Newest Literature Essays

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey portrays women as overwhelmingly negative, either dominating or submissive. Nurse Ratched, Vera Harding, and Billy’s mother are controlling women who use fear to reign over men and mask their feminine...

In a novel about racism and slavery, one can not pay too much attention to the matter of colors. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, however, the issue of color is not confined to discussions on race. Blood, ribbon, even roosters, all vividly colored,...

Maturation and personal evolution of main characters typify the bildungsroman, a distinct novelistic form. The growth of characters Tom Buchanan, George Wilson, Jay Gatsby make F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and important example of the...

Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath" has been the subject of much critical attention. Many of the novel's detractors have concentrated their critiques not upon its literary failings, but rather its politics (Zirakzadeh). At the time of the...

E.M. Forster and Charles Dickens use their novels, Howard's End and Hard Times, respectively, to discuss the social inequalities of class. These inequalities are registered in their characters' different relationships to facts and knowledge. While...

Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is a melancholic poem that considers the possibility of immortality for the people buried in the churchyard the speaker visits. Although previous sections of the poem explore different ideas,...

Both James Joyce's Eveline and Thomas Hardy's The Son's Veto express the negative effects that service has upon an individual's life. While Joyce uses an intimate obligation, a promise to a dying mother, Hardy's story addresses a wider cultural...

In "Ode to a Nightingale," John Keats uses nature and a nightingale as figures for an optimistic view on mortality, and on the speaker's life specifically. Throughout the poem, the nightingale itself is an figure for the beautiful and cyclical...

Orson Welles' films Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai each pivot on a central pair of lovers. Despite the differences of the movies, each set of main characters share a set of characteristics. Both pairs of lovers (Susan Alexander and...

The opening act of The Winter's Tale is atypical among Shakespeare's late romances. Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles, King Lear, and Othello all open by unfolding the plays' major, and most dramatic, crises. The Winter's Tale, however, offers the...

Much of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse takes place within her characters' minds. Although, of course, their thoughts cannot stop external happenings, they can and do stop time in one way: through memory. Thus, throughout the novel, Woolf...

"I shunned the face of man; all sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only consolation- deep, dark, deathlike solitude" (74). Mary Shelly's Frankenstein was written during a period known as the Romantic Era. The recognized...

Adrienne Rich uses free verse to separate herself from the male-dominated literary tradition in her poem "Diving Into the Wreck". Her poem addresses the role of women in past literature while promising hope for the future generations. Rich's...

Shakespeare's Macbeth is a male dominated play. Most of the noticeable characters in Macbeth are male, including Macbeth, Macduff, Banquo, King Duncan, and Malcolm. Despite the lack of female power by numbers, Lady Macbeth proves to be a...

In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, protagonist Lily Bart is on a quest for happiness. In her case, happiness embodied in the image of marriage to a rich and indulgent husband and, subsequently, the ability to behave as a proper woman of...

Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club provides a realistic depiction of Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters struggling in relationships strained by tragedy, lack of communication, and unreasonable expectations. Tan criticizes mothers who intend...

In the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque demonstrates, through the character of Paul Baumer, how war has obliterated almost an entire generation of men. Because these men no longer retain a place in life and are incapable...

Which man ultimately prospers: the man of integrity, or the hypocritical, unethical man? In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand questions the relationship between the moral and the practical. Many people in real life - as well as Gail Wynand and Dominique...

World War I had a devastating effect on all of its participants, transforming and disillusioning them permanently. Ernest Hemingway, himself a participant, clearly illustrates this concept in Sun Also Rises through his protagonist Jake Barnes as...

In the poem "The Flea," John Donne uses a metaphysical conceit between a simple flea and the complexities of young romance to develop the narrator's argument for a young woman to forfeit her chastity.

By giving the flea a dual meaning, Donne...

The book and subsequent film Eight Men Out both portray one of the lowest points in professional sports in American history. Popularly known as the Black Sox Scandal, it involved members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team allegedly taking...

When is one morally sanctioned to take another's life? In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's highly acclaimed philosophical detective story, Crime and Punishment, the author casts light on several important existential and metaphysical quandaries that are...

The Victorian era was a period of great social and political upheaval, especially for women. Increasing opposition to the lack of women's political rights in relation to marriage and property laws, such as the fact that any income a woman earned...

Culture, unlike biology, should allow us to seek liberation from cruel and uncomfortable practices. But instead culture wraps us in a suffocating embrace. ... re cultures discrete or bounded? ...Who defines the boundaries of culture or allows for...