Newest Literature Essays

Knut Hamsun’s fin de siècle novel Hunger sets the reader up for a journey with its opening sentence when Hamsun writes, “Christiania, singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away traces of his sojourn there.” (Hunger 1). Here,...

Horrific, extraordinary, macabre, or supernatural events and “an atmosphere of mystery and suspense” are the essentials of the American Gothic genre of literature (Phillips). The Southern Gothic sub-genre sets the events in the American South,...

In John Milton’s play Samson Agonistes, eyesight is a recurring motif and blindness used frequently as a metaphor to define the status of a character’s journey. Milton uses the presence or lack of clarity in vision, both physically and...

In 1519, when the Spanish conquistadors landed in North America, they were surprised to discover that natives already inhabited the land. These indigenous people had different beliefs from the Spaniards, so the Spanish proceeded to teach these...

In Margaret Edson’s Wit, Jason, Susie, and Professor Ashwood guide Vivian Bearing toward redemption, changing her into a person who can be both intellectual and compassionate. Jason’s cold intellectualism helps Vivian realize her own neglect of...

In Pamela, Samuel Richardson teaches a religious lesson through Pamela’s pride in virtue, love through purity, and ultimately forgiveness of others. He presents his character as rigorously devoted to God, which often makes her seem vain,...

In The Vicar of Wakefield, although Charles Primrose portrays almost flawless virtue, he retains two major flaws, pride and obstinacy, which lead to many complications in his family’s life. The Primrose family suffers from the retribution of these...

The Iliad and The Odyssey portray a hierarchical, stringently ordered society, ruled by powerful kings, followed by the masses and sanctioned by the gods. At the murder of Agamemnon, a complete breakdown of the Greek social, governmental, and...

In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,Douglass tells many anecdotes to illustrate the horrors of slavery. One of these recounts the murder of his wife's cousin. Douglass uses several strategies to gain our sympathy when...

The novel Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, tells the story of a nameless protagonist enveloped in a consumer-driven society. A stereotypical American driven by consumption and possessions, he finds himself living day-to-day as a cog in the machine...

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero exerts wrathful influence over the island and his servants Caliban and Ariel cannot help but cower in humble obedience. Ariel is indebted to Prospero for freeing him from the dreadful darkness of the “cloven...

Literature is not a static, fixed entity, confined to the parameters of its initial creation. Literary pieces are forever evolving, adapting to new cultural, historical and social contexts through the processes of revision and reinterpretation....

As a kind of collective character onto itself, the Chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex assumes multiple functions and qualities that, together, effectively blur the lines between the private and public spheres of the drama. Evidenced in the text by...

Nature of Crime in The Brothers Karamazov

The central act in The Brothers Karamazov is the murder of father Fyodor Karamazov. As such, the novel could be thought of as a crime story, the purpose of which is to find out who committed the heinous...

Analysis of the Agricultural Fair Scene in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

In writing Madame Bovary, Flaubert would often spend days in search of "le mot juste". As a result, not only his sentences but his scenes are beautifully crafted. One such example...

At the crux of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is the issue of communication. The characters' methods of communicating are many and vary, in some cases, depending upon the characters' relationships with one another. Verbal communication is curt and...

In The Big Sleep, private investigator Philip Marlowe solves the puzzle created by a multi-layered, interrelated series of heinous crimes for his client, at a fee of twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses. Marlowe strives first and foremost to...

In The Garden of Eden, David Bourne retreats into his writing to escape the complications of his life, complications located predominantly in the actions and moods of his young wife, Catherine. He keeps a space all his own in which he writes; a...

In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Harry set out to Africa with his wife in an attempt to recapture his former literary motivation; in “the good time of his life” he had been happy in Africa. His will to write has softened with the comfort and luxury...

The Dew Breaker, a novel by Edwidge Danticat that tells of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s inherited dictatorship in Haiti, appears to be a novel about two things. On the one hand, it documents the life and trials of a Tonton Macoute, a government...

In Artificial Paradises, Baudelaire writes this of hashish: “Enthusiasts who would procure the magical delights of this substance at any price have continued to seek out hashish which has crossed the Mediterranean—that is, hashish made from Indian...

“At the time I felt I was losing contact with reality” – How far can we believe and trust the narrator in ‘Lolita’?

The reality of ‘Lolita’ may differ from the narrative of Humbert Humbert, simply because there is no alternative or neutral version...

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world” – Explore the presentation of Saleem as an allegory for India in ‘Midnight’s Children’

The peculiarity of the title ‘Midnight’s Children’ makes it immediately obvious that this novel is...

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about time: its quality, its depth, and its composition. Woolf conveys the complexity of time by drawing attention to her characters’ unique struggles to create meaning for themselves within the confines...