Newest Literature Essays

Dark Phrases of Womanhood: Madness and Imprisonment in Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf

The first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” was in 1955. It incited a national controversy regarding...

A Crab, a Spider, and the Noisy Stars Above: An Analysis of the Magical Absurdity in Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”

A multitude of literary devices can ultimately sway the interpretation of a literary work in one direction or...

Those People: A Look at Demonic Othering and Homosexuality in Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Kushner’s Angels in America

The arts and humanities have served as not only social and political barometers of their representative ages, but also as...

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is powerful not only because of its moving plot, but also because of several literary tools used by Harriet Beecher Stowe to accentuate the evils of slavery. In the book, Stowe contrasts a detached and sarcastic tone with...

The myth of “happily ever after” has pervaded Western culture for centuries. Nearly all of our fairy tales and bedtime stories conclude with the hero and his beautiful bride riding off into the sunset. Because of these stories, the idea that...

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 invokes two paradigms of America: the paradigm of America in the 1950s, and the Puritan paradigm of America. This paper will discuss the way these paradigms manifest themselves in the text, the relation between them,...

In Chapter IX of Henry Roth's Call it Sleep, David achieves a rudimentary understanding of the intrinsic connection between sexuality and death. He is confronted with the reality of death for the first time in his short life when he sees a row of...

The main female characters of Sonia and Marie in Crime and Punishment and The Stranger, respectively, do more than faithfully support Raskolnikov and Meursault in their times of need. Their roles structure the men’s characters and ultimately help...

Constituting one of the dominant symbols in Thomas Hardy’s classic work Tess of the D’Urbervilles are the continually reappearing birds. The birds symbolize varying degrees of freedom, foreshadowing the events of Tess’s life and frequently...

Spencer’s Faerie Queene is perhaps the most intricate allegory written in the history of the English language. In this poem Spencer not only releases his creative genius by twisting the letters within his words to create perfect puns but also...

By 18 BC, morality among the citizens of Rome had depleted by such degree that the emperor was impelled to enact the lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus, which instituted adultery as a crime punishable by death or exile. This was the Rome of Ovid’s...

One reading of The Taming of the Shrew may cause women to shake their heads in disbelief of Kate’s changed behavior for the pleasure of her husband. A closer reading and an analyzing of the methods used by Petruchio in taming his wife, however,...

Love and friendship were major themes for Society Drama during the 1890s. An established ‘stock storyline’ of the period was that of domestic life affected by a predicament, concluding in the reassertion of common ideas: fidelity, duty,...

In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Richard of Gloucester and Queen Margaret offer conflicting worldviews and perspectives on identity. Richard believes in the power of human agency. He challenges the notion of divine providence and attempts to take on...

The theme of Love’s constancy and everlasting nature permeates each line of Shakespeare’s 116th sonnet. Sonnet 116 “is about love in its most ideal form, praising the glories of lovers who have come to each other freely, and enter into a...

The trial of Hermione (Act III, Scene 2), Queen of Sicily is the pivotal moment in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It effectively closes the tragic chapter of the play, making way for the short comedy that follows. It sets up the...

Tennessee Williams once said “If people behaved in the way nations do, they would all be put in straightjackets.” Nowhere can this be more clearly seen than in the case of Lester Ballard from Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. Lester Ballard, through...

Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated novel, A Farewell to Arms, discusses the hierarchy of nationality, class, and power during wartime. Frederic Henry finds himself an American serving in the Italian army as an ambulance driver. The United States...

Keats’ “To Autumn” is an ode that concerns itself more with the true nature of reality than many of his earlier works. The Spring Odes—“Ode to Psych”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—are all representative of consistent...

Written during separate times of war, Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery” and Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” written in 1974, both chillingly demonstrate the concept of the scapegoat. By definition, the...

“A Valediction of Weeping” embodies John Donne’s ability to unite form and content in the beauty and intricacy of his metaphysical conceits. By closely interpreting these conceits, or complex extended metaphors, the reader is able to appreciate...

Carson McCullers’ 1953 novel A Clock Without Hands exemplifies the postmodernist tradition by establishing a continuum of four central characters separated by their motives for manipulating language. The spectrum ranges from white to black, both...

William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom identifies the fundamental problem of Southern history as a wretched combination of two predominant qualities: the shameful and abhorrent nature of the past, and the haunting and mythical presence of such a...

Nearly sixty years after John Steinbeck put pen to paper and wrote the series of San Francisco News articles that would later inspire The Grapes of Wrath, a renowned singer-songwriter from Freehold, New Jersey wrote a beautifully tragic song...