Newest Literature Essays

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...

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne creates a division between the truth and a Puritan society tainted by hypocrisy. Such a division existed in Hawthorne’s life as well. Born into a historically Puritan family, Hawthorne developed an...

“There is a way to be good again” (Hosseini 2). Rahim Khan’s first words to Amir in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner set in motion Amir’s attempt to mend his scarred past. A mentally tormented man until Khan’s call, he has repressed memories from...

In Homer’s Iliad, two conflicting desires motivate Hector. He adheres to the heroic code by fighting for honor and glory, but he does not always actively pursue battle. He has a strong instinct for self survival that urges him to remove himself...

“For who so firm that cannot be seduced?” (1.2.312). Cassius’ muttered soliloquy in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar immediately calls attention to his goal of manipulating people. A man well versed in rhetoric, he puts to good...

In the late 19th century, young women began to renounce the rigid gender roles of the Victorian era, dissociating themselves from the inflexible differentiations of domestic and public spheres, and ultimately from notions of maternity. Countless...

Many say that walks bring out emotions that are otherwise unfelt. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen creates walks to portray characters’ emotions and revelations. When looking into Darcy and Elizabeth’s relationship, walks serve as important venues....

“…man cannot endure for long the absence of meaning. And meaning, in it most basic sense, is pattern. If man cannot find pattern in his world, he will try by any means at his disposal to create it, or at least imagine it” (Webb 55). Aristotle...

“The absence of action is intrinsic to Beckett’s vision of despair” Show how inactivity is linked to Beckett’s portrayal of a dystopia.

Hamm’s realisation of the futility of the search for a meaning to life leads him to a state of satisfaction in...

Admirable qualities of men in Virgil’s The Aeneid include bravery, honor, and courage, but a woman’s value is based less on their power, wit and brains and more on their beauty, or lack of beauty. There are many instances within The Aeneid where...

In his essay “The Achievement of Desire,” Richard Rodriguez acts as both a writer and reader in response to a book written by Richard Hoggart entitled The Uses of Literacy. Rodriguez discovers a parallel between his own life and the life of what...

Because of his past, the protagonist in D.H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers is a perfect example of a character crippled with the incapability to hold fast to a relationship. Paul Morel had three significant relationships in the novel that all...

How can art and warfare be reconciled? It would appear that art would have no place on the battlefield, where men are too concerned with survival and personal glory to indulge in aesthetic appreciation. The combination of art and Aeneas’ shield in...