Newest Literature Essays

In Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry finds in his relationship with Catherine Barkley – a relationship they think of as a marriage – safety, comfort, and tangible sensations of love: things that conventional religious devotion and...

A discussion of the implications of the various meanings of the word ‘play’ in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Tom Stoppard’s production Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is highly intelligent in its linguistic style,...

René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz both espouse belief in a God that is infinitely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable and infinitely benevolent. Nonetheless, Descartes and Leibniz differently structure the hierarchy of those three defining...

In his two short stories "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" and "America! America!", Delmore Schwartz depicts two protagonists born in America to Jewish immigrant parents. These two protagonists and the world as it is seen through their eyes...

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don’t recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable...

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is a testament to the man’s passion for mythology. As was also the case with his zeal for philology, Tolkien utilized elements of mythology to reinvent the past, creating a living, breathing, nearly...

Cross-dressing on the early modern stage was a highly exploited theatrical device. It subverted the traditional conceptions of gender, evoking a recurring sense of dramatic irony. Jean E. Howard explains that “behavioural differences” and “...

Don DeLillo’s post-modern novel White Noise examines the relativity of meaning in a consumer and media-controlled society. A classic dystopia comments on society’s reliance on the media, and in White Noise, it creates character identity...

Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth are texts primarily concerned with the process and results of colonization. Both follow the progression of the post-colonized generations, and both depict the struggle...

Carolyn Forché frequently uses images of everyday life to draw the reader into her poetry. After establishing a connection with the familiar, she often reveals a darker side of humanity, integrating the two seamlessly. The transition between the...

In Sula, Toni Morrison chronicles the lives of two African-American women whose close friendship is torn apart by infidelity. In the novel, Morrison paints the relationship between the character’s leading women, Sula and Nel, as one of...

In Albert Camus’ The Stranger, the main character, Mersault, is confronted with life’s absurdity after killing a man at a beach in Algiers. Mersault spends his days absorbed in living for the moment, granting little import to the past or future,...

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...