Newest Literature Essays

What is it about Tatiana Larina? How is it that a young country girl, whose semblance is hardly remarkable and whose intelligence and judgment are suspect, has captivated literary culture and come to be regarded as “the Russians’ Mona Lisa”...

In the popular fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, the road to grandmother’s house is no walk in the park – it is dark, ominous, dangerous. It also offers choices, but Little Red Cap tends to make those that lead to trouble. The innocent heroine’s...

The trouble with an unreliable narrator often lies in choosing what to believe. In the case of Vladimir Nabokov’s incestuously illicit novel Lolita, it proves to be an intriguing predicament, as the unreliability of narrator Humbert Humbert is...

Although Margaret Hale and John Thornton do not fall in love ‘at first sight,’ sight, or gazing, plays an important role in the asymmetrical power relations implicit in the courtship of the protagonists in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South....

By the time Olaudah Equiano died in 1797 he had amassed a sizable fortune, visited four continents, and written a detailed account of his enslavement in the British colonies (Carey). It was this latter act that reserved him a place in history as...

While presenting a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe expressed his alienation from the imperialist and patriarchal themes of Heart of Darkness, famously decrying Joseph Conrad’s novel as the work of “a...

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a work about transience, and perhaps no two things in the natural world are more fleeting than life and beauty. Artists aim to preserve these two qualities in their work by simultaneously imitating the natural world to give...

In his recent study of the relationship between poetry and warfare, The Poetry of War, James Anderson Winn writes of the war poet’s ability to “convey, often in the same line or stanza, both the intensity of love between men of arms and the powers...

In her essay, “Origins of the Novel”, Marthe Robert characterises the novel as knowing “neither rule nor restraint. Open to every possibility, its boundaries fluctuate in all directions”. Indeed, both Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess de Cleves...

As Daniel R. White writes in Nietzsche at the Altar: Situating the Devotee, “To laugh at the literal behavior of other characters in the social drama, is to change the truth value of what those characters do so as to undermine its seriousness, its...

In his novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz examines Latino identities and sexuality, and the ways in which both are affected and informed by violence. This violence is enacted through institutions like the state, through...

Chay Yew, in "Porcelain" and "Wonderland," examines various notions of "queer" through his characters, who desperately seek connections, and love, with the people around them. Their lives are marked by death, violence, and tragedy, which occurs...

Federico Garcia Lorca titled his “un-performable” play that “belonged to the future” El Publico. This name could mean two things: el publico, the audience, or el publico, he who is public. Both meanings are two sides of the same coin, the beating...

In William Shakespeare’s final tragedy Coriolanus, plebeians, senators, soldiers, enemies, and even some immediate family struggle in their attempts to indentify and characterize the essence of Caius Marcius Coriolanus. Coriolanus himself...

Ian Fleming’s Doctor No was published in 1958, nine years after Mao Zedong and his communist party formed the PRC (People’s Republic of China). While the formation of the PRC united the long-time warring states within China itself, it also added...

Film noir frequently explores the extremes of the American character, illuminating its dark and treacherous capabilities but also its capacity for decency and truth. Although many critics agree that the quintessential period for noirs occurred...

Female marginalisation is a major theme in The Color Purple, with Celie’s emancipation from repressive male patriarchy being the culmination of the plot. When discussing the way narrative method and perspective are used within the novel to address...

‘If I wanted to say just one thing to one person, I would write a letter.’ 1

- Margaret Atwood

Given the feminist reputation of The Handmaid’s Tale – it has been called a “feminist dystopia”1 – it is convenient to make the facile assumption that the...

In his novel Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser’s portrait of American materialism coincides with his characters’ values as they strive to promote their images. Critics of Sister Carrie often point out the inadequate human relationships Dreiser...

In the opening sequence of The Pillow Book, a small Japanese girl sits before her father on her birthday while he paints on her face and the back of her neck with calligrapher’s ink. As he writes on her he chants in Japanese: “When God made the...

The segment on pages 133-135* of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey relates the binary of light and darkness which symbolizes the interaction between Gothicism and reality in the novel, helping the reader to realize role of Catherine in the novel as a...

Both Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” involve women artists as their main characters—The Lady of Shalott weaves artful, colorful webs and the narrator in “The Bloody Chamber” is a talented...

While the countless paradoxes in John Keats’s Poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” could lead one to envision a battle between Classical and Romantic art, Keats tries to reconcile the two types of art through the form and theme of his poem.

The various...

When discussing Toni Morrison and her novels, it’s tempting to talk about race since her body of work addresses that subject in such powerful ways. However, in an interview, Morrison stated that she actually writes “about the same thing…which is...