they are...

Former African-American slave Frederick Douglass wrote his memoir My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855, sixty-three years after Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft released her Vindication on the Rights of Woman in 1792, and fourteen years before...

After his death at the tender age of twenty-five, English poet John Keats left behind a legacy of hundreds of letters in addition to his published poems. These letters to family and friends feature a few common recipients, including his brothers...

In his masterpiece The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes a collection of heartbreaking, witty, unbelievable stories about a group of young American soldiers trudging through the war against Vietnam. The Things They Carried manages to convey...

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five has been the subject of much attention and debate since its release. Its wide range of topics such as critique of the American government and discussion of existentialism have made it an extremely controversial...

The narrative of disempowerment is one that is woven extensively through Edwidge Danticat’s postcolonial novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory. Placing great emphasis on the politics of the domestic sphere and the stories told between women, the novel spans...

A variant of prosperity, Prospero undoubtedly serves as the major manipulative authority throughout Shakespeare’s drama, The Tempest. Through a postcolonial reading of the text, one can discern that The Tempest is riddled with native characters,...

In Joseph Boyden’s novel “Three Day Road,” the windigo killer plays an important role within the central characters’ Cree community. Through their separate, individual experiences, both Niska and Xavier struggle to assert their place within this...

The success of the narrative arc of both Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone and Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream heavily rely on character interactions with the natural world. In each play respectively, the protagonists must purpose and...

Irving Howe, a literary and social critic, once noted that “the knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable”(Lifehack Quotes). Often depicted in the transition from childhood to adulthood, this loss of innocence is...

Sherman Alexie’s first young-adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, uses instances of sexuality, aggression, and profanity to expose a rawness in the cultural divide between Indians and Americans. The novel’s protagonist and...

Varying representations of both genders are abundant in romantic literature of the Renaissance period in general, a fine example of which can be found in Edmund Spenser’s allegorical epic poem, The Faerie Queene. The poem depicts the tale of seven...

Susan Glaspell’s play, Trifles, reflects her fixation with culture-bound notions of gender roles and the complexities of inequality prevalent in the home as well as the public sphere during 1916. The competing roles and perspectives of men and...

Gina Berriault’s “The Stone Boy” follows the story of a young boy facing the aftermath of a terrible accident and trying to understand his responsibility in the matter. When Arnold does not respond emotionally, the adults’ false assumptions...

Stating that poetry should ‘teach, delight, and move men to take that goodness in hand’[1], it becomes clear why both Philip Sidney in ‘Sonnet 90’ and John Donne’s 'Triple Fool’ suggest that writing in regards to love is foolish. The poems contain...

Traditional qualities of a feminine women usually include a beautiful physique, a gentle, nurturing nature, and a degree of sexual reservation. Throughout literature and film, women that embrace typical ideas of femininity are also portrayed as...