Newest Literature Essays

Many have written about the guilt or innocence of Henry James' heroine, Daisy Miller. In her story, James tells of a young American girl in Europe who ignores Old World conventions and goes about, unchaperoned, with two gentlemen: one, an American...

Christina Rossetti's poems were viewed as moral pieces, especially in comparison to her brother Dante’s sensual and even sexual poetry. However, Rossetti’s poetry is demonstrative of the Victorian mindset in that, it is not simply dutiful and...

During the Civil Rights Movement, Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden each wrote poems addressing the future of the movement. Two of these poems, which expressed their hope for the future and for the equality of black Americans, were “I, too” by...

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois illustrates the very poignant image of a color line that separates the two races in his society. He introduces the term double consciousness to explain how African-Americans view themselves, not as...

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of an imagination all compact" (Act 5, Scene 1, Lines 7-8). This quote by Theseus encompasses the notion of love as being an illusion, a product of the imagination. Love is equated with lunacy and poetry,...

Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” challenges preconceived notions of religion and offers another view. His view of religion is pessimistic, as his titular protagonist de-evolves into a disillusioned old man whose “dying hour was gloom” (12)....

Female writers constantly try to negotiate their identities in a society that exalts male opinion. That the protagonists of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Chopin’s “A Pair of Silk Stockings” are married women places both discourses within a...

Untouchable describes a day in the life of a young sweeper boy, Bakha, who has been denied even a chance for a free and open-air walk because of his occupation. The novel introduces the caste system of rural India as the setting, and portrays a...

One similarity that exists across Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia is the ambivalence that their characters feel outside of their motherland. More...

America is in the Heart begins with Bulosan’s childhood and traces a difficult immigrant experience defined by poverty, rootlessness and illness and culminates in a remaking of his self through writing. As Rajini Srikanth notes, the novel is “...

Sandra Cisneros attempts to reconstruct the traditionally patriarchal realm that is the house and negotiate a space for women. Her bilingual dedication “A las Mujeres/To the Women” recognizes her ethnicity as well as her gender, which immediately...

Biddy is introduced early in Great Expectations and is mentioned regularly throughout, though she is not one of the major characters. She does, however, serve as a constant reminder to Pip of what he is leaving behind and, as she is more of a peer...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a tormented exploration of the nature of what it means to be human. The Protagonist is a bounty hunter chasing human simulations known as “androids” and he struggles with his feelings about the task of...

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shelley illustrates how the environment tears apart the life of a scientist, Victor Frankenstein. Victor’s generation of a creature from dead matter seemingly deems him an immoral man. However, one often overlooks...

Sophie Caco, in Breath, Eyes, Memory, quotes her mother, “There’s a difference between what a person wants and what’s good for them” (72). In Edwidge Danticat’s novel, there is conflict between what Sophie wants and what her mother, Martine,...

I. Introduction

Past critics have deemed Ophelia an insignificant and marginal character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, functioning only to further define Hamlet. One such critic, Jacques Lacan, interprets Ophelia as a mere object of Hamlet’s sexual...

In the introduction to William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, E.M Forster describes Piggy as not only “the brains of the party” but also “the wisdom of the heart” and “the human spirit.” This description of Piggy becomes more accurate as the...

The issue of immigration and American attitudes towards it are the object of satire in T.C Boyle's novel ‘Tortilla Curtain’. Boyle uses sarcasm to attack what he sees as the self-obsessed nature of middle-class America and their naïve view of the...

In his poem “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot presents multiple relationships between men and women, both historical and of his own creation. The interactions that he describes allow the reader to infer how Eliot views relationships, sexuality, and...

Seamus Heaney’s “Casualty” is written as an elegy for a friend who was killed in a bombing in Northern Ireland shortly after Bloody Sunday. His friend, who was a Catholic, failed to obey a curfew set in place by the Irish Republican Army. He was...

Postcolonial literature both reveals and challenges the ideals of a dominant culture in their attempt to marginalise and control a minor group. No Sugar is a play set in a period of Australian history known as Protectionism, in which Indigenous...

William Shakespeare’s take on the passage of time seems consistently concentrated on its most destructive effects on the body. He obsesses over this ineluctable force across several of his sonnets, couching the passage of time with almost...

The number thirteen carries with it symbolic connotations unique to no other digits. Widely recognized as unlucky, to the point of constructing whole buildings that omit the number altogether, it stands as a superstitious unit of fear. Thirteen...

In Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, the character Yank is used to portray the suppression of the human spirit and the degradation of the working class. Throughout the play, Yank’s sense of belonging defines both his character and his state of mind....