Newest Literature Essays

In Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Montserrat Fontes’s First Confession, symbols and characterization play a major role in outlining each novel’s primary message. Both authors’ use of these literary elements contribute to the reader’s...

In John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, Mill states that individual liberty may be limited by only one thing: the self-preservation of society and other individuals. To that end, man must retain the liberty to act and think as he so chooses,...

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison conveys her strong feelings about slavery by depicting the emotional impact slavery has had on individuals. Using characters such as Mr. Garner and Schoolteacher as enablers, Morrison is able to illustrate not...

Livy’s The Early History of Rome chronicles the rise of the Roman Empire, from its founding (traditionally dated to 753 BC) through the reign of Augustus Caesar in his own time. His catalogue details the accomplishments and failures of major Roman...

Thucydides set out to narrate the history of what he believed would be a great war, one requiring both great power and great leadership. Although he measured greatness through both economic and military prowess, Thucydides dictated the history of...

Mortals: The Playthings of Zeus

Odysseus escapes the island of Cyclops unharmed. He manages to avoid death at the face of Scylla and Charybdis. And he brings the witch Circe under his control and saves his companions… Though The Odyssey is an epic...

Piscine Molitor Patel, the protagonist of Yann Martel’s acclaimed novel Life of Pi, survives a horrific 227-day ordeal trapped aboard a directionless lifeboat with only a 450-pound Bengal Tiger, named Richard Parker, for company. Pi’s account of...

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts” (9) pronounces Mr. Thomas Gradgrind in the opening line of Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times. Gradgrind employees this utilitarian philosophy in his schoolhouse and...

The Unexamined Other:

Confronting the Social Hypocrisy of Maureen in The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye explores the darkest depths of human depravity in the face of intersecting race, class and gender discrimination. However, the...

The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story of one woman’s growth as a person physically, emotionally, and intellectually while on a journey for life fulfillment. Throughout the novel a theme illustrating the value of finding true love and...

In book two of Aristotle’s Politics, Aristotle defines his ideal state by criticizing the values put forward in Plato’s The Republic. In doing so, Aristotle censures Plato’s idea of state unification through sharing as much as possible, including...

In Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, More creates a land that contrasts directly to 16th century Europe. More starts by using the stories of fictional character Raphael Nonsenso to directly criticize the European form of government. He also attacks the...

The themes of alienation and isolation in ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ are highly prominent, as the authors seek to portray the journey of an individual (or indeed group) that exists outside of mainstream society....

Supernatural events and portents are a major theme in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. While Brontë never crosses into a truly magical realm, it is clear that Lucy Snowe believes that certain events pertain to the supernatural world. Forces of nature...

Jane’s relationship with Mr. Rochester is marked by uncertainty in equality and independence in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Using the Gothic elements of disguise in the gypsy scenes, Mr. Rochester assumes an ambiguous role of gender and class...

The central role of religion in Hopkins’ life gives it a similar significance in his poetry. The later poems by Hopkins, collectively generalised as the ‘Terrible Sonnets’, emphasise how religious doubt and faith, affected largely by personal...

Derek Walcott’s poem ‘The Almond Trees’ expresses the overwhelming power of colonial memory and the brutality of the colonial enterprise. Through his central image of “coppery, twisted, sea-almond trees”, Walcott justifies the critic Mark McWatt’s...

The view that David Lurie is “not a bad man but not good either” is a reduction of a provocative character. Disgrace explores compelling political issues ranging from post-Apartheid South Africa to moral paternalism, and David’s placement in the...

‘Dockery and Son’ is a reflective, pensive and uncertain poem in which Larkin produces a sense of life drifting away and considers “how much had gone of life, / How widely from the others.” Although it cannot be assumed that the narrator is...

‘A record of failure and disappointment’ is a reductive assessment of a poignant collection of poetry that explores the nature of existence and the conflicts, contrasts and contradictions of life. Larkin presents experience in a mixture of...

By comparing White Teeth with at least one other appropriate text, explore the presentation of family and family relationships in postcolonial literature.

The ‘metanarrative’ of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth differs from the direct linear narrative of...

Both "The Moonlit Road" and "In a Grove" are murder mysteries that confront the reader with the question of truth in storytelling. The texts present the reader with several first person testimonies of a crime, or the witness' involvement in it,...

Music is a prevalent motif in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, appearing during times of loss and confusion as a reminder of the past. The vignettes all share a common thread, in that music reveals how one must acknowledge the past and learn from it...

John Cheever’s cynical ruminations on man’s loss of humanity in the modern world are artfully articulated in his short story “The Five-Forty-Eight” (Kennedy, 316). A brief recollection of an average man’s flight from a jilted, seemingly psychotic...