Newest Literature Essays

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has a host of characters: a cross-dressing woman, an uppity, lower-class servant, a quick-witted, tricky gentlewoman, a rowdy, vulgar nobleman and his misguided friend. With so many characters to keep track of, an array...

Daisy is a pivotal character in The Great Gatsby – Fitzgerald’s interpretation of an old money princess is oft regarded as one of the most selfish fictional characters to exist throughout literary history, perhaps the epitome of a ‘Femme Fatale’....

When Albert Camus’ novel, The Stranger, was first published in 1942, many readers did not know what to think of Meursault, the emotionally disconnected protagonist of Camus’ story. His absurdist views confused the masses that yearned for meanings...

From the wealthiest neighborhood in Kabul to the poverty of San Francisco, Khaled Hosseini creates a story of redemption which transcends cultures and time in The Kite Runner. Hosseini uses the dynamics of father-son relationships to express a...

In Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, portrayals of gender and womanhood have crucial and complex roles. In addition to the binary it asserts between Lady Delacour and Lady Anne Percival, the novel also provides a young generation of female characters,...

In Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, Morrison examines what the degradation of people, by society, can result in. She sets her story in Lorain, Ohio in the 1940’s, which is a society with white ideals and standards of beauty. Morrison...

In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer sets up a rich and unexpected portrayal of The Wife of Bath, which is already well established by the beginning of her prologue to her tale. Her honest and shamelessly blunt diction and admissions, along with the...

George Etherege’s The Man of Mode criticizes the rakish society in which it is set, yet is more critical of the foolishness and desperation that women display in pursuit of romantic love, as by-products of the rakish ideals. In particular,...

One of the most striking elements of Paradise of the Blind is its constant discussion of food. Through imagery and description of traditional foodstuffs, the novel emphasizes the Vietnamese’s deep cultural connections to and love of food. These...

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams are both novels that deal with the influence of social hierarchy on the characters’ psychologies. In Caleb Williams, the protagonist is a young man who learns the...

In an excerpt from Sir Robert Filmer’s The Natural Power of Kings, the defined paternal positions of father and king are inextricably synonymous. In the periods in which William Shakespeare’s plays Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and King Lear both...

Common in film noir are the binary oppositions between characters’ personalities and the visually mesmerizing images which often explode on-screen before the eyes of the audience. The high key lighting of a beautiful countryside, the low key...

Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, explores the issues and struggles associated with the quest to find one’s own identity. Minghella’s film employs a post-structuralist analysis, seeing...

As The Red Scare infiltrated American culture and consciousness in the 1940’s and 50’s, few prominent players within the Hollywood film industry dared to challenge the accusations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC); the fear...

Of Shakespearean representations of women, it is perhaps the inexhaustible character of Cleopatra that is the most elusive of classification, which seems fitting given Antony and Cleopatra’s own defiance of dramatic genre with its tragic, comedic...

In Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, an orphan is represented as both the protagonist and the narrator of the story. Jane is a meek, plain, but good-natured girl who learns early on the hardships of life. Orphaned by the death of her parents,...

The characters in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother each straddle a line between two worlds representing old and new, the conqueror and the defeated. Kincaid’s narrator, Xuela Claudette Richardson,...

Byatt’s character Tom Wellwood in her novel The Children’s Book resents fairytales, especially Peter Pan. Tom’s resentment is the result of a troubled inner self and belonging to a mother who uses her own children to create characters—characters...

With six of its seven scenes set in the West, Act Two of 'Antony and Cleopatra' by William Shakespeare largely concerns the politics of Rome. Act Two is important in further developing the characters of Antony, Octavius, Cleopatra and Enobarbus....

'Antony and Cleopatra' by William Shakespeare is a tragic play which centres around the renowned love affair of the eponymous characters and its political and personal repercussions. In Act One, Shakespeare uses both the distinction of time and...

In 'Macbeth,' the eponymous character fulfils his own overwhelming thirst for power by committing what was viewed to be worst possible crime: regicide. This initial murder of King Duncan acts as a starting point for Macbeth's reign of terror, and...

‘Macbeth’ by William Shakespeare is a play in which great contrasts lie between its main characters. ‘Macbeth’ is a tragic play, set in eleventh century Scotland, which explores the psychological and political effects of the eponymous character,...

In Heart of Darkness, both the content and the form of Marlow’s narration consistently draw attention to and undermine language. Through relating his journey into the Congo, Marlow considers the role of speech in creating the self, and alternates...

D. H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers depicts the unhappy marriage between Walter and Gertrude Morel, and their four children. As Mrs. Morel’s relationship with her husband begins to disintegrate, she turns her attention to her sons in the hopes...