Newest Literature Essays

In Ian McEwan’s award winning novel Atonement young Briony Tallis must try and make amends for her wrongdoings toward her older sister Cecelia and her love interest, Robbie. At the end of the novel, the short, twenty-page coda entitled “London,...

Absolute monarchies have carried a negative connotation throughout history and have been the source of many rebellions and wars. However, if an absolute monarch learns to be just and execute his power rationally, then his or her reign can be...

In his minimalist short story Save as Many as You Ruin, British author Simon Van Booy comments on the human concept of fate, and how a series of random life events can bring forth the feeling of inevitability. The story is told from the point of...

As one of the leaders of the realist movement in drama, Henrik Ibsen earned his reputation for creating plays that accurately depict the details of ordinary peoples' lives. The first two acts of A Doll's House are safe territory, following the...

In T.C Boyle’s novel The Tortilla Curtain, the author offers a distorted lens to highlight the differences between two couples from separate cultures brought together through a series of unfortunate events. Candido and America Rincon are illegal...

Travel Writing and Identity in Tristram Shandy

In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne employs unconventional structure and non-linearity to disorient his readers. Sterne projects himself through the lens of Tristram Shandy,...

Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is heavily saturated with elements of satire and dark humor. Sterne proposes an argument, through the inclusion of the ‘male’ mid-wife, Dr. Slop, for the restoration of...

Two primary tropes guide Fantomina’s foray into sex and love with Beauplaisir: economic value and sight. Both of these tropes typically signify a text dominated by the masculine, treating women as commodities to be objectified and therefore...

William Shakespeare’s 55th Sonnet and John Donne’s “The Canonization” are both poems that possess the same themes, anxieties, and cultural practices, thus illuminating the two poets’ experiences in early modern Britain. According to Sasha Roberts,...

Artists such as Lily Briscoe from To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and Stephen Dedalus from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce are equally affected by the ways in which society interprets their art. They embody these two...

In his novel Light in August, Faulkner presents one of his most biting critiques of religious and social intolerance in early twentieth-century society. Faulkner uses the fictional town of Jefferson to confront the presence of racism, sexuality,...

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide wide sea!

This soul hath been

Alone on a wide wide sea:

So lonely 'twas, that God himself

Scarce seemed there to be.”

-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

On the surface, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick suggests...

In the first fifteen chapters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula the author examines and subtly comments on the role of women in Victorian England through the actions and words of Mina and Lucy. In particular, evidence from the passage that appears on pages...

Both Gregor Samsa from Franz Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis and Meursault from Albert Camus’ The Stranger struggle to communicate with the people around them. Although Samsa suffers from physical abnormalities while Meursault possesses...

In his memoir, Survival In Auschwitz, Primo Levi defines hope and expresses its significance as a key feature of our humanity through the use of style, characterization and tone.

Levi poignantly defines his personal definition of hope through the...

Both Mrs. Turpin in Flannery O’Conner’s Revelation and the narrator in Raymond Craver’s Cathedral hold prejudiced worldviews. However, Mrs. Turpin is religious and expresses her self-satisfied thoughts openly, while the narrator dismisses others...

In A Temporary Matter, Jhumpa Lahiri illustrates a temporary blackout that enables Shukumar and Shoba to reconnect only to find that they have long been disconnected from each other. Shukumar and Shoba face four states of light, which...

In Jhumpha Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, ritual plays important roles in both perpetuating and alleviating the loneliness of her characters. Many characters such as Mrs. Sen, Mr. Pirzada, Boori Ma, and Mrs. Croft maintain their rituals in...

Despite the often automatic preconception in literature that darkness and negativity are inextricably linked, darkness is first a protective and natural force of childhood on North Richmond Street. The narrator first mentions darkness when...

Dialectical structure is probably one of the major characteristics of all Metaphysical poetry. Donne was the pioneer of this type of poetry, which was marked by erudite scholarship, and difficulty of thought. It is said that a whole book of...

In the novel ‘Night’, it is clear to see there is a changing relationship between Elie and his father. On first impression, ‘he called out to me and I had not answered’, seems to indicate that the relationship has ceased. However, the change in...

The play ‘Twelve Angry Men’ by Reginald Rose contains many elements that examine the implementation of the American justice system in 1957 and help shape the deliberations of the case. Perhaps the most important element is the relationship between...

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the title character is omnipresent. To the protagonists of the novel, the difficulty of escaping his power and ultimately defeating him is often overwhelming because he is always with them in some way, shape, or form....

Both the poem The Cry of the Children by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley portray acts of cruelty in an attempt to arouse pity from readers. The victims in each case feel bitter self-pity and respond with...