Newest Literature Essays

In Sonnet 13 of Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barrett Browning skillfully manipulates the sonnet form to construct what is essentially a love poem, albeit an unusual one that paradoxically eschews the rote sentimentality associated with...

In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the titular character embarks on a journey to enact knight errantry, transfiguring the quotidian Spanish countryside into a world of his own making—one modeled after the many chivalric romances he has read and...

In Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict between Athens and Sparta is illustrated not only with direct, fact-based wartime accounts but also with dramatized orations and debates that are interwoven into the narrative. Through...

In both the play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and the novel ‘Mrs Dalloway,’ the protagonists are primarily isolated within society by the consequences of their pasts. While Williams and Woolf use the past to evoke both nostalgia for a better time...

E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman” could easily be read as a satire that rails against meek, docile women. However, when looking at the form of feminism in this story, one finds that the protagonist Nathaniel seems to struggle with an abstract mind,...

In Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, Edgar Huntly or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), many characters have problems with interpreting their own ideas of reality and of what is actually real within the context of the novel. Edgar Huntly’s...

Edgar Allan Poe was a great America gothic style writer of the eighteen hundreds. There is hardly a mention of early American literature that does not commend his work. Of his literature, The Fall of the House of Usher gives a certain air of...

In the novel Montana 1948, the relationship between David and his father is complex and distant, and leads us to better understand the struggles that they both face, and their development throughout the novel. Their relationship also helps the...

Death is all around, yet very few people notice it. The poem “Out, Out–”, by Robert Frost, is about a boy that is cutting wood and due to a momentary concentration lapse, chops off his hand and bleeds to death. The people around him are at first...

Every day we encounter bodies of text. Whether it be in articles in the daily newspaper or updated blogs from our favorite person on the internet we are surrounded by words and sentences. With each body of text we grow and broaden our capacity of...

There are certain aspects of the human experience that every one of us can identify with on a certain level. This is what allows us to connect with one another and to develop empathetic and compassionate outlooks. That being said, there are...

Though it is universally acknowledged that art is subjective, literary critic and philosopher Georg Lukacs offered his opinions on what form art ought to take. In his essay “The Ideology of Modernism,” Lukacs wrote negatively against the modernist...

Philosophers John Rawls and Hannah Arendt each establish different definitions of freedom that help to judge the legitimacy and purpose of political institutions. And while these definitions are not the same, they do not necessarily directly...

Between the events of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V, King Harry evolves from a playful and wayward son into a celebrated political adept. He forfeits a life of tavern-hopping and petty larceny in favor of becoming one of the most revered...

Author Joyce Carol Oates of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and author Kate Chopin of “The Story of an Hour" use the “death of the maiden” motif effectively to support a theme of unwarranted patriarchy throughout their writing. Both...

Rites of passage are a key element in adolescent literature. These are moments in which the character or characters do something where they essentially cross over the realm of adolescence to adulthood in some aspect. They are extremely common...

Water, in its many forms, is a force to be reckoned with. It can give life, or it can take it; it is the foundation of our planet, and a meaningful factor in human existence. Of all the naturally occurring entities in the world, water – embracing...

As a subversion of what we understand today as the “male gaze”, Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber, The Company of Wolves, and The Courtship of Mr Lyon exercises postmodern parody in order to both expose and destabilize gender stereotypes through...

Death has been a prevalent theme in literature of all cultures throughout the centuries. In The Thief and the Dogs, the author Naguib Mahfouz explores the realm of death and its interconnections with life. Witnessing the turmoil of the Egyptian...

Set in postmodern Japan, the novella Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto is a tale of two young people struggling to find a means of self-expression. Suspended in a fast-paced society that often isolates them in a state of constant restlessness, the main...

Man’s search for spiritual fulfillment in their lifelong escape from emotional isolation has been a common theme in literature of all cultures. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, a feminist American writer, this spiritual search...