Newest Literature Essays

In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, the reader sees what was supposed to be a utopian society. From the characters’ painfully regimented daily lives to the clandestine desire to break free from the monotony of OneState, we see that not all...

“How to Tell a True War Story,” in Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried, has almost nothing to do with war. Rather, it has to do with the difficulties of a speaker to communicate their feelings—which are conveyed through stories—as well as...

In Nervous Conditions, the main character, Tambudzai, feels restricted within her family and culture because she is female. The people of Rhodesia assert very traditional roles for men and women; the women cook and clean, while the men go to...

In novels The Catcher in the Rye and The Member of the Wedding, Salinger and McCullers both invite the reader to experience how the adult world can have an impact on the lives of young people. In particular, the novels describe how their...

Throughout The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien often alludes to Kathleen, his daughter, and Linda, his childhood friend with cancer. However, Kathleen and Linda do not exist. O’Brien includes them in his story because they allow him to interact...

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote “The Lover: A Ballad” in an effort to dismiss the sexist attitudes of several male poets from the period. John Donne (“The Flea”), Andrew Marvell (“To his Coy Mistress”), and Robert Herrick (“To Virgins, Make Much...

When Hamlet’s father orders him to kill Claudius, Hamlet’s reaction is one of questioning and disbelief. While he feels strongly about the murder of his father and yearns to discover the killer, he harbors suspicions about the truth behind the...

"Sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have" (Steinbeck 75). To Cathy Ames, a seductively charismatic sociopath, sexuality and the vulnerability that accompanies it is...

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain creates a sense that Huck and Jim grow close and Huck perhaps begins to see Jim not as a slave, but as a human being. In accordance with his reputation for cynicism, though, Twain forgoes the...

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Jane’s skewed perceptions of her surroundings, caretakers, and mental state reflect her refusal to confront the reality of her confinement to a mental institution. Supposed husband and...

A Romantic poet, Wordsworth often draws from nature to describe his subjects or his narrator’s outlook on the world. In his poem “Resolution and Independence,” which employs twenty septets with an ababcc rhyme scheme, Wordsworth expresses his...

“Requiem for the Croppies”, written by Seamus Heaney in 1962, describes the Irish Rebellion of 1798 as seen through the eyes and narrative voice of one random, deceased Irish soldier. The term “croppies” refers to the rebels, attributable to their...

Judith Fetterly coined the term “immasculation” in her 1978 book “The Resisting Reader,” using it to define the process by which “women are taught […] to identify with a male point of view and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of...

In Plato’s Symposium and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the two protagonists are overcome by their love and dedicate an eulogy in the form of a speech or a series of letters to their beloved. The multitude of letters...

The genre of revenge tragedy has been both popular and unique in its ability to simultaneously arouse feelings that appear to be unrelated in its audience: vengeance and sympathy. What makes this genre vary from play to play, however, is the...

Placing Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion and William Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra side by side, one observes an interesting parallelism in the manner in which the protagonists are portrayed. Though the views and opinions of Austen’s Anne...

Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” offers a major piece of literary analysis with an eye towards the ever evolving role of the female author. During Woolf’s discussion of past and present writers, she repeatedly refers to the work of William...

John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” though written nearly a century apart, share many poetic elements that allow readers to effectively draw a surface parallel between the two poems. Though both of these...

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage follows the enlistment of the protagonist Henry and his struggle to mature from a youthful vanity that drives most of his actions through the novel to a final acceptance of the uncaring reality of war and...

Walt Whitman’s poetry contains many basic elements that come together to characterize his own stance in 19th century social and political thought. An analysis of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric” specifically highlight...

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Aphra Behn’s The Rover are two vastly different works of literature that focus on different matters: More’s work is a political document, while Behn’s can be categorized as more of a social one. While the two works in...

In his play Antigone, Sophocles portrays the character of Creon in a multitude of ways but particularly as proud and uncompromising. Because he is ruler of Thebes, many of his actions drive and shape the course of the drama. Significantly, it is...

The Russian Revolution of 1917 greatly influenced the lives of Russian citizens as socialism became a driving political force. Ayn Rand, who grew up during this time of political change and uncertainty, experienced firsthand the effects of...

Jennifer Geer’s article “`All sorts of pitfalls and surprises’: Competing Views of Idealized Girlhood in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books,” discusses at length the implications of Lewis Carroll’s novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, on the...