Newest Literature Essays

Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ is a domestic tragedy that centres around the dysfunctional Loman family, most notably Willy Loman, a failed salesman so captivated by the American Dream and his desire to be a good father that it ultimately...

In Steven Pressfield's book Gates of Fire, a mortally wounded soldier named Xeones tells his life story to a Persian scribe under the order of King Xerxes of Persia. The story is told through a series of flashbacks, broken up by the scribe, who...

In William Shakespeare's Sonnet 147, the speaker addresses his beloved using a metaphor, stating that his love is like an illness. However, he longs for the thing that keeps him ill, or in love. The fact that he compares his love to an illness...

In Song of Rowland, the author tells the story of Charlemagne's attempted takeover of Saragossa, a land controlled by the Muslim king, Marsilla. The poem covers the feud between Rowland and his stepfather Ganelon, as well as the disastrous...

In four of Shakespeare's plays, he introduces a character who is illegitimate. Philip Faulconbridge, Don John, Thersites, and Edmund are all children who were born out of wedlock. Also, all four characters were antagonists, if not the main...

Two of Seamus Heaney's poems that rely on the shifts in language to create meaning are “The Strand at Lough Beg” and “Casualty”, both from his Field Work (1979) Anthology. Both poems revolve around the effects of sectarian violence in Ireland...

‘Art is unimaginable without a matrix of culture… it is inconceivable without a history’ .

Stephen Cox’s comment articulates the poststructuralist view that the meanings of a text always derive from its context. Certainly, much of Mary Shelley’s...

Brecht’s development of epic theatre challenged many aspects of the popular conventions of naturalism and expressionism that were prevalent during his rise to prominence in the 1920s. In The Life of Galileo, elements of epic theatre such as the...

Joseph Harris outlines an analytical approach to rhetoric through the identification and classification of discourse communities. The application of Harris’ model to The Laramie Project reveals two individual communities’ desires to be perceived...

Throughout Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever,” Mrs. Alida Slade experiences the consequences of an inflated ego as she fails to fully understand her companion, Mrs. Grace Ansley. She is consumed with egocentric priorities, like superiority, deception,...

The protagonist and titular character in Jane Eyre faces an interesting decision in the final chapters of the novel. Jane's cousin, the missionary St. John Rivers, presents her with the proposal that she marry him and accompany him on a mission to...

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville is the story of a scrivener (a copyist) who has an unusually bleak disposition. Eventually, he takes it upon himself to refuse his boss' (the narrator's) requests for completing the very work for which...

"Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad is a very contemplative, symbolic piece of literature. Superficially, the story is about the journey of a man named Marlow, working for an ivory company and in search of adventure, deep into Sub-Saharan Africa....

“Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.” These are the words of the 19th century writer and poet Oscar Wilde, and they perfectly illustrate the oft-contentious dispute between individualism and...

“It is not politically correct to talk about white, poor people,” advised a senior official of Solidarity, a prominent South African trade union, during a visit of President Jacob Zuma to the impoverished white community of Bethlehem (Evans)....

A woman climbs into the pulpit and begins to preach. Her words are persuasive and moving, and many believe that she speaks from the Spirit. She is a woman of faith who longs to fulfill her mother’s desire for her to become a missionary. She is...

In The Book Thief, Zusak expounds upon the concept of death as a passive force and not a vengeful creature. Zusak presents the character Death in a manner that is more effectively conceived than the traditional rendition of Death’s personae. This...

In Zamyatin’s We, the One-State society is structured to eliminate all aspects of life that may contribute to negativity. A totalitarian government controlled by the Benefactor sets up a world in which people – referred to by numbers – do not have...

In The Trial, Franz Kafka tells the story of Joseph K., a man under persecution of the law. The novel begins with the arrest of K., which inducts him into a seemingly bizarre legal system. The arrest proves peculiar, as K. is never told what he is...

The following essay aims to compare Ancient versus Modern theories of ethics, particularly those of Aristotle and Immanuel Kant. The central concepts of virtue, happiness, and the human good are relevant to modern ethics, but do not play the same...

The Dutch Historian Pieter Geyl once stated that “Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality.”(1) If we were to replace the word ‘history’ with ‘a...

William Wordsworth once described poetry as being “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings...”(1). He could not have described Barrett’s Sonnet 43 more succinctly, in spite of the fact that he preceded her by half a century. Barrett wrote 44...

John Donne addresses his poem “The Sun Rising” to the sun, but the theme of the poem is the joy of true love. The poet derives infinite joy by loving and by being loved. The poet’s wit and irony are here directed against the sun for trying to...

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre presents a woman’s struggle for freedom in early 19th century England. Male suppression, societal conceptions, religious authority, and even self-inhibition threaten Jane’s independence. But perhaps the greatest...