Newest Literature Essays

First published in 1813, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice aptly describes the nature of courtship and marriage in 19th century England. In this novel, Elizabeth Bennett eventually marries Fitzwilliam Darcy, a man who has a considerable estate....

The narrator of Thomas Campion’s “There Is a Garden in Her Face” warns fellow admirers of a young girl’s beauty against taking advantage of her virginity. As indicated in the title, Campion uses words associated with gardens to describe the girl’s...

Nihilism plays a dominant role in both Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. Both novels target a particular character to be made an example, but the circumstances of this undertaking are notably...

What does it mean to be human? We are “decision-making creatures capable of overruling [their] own instincts.” It naturally follows that those tools which enable humans to exhibit these unique characteristics are the most essential to human...

In "The Book of the Grosteques," the first story of his novel Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson introduces the concept of the “grotesque.” This concept sets up the following stories in the novel, and can also be seen in other modernist texts...

In The Waste Land, Eliot utilizes women as a window to show the dissolution and distortion of love and desire. Eliot creates a progression from invitation, to violation, to automation through the use of three distinct female characters: the...

Aristotle’s passage Poetics (350 BC) was written the century after the composition of Sophocles Oedipus the King (428 BC). Despite their chronological separation, the two texts relate in incisive ways. In particular, Aristotle used Oedipus as the...

In Langston Hughes’ shorty story collection "Ways of White Folks," gifted, upwardly mobile African Americans often meet misfortune. On a cursory read, these fatalistic narratives seem to connote a disastrous, helpless fate for African Americans....

Aphra Behn’s genre-blending tale Oroonoko melds travel narrative with fictional biography to tell the story of Prince Oroonoko, “the royal slave.” Although Behn writes of Oroonoko’s honor as unique among men, her admiration for him seems to derive...

Paula Geyh writes that “the term [postmodernism] is used by so many people in so many disparate ways, that it seems almost to mean or describe everything--and therefore, some of the critics of postmodernism would say, it means nothing” (1-2)....

In Kipling’s Kim, our protagonist fills the role of a hybrid: He is Irish, but born in India. As a result, his life is split in two by the different influences. His duality allows him to fill the various roles that are requested of him. Kim is a...

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson provides the narrative of the Charles family as they encounter both the challenges of the present and struggle to come to terms with the grief and suffering of their family’s past. Throughout the play, the family’...

As the old adage goes, it is not what one says, but how they say it that matters most. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the novel’s protagonist, Janie Crawford, is immersed in a journey to establish her voice and,...

Hamlet is a play about a young man’s journey to self-discovery through an intense examination of his spirituality, morality, and purpose on earth. Prince Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his murdered father prompts this path to...

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” can be followed for entertainment value, but one passage in particular calls for deeper analysis. Before Sir Gawain begins to undertake his quest for the Green Chapel and dons his armor, the plot has been moving...

In the Bible, as in The Master and Margarita, the reader has grown accustomed to despising Pontius Pilate, the infamous procurator of Judea. In both texts, it is Pontius Pilate who sentences Yeshua Ha-Notsri—a harmless, wandering preacher—to a...

Reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” is like being drawn into the imaginary world of someone who is slowly leaving reality behind them. The short story is written as a kind of journal of the narrator as she becomes more and more detached from her family...

The final, powerful scene of The Awakening by Kate Chopin provides a fitting end to Edna’s long struggle between expectation and desire. Edna’s traditional role of wife and mother holds her back from her wish to be a free woman. Both the sea and...

Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” constantly draws parallels between painting and poetry. O’Hara uses the title to set up these parallels. Next, he proceeds to use the first stanza to catch the reader’s interest in why, in fact, he is not a...

1. Introduction

In the course of history, there are certain incisive incidents that mark a period, ring in a new era or alter people's individual lives most drastically. One such incident is the American Civil War (1861-1865), fought over issues...

William Wordsworth himself once said, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Wordsworth, like most romantic poets, had a strong attitude towards the rebellion against the industrial revolution and strove to revert back to the “...

Matthew Arnold was born in 1822 in Laleham-on-Thames in Middlesex County, England. Due to some temporary childhood leg braces, (Machann, 1) and a competitiveness within the large family of nine (Culler xxi) young Matthew earned the nickname...

In Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare tackles the subject of honorable rebellion, primarily through the duality of the two characters of Prince Hal and Hotspur. Hal is the offspring of King Henry IV, who attained the throne of England through a...

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is an anarchic, pessimistic novel that portrays the need for identity in life and Palahniuk explains, through the narrator’s personality disorder, that the desire for meaning is the sole internal motivation of...