Newest Literature Essays

Lonely mansions, ghostly apparitions, and magic are some of the elements that create the atmosphere in Gothic stories. In his novel Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown uses most of these to create an aura of mystery and suspense. Brown once said that...

To a substantial degree, the political system of patriarchy is dependent on the manipulation of knowledge. The biological, psychological, and economic discrimination against women, as well as other marginal groups, has relied upon the...

Every act of translation is simultaneously an act of interpretation. With regard to Beowulf’s last scene and final words to the young warrior Wiglaf, an analysis of three translations of the poem, by E. Talbot Donaldson, R.M. Liuzza, and Seamus...

The construction of subjectivity in relation to the “real” world of objects has long been a concern for critics of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In his seminal work, Mimesis, Eric Auerbach argues that the novel inverts the conventional...

Though they come from the shores of different eras and the minds of different authors, the protagonists of Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred...

The characters of Pechorin and Bazarov, the protagonists of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, are both men who are, in a sense, doomed. One voluntarily wanders the globe, waiting and finally meeting an unnoticed end,...

Elinor Dashwood’s famous speech in Volume III of Sense and Sensibility, in which she gives vent to emotions long-repressed, is in many senses the heart and soul of the novel. Having suffered through months of silent disappointment, endured for the...

“We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces” (2257). So the character of Lady Bracknell observes at the conclusion of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The play as a whole is one firmly preoccupied with the idea of surfaces and...

Though many have argued that Dickens used the character of James Harthouse to criticize Romanticism in his novel Hard Times, it is his utilitarianism that makes him such a danger. Harthouse himself notes early in the novel that there are many...

Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint follows a young Ghanian woman known as Sissie and her experiences in Europe. As Aidoo’s story floats from reflections on Sissie’s sexually charged relationship with a...

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre opens at dreary Gateshead Hall, where the orphaned title character is compelled to live with her wealthy aunt. Here the young Jane appears reserved and unusual, a girl who says she can be “happy at least in my way”...

In the coming-of-age story “The Flowers,” Alice Walker effectively portrays an endearing, innocent African American girl whose transition to adulthood comes suddenly and without warning. It begins with a rosy and light-hearted illustration of Myop...

"The Enormous Radio", by John Cheever, can be viewed as a study of addiction and its detrimental effects on the individual and their surroundings. The story introduces the Westcott family and the radio they listen to daily. The radio stops...

The Merchant of Venice has been interpreted over time as both a defense and an attack on Jews. (“Shylock”) While it would seem improbable that Shakespeare was forward thinking enough to completely reject the anti-Semitic sentiment of his time, the...

Joanne Harris’ novel Chocolat and Scott Hicks’ film Snow Falling on Cedars use characters and their interactions to explore the influence of the past on the present. Both texts reveal the influence of past relationships on their major female and...

In Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman criticizes people’s struggles to hold onto time through hyperbole, nameless characters, average themes and simplistic syntax. The people in Lightman’s vignettes have a common problem: how to slow down time;...

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows a view of women that was widely accepted by society during the period the novel portrays. All of Huck Finn’s women, who are alternatively scorned, mistrusted and venerated by the title...

When Nanny tells her young, naïve granddaughter Janie Crawford, “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see,” (14) she is merely setting the stage for a number of connections between humans and animals that communicate Hurston’s...

Somewhere amongst the fallen pecans, the woolen afghan, and the clandestine photographs, we can find in Animal Dreams a consistent symbol of death. Codi is followed throughout the story by a seeming demise of those around her, from friends and...

“And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and...

The Female Arab:

Physical and mental lust were eating out my body at the same time I knew there was only loneliness. The CIA had treated loneliness in that city and made the sun into a piece of ice. I decided either I can die or I have to refind...

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War connects the tragedy of wartime to the loss of youth and love. It is the story of an idealist named Kien and his first love, Phuong, and how the dramatic events of war caused their pure love to diminish little by...

There are many texts that deal with the role of the individual male in society; their positions are discussed politically, socially and personally. However, in-depth discussion of the individual female role in society is often lacking during the...

Narration is a critical aspect of Ford’s The Good Soldier. Since the narrator also serves as one of the main characters, his narrative perspective becomes even more interesting to the reader. One of the most fascinating aspects of Dowell’s...