Newest Literature Essays

A seemingly factual account of a murder story opens with a rendition of a dream. The chronological order of the story is skewed so that the aftermath is rendered even before the murder has taken place. The addition of the narrator’s own stylistic...

According to Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” storytellers are a dying breed, and the novel only contributes to the death of storytelling. If that is true, then Willa Cather’s My Antonia is a fan fueling flames on the somber coals of...

Blake's “The Tyger” begins with the speaker asking a tiger what kind of divine being could have created it: “What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” There is an air of questioning throughout the poem. Each subsequent stanza...

“Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett challenges the stereotypical conventions of Gothic literature and provides a more modern approach to the genre. Conventionally, the Gothic is associated with terrifying creatures such as Frankenstein...

One of the most important Christian writers, St. Augustine acts as a bridge between the Classical period and Late Antiquity. His autobiography about personal struggles, conversion, and contemplation about God sheds light on both how people of Late...

Jesus’ ability to perform various miracles is prominent in both the Gospels of John and Matthew. As the creator, embodiment, and giver of light, Jesus wins worshippers through the use of supernatural powers given by God. One miraculous work in...

At the end of the Metamorphoses, Ovid boldly states “I will be borne, /The finer part of me, above the stars, /Immortal, and my name shall never die” (XV. 877-78). For Ovid, metamorphosis is a path to eternity and the preservation of time....

Jane’s marginal status as an orphan is partially obviated by various parental figures that appear throughout the novel. For example, Bessie and Miss Temple play very maternal roles and take Jane under their wings when she is wrongfully accused....

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck introduces a family rooted in the leadership of men. The journey of hardship they endure, however, disintegrates this patriarchal control, leaving the women, Ma specifically, to take charge. As Pa falls...

In his novel Dracula, Bram Stoker’s characters are deeply disturbed by the existence of the vampire. The notion of a creature that is both living and dead challenges their sanity by forcing them to question those things which they had previously...

Within Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s novel, Venus in Furs, it is possible to see several aspects of Freud’s proposals about the male and female masochistic fantasies, as well as some congruities with masochistic theories from more modern...

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent. . . therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

—John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

The year is 1923. In the suburbs of London,...

“It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those...

In the 1997 film, Romeo + Juliet, Baz Luhrmann has attempted to take the original play by William Shakespeare, and create an appropriation of it for today. He takes what we value about the text: the themes, evocative language and poetry, the...

The Greek Myth of Pygmalion, about a sculptor and the woman he creates and falls in love with, has been appropriated into various texts of different times and made relevant to a wide range of audiences. In particular, George Bernard Shaw’s English...

“His effort to examine poetry with a coroner’s or detective’s clinical eye conceives of poetry as engaged with history and society”

Loris Mirella (on W.H. Auden), “Realigning Modernism”

Auden’s poems “Spain, 1937”, “Sonnet XVI”, and “1st September...

Satan is no longer to be feared: he is to be jeered, scorned, and mocked! At least this is the attitude shared by notable scholars like C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther, and Thomas More. Lewis devoted a whole book, The Screwtape Letters, to the cause;...

In the play Macbeth, some of the most significant characters rely upon their ability to equivocate, in order to hide their treacherously covetous, or purely malicious intentions. Most characters take part in these acts of subterfuge, but the three...

Black and white, morning and night: the world fills itself with conflicting forces that must coexist in order for it to run smoothly. Forces like diversity and the fear of terrorism or competition and the desire to peacefully live with one...

Robert Olen Butler’s collection of short stories in his novella, “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,” explores issues confronting Vietnamese immigrants in America after the conclusion of the U.S. war in Vietnam. With great care, Butler exhibits...

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby completes a decline from his carefully crafted image of greatness to his exposed, unsightly, and lonely death. The story of the novel is really the deconstruction of this image, and the...

Poets of the Harlem Renaissance faced a challenge above and beyond that of their modern contemporaries. The two groups were unified in their struggle to make sense of a chaotic reality. But Black poets writing in Harlem confronted a compounded...

Author Jack Kerouac once said, “My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.” Kerouac believed his fate consisted of much more than bad luck and poor decision making and attributed it to the naturally...

Beowulf, as a character, is often described as the original model for the hero found in literature from antiquity to the modern day. New interpretations of the text, however, focus more on Beowulf the man rather than Beowulf the hero of Heorot. If...