Newest Literature Essays

The idea of the grotesque is presented in both Naguib Mahfouz’s novel <i>Midaq Alley</i> and Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People.” Although the settings, plots, and characters differ, both works present an underlying...

“Poetry,” said Robert Frost “is a way of seizing life by the throat.” Not having been equipped with the media and technology of today, poets of the post-1770s era often approached their poetry in this fashion. They took advantage of the freedom of...

In Ken Kesey’s <i>Sometimes a Great Notion</i>, the Stamper family illustrates how the idealistic American culture -- and the equally idealistic individuals living and working within that culture -- become corrupted by the dark side of...

In Gabriel García Márquez’s <i>One Hundred Years of Solitude</i>, Colonel Aureliano Buendía experiences several metamorphoses that grant him his multidimensional character. However, these metamorphoses become regressive, and he finds...

In her essay “From the Women’s Prison: Third World Women’s Narratives of Prison,” Barbara Harlow argues that the solidarity that transcends race, gender, class, and other social categories is a vital component in the fight against oppressive...

In Shakespeare’s <i>Winter’s Tale</i>, the “death” of Hermione catalyzes the narrative development. Quantitatively, she plays little role beyond the first three acts, but the play revolves and eventually unites around her. It is,...

With the close of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th, much of the world was changing. In particular, world literature was shifting from the ideals of Romanticism to the stark realism of novels written after the Great War. At the beginning...

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “Gorilla Girl” tells the twisted coming-of-age story of a budding sociopath in southern Michigan. The narrator, whose name is not revealed in the text, takes the reader through some of the more notable life events in her...

Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” written apart from but included in his unfinished anthology <i>The Canterbury Tales</i>, is considered one of his greatest works. It could be at once a number of things: a dark meditation on...

Within the pages of Bram Stoker’s <i>Dracula</i>, the author explores concepts of love, darkness, and sexuality as well as the theme of good versus evil. The most powerful theme surrounding the infamous vampire, however, is that of...

Geoffrey Chaucer’s <i>The Canterbury Tales</i> contain his trademark challenges to and reimaginings of the popular literary genres of his time. With each tale, Chaucer takes a common genre and follows its general conventions in order...

<blockquote>“Regardless of what we might think of our gender, we can only live that gender through the body we have.”</blockquote>

Throughout Sharon Pollock’s play <i>Blood Relations</i>, the plotline focuses on the life of...

In his poem “A Hymn to God the Father,” John Donne addresses God directly through a series of questions intended to reaffirm his faith. He prays for forgiveness for his transgressions in an inquisitive and almost intimate tone; it seems that he is...

With regard to his own work, David Mamet admits that “What I write about is what I think is missing from our society. And that’s communication on a basic level.” In his play <i>Glengarry Glen Ross</i>, Mamet uses an ironic technique to...

Much has been written about the religion and politics of <i>Gulliver’s Travels</i>, specifically in relation to Part I, A Voyage to Lilliput. Of all of the voyages and peoples that Gulliver, the protagonist of the novel, meets during...

Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony is a multidimensional novel full of Laguna symbols and themes that are easily overlooked in a superficial reading. Like many of the elements in this work, Josiah's spotted cattle can be interpreted in multiple ways:...

In Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver reinvents the Western genre, riffing on a couple of common tropes and stock characters while simultaneously creating a female-centered story that rejects the violence and disconnected heroes of stereotypical...

Among the many themes explored in The Hours is the effect that certain pivotal moments have on our lives. The first and most obvious of these moments is described in the prologue: Virginia weighs herself down with stones and walks into the river....

Charles Dickens’ bildungsroman Great Expectations (1913) cannot help but impress upon the reader an overwhelming sense of guilt that permeates the novel at various levels. As the plot unfolds, the characters develop; the sense of guilt, however,...

Andrew Marvell’s poetry exemplifies an ancient literary genre known as the pastoral. This genre, which dates back to the third century B.C.E., represents the values of the shepherd and rustic life. Marvell’s poems “The Garden” and “The Nymph...

Alternatively dubbed that “despotic logician” and “the vortex and turning-point of so-called world history,” Socrates represents a radical departure point in the history of philosophy. To Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of rationalism puts forth a...

Nietzsche’s short work Homer’s Contest is part of his attempt to develop an axiology that reinstates morality within the realm of aesthetic existence, grounding lofty ideas like “good” and “evil” within a naturalistic framework. In this essay, he...

Readers of the Odyssey could certainly find frustration in crafting a judgment of Odysseus’ decision to depart from life alongside the goddess Kalypso. Some might point to a yearning for his day of homecoming. Others might argue precisely the...

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby is an utterly American character: deviant and romantic idealist; tenacious yet sensitive; ostentatious yet nostalgic. At his core is a transcendental yearning, and for this reason as a character he never quite...