Newest Literature Essays

Immigrants almost inevitably face immense challenges pursuing the American Dream--socially, economically, perhaps even internally. Such struggles are evident in the novel "Jasmine," Bharati Mukherjee's richly descriptive and emotionally powerful...

This essay will focus on the collapse of William Dorrit (Bk 2, ch 19) and examine William’s imprisonment to self-deception in this passage as a consequence of his moral debts to society and Amy, what effects this has on his character in the novel...

In The Homecoming, Harold Pinter suggests that there are two types of women: whores or mothers. The whore, he believes, can have little success in family life; the mother, on the other hand, can create a successful family. Pinter’s statement is...

The Canterbury Tales presents the Wife of Bath as an honest woman in conflict with her society. “Honest” here takes on two meanings. It either implies that the Wife of Bath is a moral and Christian member of society or, more literally, that she in...

In his discourse on inequality among men, Rousseau argued that, contrary to intuition, "savage" man living in a totally pre-social wilderness acted with more empathy and kindness towards fellow human beings than even reasoned philosophers of the...

Joel Chandler Harris’s short story “Free Joe and the Rest of the World” has long been classified as a prominent example of Plantation Tradition literature. Literature in this tradition often portrays African-Americans as clueless, “shiftless”...

In "The Politics" Aristotle made an explicit rationale for subordination. He suggested that some human beings may possess an innate fitness for either slavery or rule, and that those who are enslaved deserve to be so entirely because they have...

Classical liberalism, as expressed by Locke, contains the notions of both intellectual or physical liberty (i.e., the natural rights and freedoms of man with respect to society) and economic liberty (i.e., the right to own and transmit property)....

Lennox (1978) argues that Brecht was “unable to see real women in their full dimensions” perhaps due to “a terror of women like that possessed by many men”. Accepting this, Brecht’s portrayal of women is in terms of stereotypes only slightly...

Salinger (1974) calls Twelfth Night a “comedy about comedy” in which Shakespeare demonstrates his “fundamental debt to the earlier Renaissance tradition of comic playwriting and his abiding sense of detachment from it” (pg 242), and it is from...

The cinematic adaptation of Phillip K Dick’s thrilling science-fiction story Minority Report captures perfectly the futuristic noir feel of the original. However, the movie’s plotline, characters and central themes contain major dissimilarities....

Keats’s preoccupation with the inescapable precession of time and mutability is evident in all three poems: “Ode to a Nightingale,”, the ode “To Autumn” and the sonnet, “Bright Star, Would I were as Steadfast as Thou Art.” In his “Ode to a...

Like much of the poetry of Keats, these three poems explore life’s contrasts of pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow, permanence and impermanence. The mortal pleasures of Beauty and Love are longed for, but proven to be all too often tempered...

Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro is essentially a Bildungsroman, in that it follows Paul on his journey from child to adult, and from childishness to maturity. As with all stories of growth and development, Maestro’s focus is often upon Paul’s...

Sean O’Casey’s drama Juno and the Paycock details the slow, painful degradation of the Boyle family in war-torn Ireland in the early 1920s. Juno remains strong and calm throughout the course of the play, even though she suffers from a drunkard,...

Walter Benjamin’s work as a philosopher and theorist speaks at length of mechanical reproduction and the impact it has on society. Benjamin’s work can therefore be applied to the society depicted in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, illuminating it...

An apple pressed precariously to her blushed lips, Lula from Leroi Jones’ existential drama Dutchman is the epitome of temptation. She snakes around the train car, spying Clay and eventually driving him to his outburst late in the second scene....

Carpenters are traditionally regarded as hard-working, rugged men with calluses on their hands and dirt beneath their fingernails. They are strong and silent; they take pride in their work and are generally self-assured. One of the main characters...

In “The Grammar of Narrative,” a chapter in his longer work, The Poetics of Prose, Tzvetan Todorov describes the simplest, “minimal complete plot” as consisting “in the passage from one equilibrium to another. An ‘ideal’ narrative begins with a...

In the “Narrative Desire” chapter of his larger work, Reading for Plot, author Peter Brooks discusses the different modes of desire that exist within a reader. He argues that these desires are the forces of momentum brought to a text that in fact...

The thirteenth of fifteen stories in James Joyce's Dubliners collection, "A Mother," can be seen as something of a break between the heavy, serious vignettes in its vicinity. It can be seen as a story to chuckle at; after all, the title character...

In The Rover, Aphra Behn illustrates a world in which sex and economic exchange unite under the mandates of the patriarchy. In such a society, sexuality is commodified, and a woman is either sold into the marriage market (by her family, in an...

The doctrine of creation is not an ambiguous aspect of the Bible. The first four chapters of Genesis contain the primary biblical information on creation; therefore, they provide the basis of the biblical doctrine. This seemingly straightforward...

The last two paragraphs of The Plague emphasize Camus’ belief that even during a crisis, humans must always fight against death even if that battle will be a constant struggle without victory.

Rieux deems the stubborn and communal fight of man...