Newest Literature Essays

Bestselling American author Orson Scott Card once said, “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” The Canterbury Tales were written over 600 years before Card made that profound statement, but clearly Chaucer would agree...

In “Sonnet X” and "The Fall of the House of Usher”, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Edgar Allan Poe, the respective authors, both argue that to be successful a person must have, as Richard Wilbur describes, rational and non-rational capabilities....

In his survey of American society in the early 1800's, Alexis de Tocqueville spares a few chapters to describe the American woman as he sees her. Obviously, from our more modern view, Tocqueville's claim that women and men in America enjoy a...

Though brief and comedic, Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit” offers great insight into the basic ideas of his existentialist philosophy. The commonplace setting of the work and the diversity of the basic character types allude to the applicability...

A recurring plot point in Edgar Allan Poe’s short horror stories, doppelgängers allow Poe to delve deep into characters’ consciences, enabling the reader to grasp the contrasting duality of human nature. This theme appears in Poe’s “William Wilson...

Marivaux’s play "The Game of Love and Chance" is a short work composed in the Italian style of commedia dell’arte, using stock characters and humor to explore conventional themes. Specifically, "The Game of Love and Chance" is tailored to address...

“The Human Abstract” offers an alternative analysis of the virtues of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love that constituted God and Man in “The Divine Image”, and can be thus considered a companion poem. The speaker argues that Pity could not exist...

John Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy” is a complex poetic investigation into the equally complex emotions of pain and sadness. Melancholy is defined as a gloomy state of mind, a dejection, depression, or despondency. Keats urges the reader to view...

At the crux of Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a love story. The story itself is quite simple but in reality is dominated by the elusiveness of love and filled with cultural customs, clashes, illusions, and ambivalence. The conception of love in...

This paper postulates a subversive reading of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The novella ostensibly relates the tale of a governess who struggles to shield her charges from supernatural malevolence. Yet I suggest that it is actually the...

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his essay "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," argues that the "chronotope" of a literary work – the configuration of time and space in the fictional world that the text projects – is inextricably connected with its...

Matthew Lewis' The Monk makes extensive use of the institution of family in order to underscore the implied author's ambivalent position towards the French Revolution and its aftermath. The novel recounts the tale of two families: Antonia's...

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,...