Newest Literature Essays

At times, a novel can communicate the most with the stories it chooses not to tell, rather than the ones it does. In Sandor Marai’s moody, claustrophobic drama, Embers, such is the case of the Henrik’s wife Krisztina, a woman who is already long...

In the tradition story-telling, few concepts are as popular as supernatural intervention into human life. These interventions typically feature a very familiar, nearly house-hold collection of descriptive forms: angels, demons, invisible kinetic...

Colson Whitehead’s novel Sag Harbor (2009) and Barack Obama’s memoirs Dreams From My Father (1995) both tell a portion of the complicated story of race and race relations in America. The main characters in both of these novels have experiences of...

The impact literature can impose on society remains striking even to this day. Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead contains themes that resonated so significantly with readers that it triggered a political movement, and assisted in forming the...

The speaker in Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry” is transformed so much by his consumption of poetry that he frightens a librarian with his animalistic behavior. At first glance, the poem focuses on the literal and visceral consumption of poetry by...

In British literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, plots often center on romance, royalty, and the battle for power. With this emphasis come stories that feature the stereotypes of the damsel in distress, the powerless princess, and the haughty...

Most, if not all of them, were drafted unwillingly. They were asked to leave their families and their homes, their girls or their kids, and they were told to die and kill for reasons unclear. These soldiers marched through swamps and villages with...

Shakespeare’s iconic sonnet 29 is a sonnet that embodies the superficial nature of humanity, both intrinsically and extrinsically. The sonnet begins with the speaker denouncing his current state, which is quite unfavorable, as he “beweep[s] [his]...

In Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the author directs the reader’s attention to the sense of distrust and suspicion that many Americans notably have toward Middle Easterners and Muslims in general after 9/11. By doing so, Hamid is...

Voltaire’s novella Candide is a satirical piece detailing the eventful travels of Candide in order to criticize many aspects of Enlightenment philosophical thought, including theodicy and Leibniz’s philosophical optimism, rationalism, and the...

A gambler is nothing but a man who makes his living out of hope.”(Bolitho). In “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” the narrator introduces Simon Wheeler by asking for a man named Leonidas W. Smiley. Instead of indicating the narrator...

In Reginald Rose’s play entitled “12 Angry Men”, a story is developed around the actions of a jury on a murder trial, which deals with many concepts important to one’s self and one’s decisions. The most important of these concepts is a personal...

Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek is rife with elements of postcolonial ideologies that insert themselves into the story and create tension for the protagonist by “othering” her and her family through a form of orientalism that stereotypes...

Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks while she was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, researching the country’s major voodoo gods and studying as an initiate under the tutelage of Haiti’s most well-known Voodoo hougans...

At their deepest level, both The Rule of St. Benedict and Beowulf deal with the question of how one can go about using his short time on earth to achieve a form of eternity in the face of a dangerous, threatening, unpredictable world. The Rule of...

Anton Chekhov’s play “The Cherry Orchard” is labeled a comedy, however, it has a handful of meaningful lessons that can be learned from the characters featured in the play. These character’s debacles and actions act almost as a social commentary...

Intrigue, murder, and suicide -- by all accounts, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure was a complete and terrible shock to the religiously conservative readers of the late nineteenth century, and this is exactly what he intended. These were, after...

The philosophy of transcendentalism has played a major role in shaping American literature for the last 150 years. At its core, transcendentalism is a set of principles designed to guide a person to happiness through their relationships with God,...

The Panopticon theory. Imagine there is a prison with no bars, no chains, no guards patrolling around, but there is a watchtower which can see into every cell. It has one-way glass so no one can see in, and only zigzag pathways to walk through....

Most literary critics agree that Margaret Hale is the central figure in Gaskell’s North and South. Margaret’s emotional, social, and psychological contexts are often analyzed with excruciating detail, as many view her story to be of principal...

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches… they had to be together,...

The idea of piety in Ancient Rome is not the same idea of piety that we have today. To the Romans, piety, or “pietas” in Latin, describes a set of social constructs that governs what makes a respectable person. Piety encompasses one’s devotion to...