Newest Literature Essays

“It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted, Northland Wild.” In this quote, American author Jack London establishes the key theme...

In both Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the authors use the gothic style to represent fears or anxieties their female protagonists' lives. Both Jane Eyre and Catherine Morland suffer from gothic delusions when they...

The male-dominated society of the early 1900's was thriving during the time that Susan Glaspell was writing 'Trifles', her one-act play. Women did not have the right to vote and had severely limited opportunities in the professional arena. They...

George Eliot’s novel, Silas Marner, conveys the power of the church in Victorian era England over the lives of its parishioners. Silas, in the opening pages, is an innocent, albeit naïve, God-fearing Christian. When the church of Lantern Yard...

Perhaps the greatest pleasure comes at the expense of others. Geoffrey Chaucer seems acutely aware of this, and has his Parson —the final tale-teller in The Canterbury Tales, though the Parson’s is not really a tale at all— include in his sermon...

Intelligent and self-aware as a child, the protagonist of the novel, Jane Eyre, grows from an immature youth to a well-respected woman by learning from several different environments that test her character. Jane must navigate society as she...

The Playboy of the Western World is a story about conformity and rebellion towards the law. In the play, Shawn Keogh is the ultra-conservative figure who bows towards the law with deference and meekness. At the other extreme, Christy Mahon is the...

The tile of Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses literally translates to mean “transformation.” The compendium is actually itself a transformational work, merging a multitude of Greek and Roman historical traditions into one massive epic poem. There are many...

Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoirs do not share the focus of typical memoirs- biographical details of friends, siblings, favorite pastimes. Rather, Kingston examines the social influences that have shaped her life, view of herself, and the world. The...

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale presents a disturbing future dystopia in which all power is stripped from women and left in a male-dominated power structure. Throughout the novel, betrayal remains the over-arching theme, seen in men’s...

During the Modern period, writers were concerned with “making it new.” People had been disillusioned, largely due to the devastation of the First World War, and they were fed up with the hypocrisy of Victorian society. People’s way of looking at...

Chekhov’s stories often describe the little intricate moments in Russian life, focusing in on one character’s experience of a normal event and in doing so commenting on the character themselves. Agafya is one of Chekhov’s longer short stories, and...

We often attribute power, when not wielded properly, to destruction and downfall. The concept of power plays an essential role in both Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, but each author portrays...

To understand art, one must first understand the artist who created it and their motivation in doing so. In Willa Cather’s short story “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperance” the protagonist, Paul, is a unique and complex character, which gives...

Edith Wharton challenges the notion of knowledge and understanding, even of one’s own personal experience, in her short story “Roman Fever.” The application of Jackie Royster’s scenic analysis to Wharton’s “Roman Fever” perpetuates the idea that...

The Grammar of the Idols

Salman Rushdie’s “The Prophet’s Hair” reflects on religious practice and worship as a number of people cross paths with a sacred relic that has been stolen from their mosque. A vial, containing a strand of hair from...

Sharon Olds is renowned for keeping her readers on their toes and changing the direction of her poems drastically and without warning (Galens). This remains especially true in her poem “I Go Back to May 1937”. Olds’ brash style ensures that her...

“It’s a curious thing, Duchess, about the game of marriage – a game, by the way, that is going out of fashion – the wives hold all the honours, and invariably lose the odd trick”.

The play ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ by Oscar Wilde presents a window...

In Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer the theme of illumination is explored by the triple meaning of the word itself. Foer shows how illumination may mean to clarify or explain, to produce actual light, or to embellish something....

Shakespeare weaves an intricate web ensnaring the characters in The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice. A handkerchief, a small and seemingly insignificant square of fabric, exerts magical powers over the characters as it transfers from person...

A Different Outlook on Christian Symbolism in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

The ideas revolving around Christian symbolism in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea have run rampant ever since the novella was first published in 1952...

Seeking an Asylum: Power in Caligari and its Relationship to the Viewer

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) is an allegory of the abuses of the older generation of political authorities, who irrationally led younger generations of Germans into WWI...

Alvy’s First Session: Annie Hall’s First Scene and Its Relation to Bergman

The influence of Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen’s favorite filmmaker, can be seen in many of Allen’s later films, but his inspiration is also evident in 1977’s Annie Hall. In...

In The Legend of Good Women, the God of Love predicates his definition of a “good woman” on the actions of surrounding characters rather than the protagonist herself. Being “virtuous” requires no action in these legends. Instead, it insists on a...