Newest Literature Essays

In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily feels lost without a mother to lead her step by step through life. However, with her escape to Tiburon, Lily finally finds support and consolation through new experiences and exposures....

Title: A Universal Loss of Innocence: Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”

Author: Katherine Perry

Words: 1,139

Written: January 23, 2009

Paul Bäumer lives in a world where killing is the only way to live, memories are as foreign as the enemy...

Eden is at the very centre of all major events in Paradise Lost Book IX, and Milton proves keen to exploit its potency as a setting. The Garden represents both the glory of God’s Creation and the fragility of its existence. Milton juxtaposes Satan...

Critics continue to debate the precise genre of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, because even at closer inspection it refuses to be neatly classified. To brand it a simple “comedy” would be to overlook the unnerving sense of disquiet at the end...

It is often noted that The Tempest is an odd play in Shakespeare’s canon; unlike any of his other works, with the exception of The Comedy of Errors, it observes classical unities of time and setting. Of all of Shakespeare’s opening scenes, the one...

As a child coming of age in the mass-consumerist, technologically innovative, and media-influenced climate of the twentieth century, one’s exposure to fairy tales will have likely been informed by recurrent viewings of Disney film adaptations....

One of the key thematic threads running through the plays of The Oedipus Cycle is the debate regarding the primary importance between the laws of the gods over those of the State. For example, in both Oedipus Rex and Antigone, the eponymous...

Title: The Believer and MacIntyre’s Emotivist Culture

Author: Katherine Perry

Date Written: Feb. 22, 2006

Words: 2,085

In his book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre asserts that members of contemporary society live in a world devoid of definitively...

In Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, Joseph Campbell’s concept of the monomyth is employed to develop Lily’s journey from a lack of familial recognition and worthlessness into a new life of true meaning and appreciation. Joseph Campbell...

Through the use of modulating points of view, Art Spiegelman pieces several stories into one in order to portray his father Vladek’s Holocaust story as well as his experiences with Vladek as he wrote the book. The conflict between Art and his...

In the play “The Glass Menagerie,” Tennessee Williams the author presents the glass menagerie as a metaphor for the Wingfield family and other families during the Great Depression. The author highlights the concept of the family’s vulnerability...

Throughout Like Water for Chocolate and Therese Raquin, mothers reinforce limitations that repress their daughters’ emotions. Striving for their goals, Tita and Therese face barricades that alter their personalities and morph their desires. The...

William Faulkner uses multiple narrators in As I Lay Dying, a technique that enables him to illustrate different mindsets on events and ethical questions. Some narrators’ motivations are clear: Dewey Dell is determined to get an abortion, for...

Eric Auerbach writes in Mimesis that one of the characteristics of the realistic novel of the era between the two world wars is the multi-personal representations of consciousness. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, first published in 1925, the...

Disgrace, by J.M Coetzee, is a deceivingly short book. On the surface it looks like a simple personal narrative, but it is much more complex than that. The novel not only deals with the delicate matter of rape, it also examines the intricate...

In his 1985 novel White Noise, Don DeLillo paints a modern society that is composed of systems too great to comprehend, putting control out of the hands of individuals. Don DeLillo crafts a postmodern society governed by cryptic systems, a world...

A complete structural study of a novel demands preoccupation with structure as both organizational and temporal; in the case of Wuthering Heights especially, the two are inextricably linked. The novel is largely predicated on organization and...

King Solomon's Mines, in its first pages, poses the question, “What is a gentleman?” (10). Men and masculinity are at the novel's core. It is both for and about men, and consciously so: Haggard assures his readers that there is not a woman in the...

The post-apocalyptical novel, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, explores the perseverance of a man and his son to survive in an obliterated world. The novel is a modern quest demonstrating faith in man’s power to rejuvenate himself through trust and...

Although smoking of the past was viewed as glamorous and romantic, its cancerous, harmful effects are now a common fact. Similarly, in Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses, the consistent smoking throughout the novel juxtaposes the...

“Love is the seed in you of every virtue and of all acts deserving punishment.”

——Purg. XVII, 104-5

Dante calls his great work a comedy, not for its humor but because it meets the traditional definition of a comedy: a story with a rising plot from...

German philosopher Friedrich Engels once said “All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development”. In all societies, each social class has unique characteristics and distinctions,...

Kate Chopin seamlessly integrates plot with setting in her novel The Awakening. Various locations mold Edna Pontellier into a bold transgressor of outdated social conventions, and allow for her dynamic growth. Edna grows accustomed to the lax...

As the cult of domesticity grew during the nineteenth century, society began to fixate on the proper role of a woman. Jean Rhys examines the contradictions and consequences involved in setting such standards through documenting the decline of Jane...