Newest Literature Essays

First person narrators often serve as important additions to texts. This is the case in Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders, where the intelligent, authentic voice of the central character Anna Frith added significantly to the story as she described...

Crisis inevitably comes with anguish and grief, but it is possible for positive outcomes to stem from such events. The plague year in Geraldine Brooks’ “Year Of Wonders” is a primary example of this phenomenon, as we see devastation unfold that is...

Humankind has the capacity to show extraordinary strength and compassion in times of catastrophe. Michael Mompellion in Geraldine Brooks’ “Year of Wonders” is a primary example of such a person, as despite his misguided religious beliefs he...

When faith is diminished in a community where it was once crucial, it is logical for the citizens' reactions to be varied and occasionally destructive. In Geraldine Brooks’ historical novel “Year of Wonders,” villagers display myriad responses as...

Rick is far from the most detestable character in Casablanca. While he demonstrates some qualities and actions that could lead to the assumption that he is loathsome, he is not to be confused with his cowardly counterparts. His tireless charade at...

The “fantastical” elements of The Tempest by William Shakespeare are made evident by the introduction of Ariel, the spirit, Caliban, the son of a witch, and Prospero, a banished duke who has mastered occult powers. Despite what seems to be an...

Within the first six hundred lines of Beowulf, the poet introduces several characters – Hrothgar, Wulfgar and Unferth – who are juxtaposed against Beowulf to not only glorify the protagonist, but also illustrate the heroic codes of the time.

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Geraldine’s Brooks’ exploration of the multi-faceted nature of humanity in her historical novel, ‘Year of Wonders,’ opens a myriad of concerns regarding transformation strife through the first-hand account of Anna Frith. Brooks extensively employs...

In Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth, the beautiful but helpless Lily Bart is never able to escape from the follies and superficialities of the society that she is born into. According to a verse in Ecclesiastics which the novel was titled...

In William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, the dysfunctional Bundren family embarks on a telling journey from their farm in Yoknapatawpha County to bury their recently deceased and unmatronly matriarch, Addie. Composed of 59 sections narrated by...

Whilst the world of Chinatown is a filthy pool of bitter desperation and questionable morality in both the script created by Robert Townes and the film made by Roman Polanski, the versions show noticeable differences due to the altering of...

Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in its continuously dissected and heavily studied narrative, details a transformation from man to creature but hides the true meaning of what it means to change form, both in mind and body. From the onset, it is...

In the long essay, “A Defense of Poesy,” Sir Philip Sidney responds to the attempts of repression by the Puritan Movement on poets and their work by characterizing poetry as the roots of culture and intelligence. Sidney uses mythical allusions and...

Alexandra Harris claims in Romantic Moderns that to plant flowers in the middle of a war was to assert one’s firm belief in the future. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925 seven years after the first world war, and her final novel...

In Anne McLintock’s Imperial Leather, she claims that women are the earth that is to be discovered, entered, named, and above all, owned. In the work of James Joyce, particularly Ulysses and Dubliners, he explores women who fit into McLintock’s...

Christina Rossetti grew up among a family of skilled writers and artists whose muses had to do with contemporary life and past scholarship, yet they were strictly evangelical Christians. Christina Rossetti strictly followed the expectations of...

In "Rites of Passage" Sharon Olds honestly portrays her own struggles with understanding manhood and attempting to overcome her contempt for conventional modes of masculinity by alternating between visions of her son as a baby and the children at...

Although there is much controversy surrounding Lewis Carroll’s relationships with and feelings towards little girls, it is a simple fact that his works “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There”...

When Herman Melville began writing Moby-Dick, he felt constrained by his financial obligations. In a letter to his close friend and fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville proclaims that “Dollars damn me” and clarifies, “What I feel most moved...

In her novel Hope Leslie, Catharine Maria Sedgwick explores the influence laws arising from religion, nature, and society have on the development of a new nation. Specifically, her historical romance analyzes the culture created by...

T.S. Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality” is a close examination of life and death. Penned during the war-torn years between 1915 and 1918, Eliot’s quatrain poem cites the writers John Donne and John Webster as examples of metaphysical poets whose...

The 1950s brought about a multitude of changes in the culture of the United States: “conservative family values and morals were threatened as the decade came to a close” (Literature and Its Times). What was unthinkable in the 1940s gradually...

One character in the love triangle described in the novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café,” by Carson McCullers, is unworthy of love. Miss Amelia, a businesswoman with manly characteristics and little compassion, gains joy and happiness from Lymon...

Ernest Hemingway called his novel A Farewell to Arms his “Romeo and Juliet.” The most obvious similarity between these works is their star-crossed lovers, as noted by critic Carlos Baker; another is that the deaths of both Juliet and Hemingway’s...