Newest Literature Essays

In the novel Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe introduces the ideas of maturity/reputation, respect, and communication as Umuofian cultural values. The success of its citizens when it comes to their social standing is dependent on their abilities...

He’ll want to know what you done with the money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bare to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of...

As Ernest Hemingway once wisely proclaimed, “All things truly wicked start from innocence” (Hemingway 73). The truth in Hemingway’s words is that most everything does begin as pure and true, and only through a series of components does it turn...

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity” (Eisenhower 1). These are words written by Dwight Eisenhower, a Five Star General in the United States Army, and a veteran soldier from...

In Ann Petry’s novel The Street, even the most simple, everyday objects take on fiendish personalities and shifting, threatening aspects. From the cruel wind in the story’s opening chapter to the hard, bitter street itself, glaring situational...

The first few books of Daniel Deronda focused on Gwendolen Harleth, who shines as a self-centered, domineering young woman. In becoming trapped by marriage to Grandcourt, she develops growing fascination with Daniel, an attraction that began...

Throughout The Bloody Chamber, Carter uses traditional fairytales as a template for discussion on gender and sexual politics. Therefore, although her short stories contain conventional forms of transformation - men turn into wolves in The Company...

In Oroonoko, Aphra Behn presents two very distinct civilizations: Coramantien, an African country ruled by royalty, and Surinam, an English colony in South America that is home to colonists and natives alike. However, Behn’s depictions of these...

Jane Austen's books are too often reduced to simple two-sided issues, and are often seen in a narrow and restrictive light. Instead of being a novel primarily concerned with romantic attachments or the close sisterly bond between Elinor and...

Rhetoric in The Illiterate

Gregerson’s article “Rhetorical Contract in the Lyric Poem” expounds upon the purpose of lyric poetry. She posits that there is a relationship between the reader and the speaker that extends beyond utilitarian or surface...

In American culture, the West is represented as a sprawling wilderness to be dominated by mankind. The idea of the frontier began with the Puritans in the 1600s as a dwelling of evil, a godless land that needed to be claimed by a higher power, but...

The people in one's life are often more important in shaping one's future than the choices of that individual themselves. In Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, the protagonist, Toru Watanabe, encounters various women who influence him and alter his...

There are a handful of logical approaches and techniques that human beings use to rationalize and understand situations we are not completely sure of. When placed in a situation in which we feel trauma or fear, our immediate reaction is to concoct...

It is said that “Children suffer the sins of their parents.” In a more literal sense, many people believe that it is the parents fault for any flaw possessed by the child, not literal “sin”. People blame the child’s development whether bad or good...

Equality in “The Wound-Dresser” and “Song of Myself”

The theme of equality permeates both “The Wound-Dresser” and “Song of Myself”. Whitman remarks upon judgments that others make and refutes them with his own ideas of impartiality. These...

The power of education and the power of the literary form within slave narratives has been a consistent and resounding theme. From Frederick Douglass’ Narratives In The Life Of A Slave to Harriet Beecher Stowe saying in 1879 that “[Freedmen]...

The birthplace of Walt Whitman, New York is where the poet spent much of his life and became the inspiration for much of Whitman’s poetry. Living in an era where mass industrialization and modernization began to change and shape the New York,...

Oroonoko was a ground-breaking and revolutionary novella that depicted its African hero in a dignified, even regal, light and is considered to be one of the first works during this time era that showed a compassionate side towards Africans. It is...

In Wycherley’s The Country Wife and Aphra Behn’s The Rover, both authors explore masculine ideals through the legendary character of Don Juan, as respectively exemplified by Harry Horner and Willmore. By casting their heroes as embodiments of this...

The Squandering of Wit

Women living in the long eighteenth century in England found themselves snagged in a male-spun web of expectations and exclusions. Despite wit being considered a desirable quality in a woman, the expression of wit was only...

Victim of Greed

Flaubert, a novelist with a seething disdain for the Bourgeois lifestyle, uses his works to illustrate the flaws he sees in society, and more specifically the flaws he sees in this new, materialistic middle class. In his novel, ...

Throughout Karen Desai’s novel, The Inheritance of Loss, the Judge’s westernization and Indian resentment amplify during his studies in England despite confronting both internal and external facets of racism. In postcolonial India, the English...

Throughout Jane Austen’s Persuasion, observations arise concerning the differences between the two genders. There is an ongoing dispute between what is and is not intrinsic to one gender as opposed to the other. Anne’s observations on the matter...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” depicts the journey of a young man going into the woods and losing his faith in humanity. Hawthorne uses the stories of the communion of Goodman Brown and Faith in order to portray that a loss of...