Newest Literature Essays

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus presents a protagonist who sells his soul to the devil for god-like knowledge and power. The tension in Faustus surfaces from the protagonist’s self-damnation, for he is constantly reminded and aware of his...

It has been said that the success of any democracy is incumbent upon the participation of its citizenry. Indeed, our governmental, economic, and social institutions (explicit or otherwise) require the cognizant and informed participation of us...

Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” explores an extraordinary meeting between two enemy combatants in the midst of battle. Owen forgoes the familiar poetics of glory and honor associated with war and, instead, constructs a balance of graphic reality...

Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life is both a compelling illusory story and a concerted effort to moderate the imperialist mindset of its readers. In fact, Typee is a narrative that doubles as a manifesto, a collection of Melville’s...

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, one of the most famous war novels of the 19th century, can also be analyzed outside of the trope of military literature and along a psychological route. Crane’s novel follows the journey of young soldier...

In Ian McEwan's Saturday, the protagonist Henry Perowne is given the task of representing the trials of being a contemporary man. However, he seems to be more than just an average contemporary man. McEwan gives Henry the characteristics of a...

“Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. Would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? One death, and a hundred lives in exchange.” (Dostoevsky, 69)

At...

Intergenerational relations between mothers and daughters are further complicated in The Joy Luck Club as cultural differences come into play for the first generation Chinese immigrant mother and her Americanized daughter. This is clearly brought...

Beowulf’s fight with Grendel proves his heroic credentials and strength. Grendel, the unstoppable demonic troll, all but surrenders at Beowulf’s squashing grip. The bone-crushing grab, however, raises a crux debated by Beowulf scholars: Does...

Henry Thoreau’s Walden is often classified as a philosophical autobiography recounting his two-year experience living in a woodland outside Concord, Massachusetts. Residing in a tiny cabin overlooking Walden Pond, Thoreau spent his days observing...

“It’s just a small story really, about, among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist fighter, and quite a lot of thievery” (Zusak 5). And of course, there is Death. Set in Nazi Germany during the...

Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery is an alarming parable that explores the concept of senseless violence whilst featuring many other prominent themes. The short story revolves around an annual lottery that a village holds to ensure that “lottery in...

In Wise Blood, Flannery O’Conner creates a spiritually empty world in which her characters attempt to live life without morals or religion. Hazel Motes, the protagonist, creates the Church without Christ to escape organized religion all together....

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.” -Elie Wiesel

Throughout...

In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, the heath is essentially treated as a character, albeit an extremely powerful one. Like the other characters, it loves possessively and without regard to the feelings of others. It competes with Ms....

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons, Thomas More is a man whose sense of self is set in stone. He dies not because he wants to be martyred or made a hero, but because he finds himself unable to compromise his integrity. Throughout the play, the...

Throughout much of Nella Larsen’s Passing, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry are portrayed as polar opposites. Though they both occupy the role of a young African-American mother living during the prosperous 1920s, they define that role in intensely...

The search for identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is one of the threads that Smith continually weaves throughout her novel. At one point or another, each character deals with the inevitable question of “Who am I?” From Irie’s search for an...

Through the scope of a satirical lens, both Anthony Trollope’s novel Barchester Towers and Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest take turns examining the carefully structured norms of courtship and marriage in Victorian England....

Italo Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun is based almost entirely on a foundation of three essential themes, all of which relate in some way to the sensation of taste. While Calvino creates many antitheses, the dissonances actually turn into wonderful...

Religion, specifically Christianity, gives Phillis Wheatley an avenue with which to connect and influence her readers. Wheatley appears to embrace Christianity without offering criticism or highlighting hypocrisies. However, a deeper reading of...

Throughout Wieland the text circles around the possibility of social, and therefore national, progress during the period following the American Revolution. The eventual answers the text might provide are ambiguous and certainly outside the scope...

While oftentimes viewed as contributing to the development of Freudian psychoanalysis, the psychological discourse, and specifically that which deals with the unconscious (the part of the psyche which subjects are actively unaware), of Romantic...

Romantic literature is deeply concerned with manifestations and attainment of the sublime. The notion itself asserts gender upon both subject and object, and pervades any attempt to gain historical knowledge. This fetishization of the sublime,...