Newest Literature Essays

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer portrays the actual practice of alchemy to be a ruse. In the Canon Yeoman’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, transformation is merely an illusion when one attempts to go against the forces of nature. In the...

Featuring a wide assortment of colorful personalities, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice contains both emotionally deep, interesting characters as well as hilarious caricatures of the bumpkins who make up the rural social scene of 18th-century...

As evidenced by its continued appearance throughout the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, the language of finance served as a particularly useful wellspring for examples and terminology to help those authors convey the important...

Written as an allegory for slavery and the way it affects the people who employ it, Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” questions just how much of an impact living in a society has on one’s willingness to act in ways different...

At its core, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is the story of two girls and the differing ideologies by which they live and view the world. Elinor, the oldest of the Dashwood girls, is a calm and rational thinker who always tries her best to be...

The story of a dysfunctional family and its epic journey across the South, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is famous for its use of multiple narrators who interpret and recount the journey of the Bundren clan from their own unique perspectives....

Out of all the competing plots and themes in Paradise Lost, arguably the central and most important story is that of humanity’s first members, Adam and Eve, and their self-induced fall from grace into sin. The nature of their relationship is a...

Throughout Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, the theme of love is visited often. Between the two works, it becomes clear that Dante’s notion of love is divided into two parts: Natural and Elective Love. Natural Love does not err -- that is to say,...

The primary concern of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” is how the female speaker views her relationship with men; the emotions associated with her views of sex are equated to death, and the desire for her to die. This metaphor of death, used...

Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series presents a society that regulates touch not through laws and mandates that can easily be broken, but through actually rewiring the brain chemistry of its citizens so that they will not desire touch with the wrong...

James Joyce’s Ulysses is unlike any other novel. With a variety of characters, a stream-of-consciousness narrative, parodies, allusions, and obscenities, Joyce’s eighteen-episode novel illustrates only a single Dublin day. While the first thirteen...

Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting uses the combination of grotesque imagery within a narrative lacking clear progression to portray the nihilistic lifestyle of a heroin addict. Welsh creates distinct voices through the main characters in his...

The em-dash, often formed in print by two hyphens lacking separation, is a piece of punctuation “stronger than a comma, less formal than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses” (Strunk and White 9). Traditionally a dash indicates an abrupt...

In typical modernist fashion, William Faulkner experiments in his work with a number of nontraditional stylistic and thematic characteristics, including brokenness, fragmentation, despair, pessimism, perception distortion, and the rejection of...

Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging,” an eight-stanza poem written in free verse, is the first in his collection of poems entitled Death of a Naturalist, which was published in 1966. Written in first-person narrative, this circularly structured poem...

Jack Burden is far more than a narrator describing the rise and fall of Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Intertwined in his description of The Boss’s political machinations and personal dilemmas is an account of his own...

The Hemingway code hero is almost always a man, but in The Sun Also Rises, the real code hero is lead female Brett Ashley. From her cropped hair to her penchant for partying, Lady Brett Ashley is more code hero-like than any of her fellow...

The concept of the novum is a central theme to science fiction as a whole. It represents something new and different from the world as we know it. The novum usually functions as the impetus to the science fiction story, guiding the motivations of...

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment lets the reader into the mind of a murderer as he commits his crime and copes with the consequences. The novel grapples with many philosophical questions and challenges accepted ideas of right versus wrong....

Sometimes, we pay even when there’s been no mistake, just for being who we are. I don’t mind paying for my mistakes. But it seems like we’re paying for everyone else’s mistakes too.

--Luis Rodriguez

Although injustices like racial oppression are...

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and...

In reading A Room of One’s Own, it is difficult to tell whether Virginia Woolf cares more passionately for her gender or for her craft. Guiding the future of the art of fiction, rather than scorning men or even fighting for justice, seems to be...

How far can an ancient ideal stretch? From Euclidean geometry to Plato’s Republic, ancient ideas are still being analyzed and furthered. One example, the fourth book in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, is directly related to Plato’s ideal state,...

I desire / the learned and charitable critic to have so much faith in me / to think it was done of industry.

--Ben Jonson, lines 110-112 of the prefatory epistle to Volpone

Ben Jonson’s play Volpone, or “Sly Fox,” was performed for the first time on...