Newest Literature Essays

Small towns are often depicted as serene and bucolic places filled with caring people. Gopher Prairie appears, at first glance, to be one of these towns. But through the trials of Carol Kennicott the true nature of these towns is exposed. In this...

Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White portrays the distinctly partitioned sexual spheres in the Victorian era, as is reflected through the weak and victimized female characters and the powerful and domineering male characters. The Victorian...

Miriam, a main character in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, experiences extreme physical, mental, and sexual abuse from virtually every authority figure in her life. Using Hosseini’s book and Erik Erickon’s Psychosocial stages of development,...

In his Iliad, Homer uses the character of Diomedes to personify his definition of effective leadership, often juxtaposing him with the unproductive and cowardly Agamemnon. Homer believes that the bravery to assert one’s opinions and the...

Even in a globalized community that consists of a blending of many different cultures and races, stereotypes still thrive in the modern day. Two persistent and contrasting stereotypes of Asian American men exist: the first is that they are...

Both Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows are honored and cherished children’s classics. Though the two stories were written over a hundred years ago, they are still popular and widely loved today....

“Ah, don’t say that. If you knew how I hate to be different!” (Wharton 69). Ellen Olenska in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence is, to Newland Archer, the perfect example of an exciting rebel to the mores of society in the New York aristocracy. He...

In a benumbing world, devoid of much refreshment, a felicitous moment in time can unite people in a cohesive bond and rejuvenate the world. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” weaves this idea masterfully. He does...

Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) consists of a series of stories, and its teaching comes to light only when one has grasped each of these stories in its complex artistic details and in its entirety. The interpretation of this hybrid text, the...

The Myth of Sisyphus is one of the profound philosophical texts written in the 20th century. The book was originally published in French as Le Mythe de Sisyphe in 1942. Albert Camus’ philosophy of absurdity is most apparent in Le Etranger (The...

The devil is a common literary icon. This enemy of God has generally been established as an unwavering representation of evil—a figure out to trick and torment his arch-nemesis and readers alike. Whether making pacts with mortals to sell their...

Switch County, Kentucky, is the rural area depicted in John Yount’s novel Hardcastle. Once a peaceful, rural farming community, it was transformed into a coal-mining region during the industrial revolution of the early 1900s. It soon lost its...

As a Puritan, Anne Bradstreet strove to live her life according to Calvinist doctrine while still having to cope with the struggles of her human condition (Mooney). When Bradstreet’s house burned down, she was struck with the reality of life’s...

There are many instances where if one were not laughing, they would be crying; that is to say, the difference between the laughable and the lamentable is oftentimes narrow. In fact, the irony behind what is tragic and what is comedic is naturally...

The appearance of guns in Bayard's story in The Unvanquished personify turning points in his life, and each of these events holds remarkable significance in the journey as a whole. Bayard's encounters with firearms parallel his journey from...

Formula fiction is common in the canon of seductive fiction. It relies on standard themes, plot devices, and characters that indulge the reader with a combination of predictability and intrigue. Seduction novels, already a staple of formula...

In Major Barbara (1907), George Bernard Shaw questions the prevailing ethical assumptions and attitudes of Western culture on social engineering and poverty. Like Nietzsche, he calls for the revaluation of values, as the meaning of concepts like “...

The works of Harold Pinter question the traditional views of language and communication, asking the audience to reconsider the hierarchal relationship between speech/silence, presence/absence, and the role of each opposition in the struggle for...

In Act Without Words (1956), Samuel Beckett strips the human condition to its barest level of existence, the “last extremity of meat – or bones” (Connor 181). The play is no longer than four pages, but, in those few pages, Beckett confronts...

Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated (underline) is a playful celebration of postmodern eclecticism, piecing together the stylistic conventions and devices of modernity, as Jean Baudrilliard claimed, “…all that are left are...

In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1793), Blake writes with a strong prophetic voice, bringing forth a new set of proverbs, a new poetics, twisting and flipping traditional wisdom. Blake challenges the status quo, questioning stagnant,...

In The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the authors use the motif of solitude and isolation to symbolize freedom. These qualities free Gregor Samsa and the town of Macondo, respectively,...

The Forest Dweller, by Hermann Hesse, is a tale not only of the downfall of tyranny or the fall of the high priest it is a tale of existential enlightenment. The Forest Dweller stands as an allegory for existential thought and triumph. The story’s...

“My Lord is the King of Heaven” (633; sc. 1). With these words, Joan of Arc, heroine in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, declares her allegiance to God. But with these words, she also implies their corrolary: Joan yields to no other authority....