Newest Literature Essays

Tolstoy uses The Death of Ivan Ilyich to show his readers the negative consequences of living as Ilyich did. Ivan Ilyich made decisions based on what others thought and what would benefit him monetarily. As death approaches, Ilyich realizes that...

In Cloud Nine, playwright Caryl Churchill examines questions of gender identity, sexuality and individual freedom as they exist within two traditional, oppressive ideological paradigms: colonial imperialism and masculine hegemony. By juxtaposing...

Many of David Hume’s writings and ideas, such as the famous “Hume’s Fork,” are common currency today. While his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was not well-received when it was first published, it later became known as one of his major...

Remarque’s account of the horrors of the Western Front in World War I, from the common German soldier’s perspective, is a poignant reminder of the horrors of war. Dehumanisation, death and destruction are the key themes are relayed through the...

Oftentimes, modern adaptation of a classic work loses many elements of the original. This is not the case with Jane Austen’s Emma and Amy Heckerling’s film adaptation, Clueless. The adaptation closely parallels the original text, from themes to...

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles provides social commentary on many issues prevalent in Victorian society. In particular, Hardy uses Tess’ submission to her parents, Alec d’Urberville, Angel Clare, and society as a whole to examine the...

Justice and its relationship with prejudice is the central theme of the timeless 1960 novel, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Its focal point is the trial of Tom Robinson, an African-American erroneously charged with the rape of a white girl,...

The central idea of Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion is the presentation of the marginalised voice, which is in keeping with his motivation to craft texts of post-colonial fiction. He offers an alternative version of events to reveal the...

The lash which drives [the modern slave—the slave of the factory, the sweat shop] cannot be either be seen or heard . . . This slave is never hunted by bloodhounds; he is not beaten to pieces by picturesque villains, nor does he die in ecstasies...

Beyond the brutalities that all slaves endured, females suffered the additional anguish of sexual exploitation and the deprivation of motherhood. In “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Harriet Jacobs focuses on racial subjugation but also...

In The Chosen, the setting of each scene contributes to our understanding of the book’s central themes. The baseball field reveals the theme of conflict between two opposing forces, the hospital brings about different perceptions of the world, the...

The poem Beowulf was written between the 8th and 10th centuries, a time of great transition. Anglo-Saxons still dominated England, and Christianity had only come to the region one hundred or so years before. Although the new religion spread...

The last three paragraphs of Chapter 1 of “A Room with a View” describe the actions of the two female protagonists, Lucy Honeychurch and Miss Bartlett, when they find themselves alone in their own rooms. This short scene is a brief yet extremely...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Feodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment share a common theme – the consequences of escaping punishment. This paper explores the authors’ views about psychological punishment as a much worse sentence...

Sophocles used his plays to encourage Athenians to take responsibility for their own actions. In the fifth century B.C., Greece was experiencing an era of military exploration, political turmoil and social revolution, including women’s...

Adrienne Rich’s poems in The Fact of a Doorframe dramatize the conflict between what patriarchal society dictates women should be and what they are. In her earlier poems, like “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” she uses tight rhyme and careful control as...

Adrienne Rich’s “Song” plays out an uncomfortably intimate melody concerning a woman’s feelings of inescapable loneliness. Adrienne asserts the tortured song of this woman’s soul so beautifully, teasing the reader early on with passivity, and then...

Discuss Tennyson’s representations of the artist figure and his conceptions of art, think about issues of esoteric isolation versus political or emotional connection.

In his poem The Palace of Art, Tennyson portrays an artist attempting to build an...

In Shakespeare's tragedy “King Lear,” Lear, king of England, surrenders all of this power to his daughters as a reward for their demonstration of love towards him. This untimely abdication of his throne results in a chain reaction of events that...

H.G. Wells believed intensely in the productive aspects of science and the potential of the human race. At the same time, he was also acutely aware that scientific knowledge placed in the wrong hands could result in evil caused by the darker...

Marxist critic Louis Althusser’s fame rests substantially on the basis of his critical theories surrounding his proposition that human beings are interpellated by society to become complicit in propagating the prevailing ideology even when that...

Christopher Okigbo’s poetry has often been compared to that of T. S. Eliot, partly because Okigbo uses Eliot’s signature linguistic devices such as exploiting metaphor to create a densely symbolic dimension to his poetry. In addition, he also...

History, always open to interpretation, is not merely limited to the traditional sources. It can be viewed through forms such as fiction, autobiography, or journalistic memoir, as demonstrated by Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front,...

In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the Chorus of Agamemnon and Cassandra share several common traits. The chorus, a large group made up of miscellaneous elders, would, as individuals, all function as secondary characters. Cumulatively these individuals...