Newest Literature Essays

When thinking of a bowl of soup, you may conjure up a variety of associations. Perhaps you recall being brought a hot bowl of chicken noodle soup when sick, or having soup for dinner to warm up in the winter. In the case of Gertrude Stein’s...

For a text that so confidently declares itself “an epic,” Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic demonstrates a peculiar preoccupation with the lyric ‘I.’ Few things at this point could be more tired than to remind us yet again that this ‘I’ is no...

The theme of marriage is a prevalent one throughout the novel, often utilised by Dickens to convey the prominence of values such as wealth and status within its contemporary society. The depiction of marriage in the novel acts as a vehicle through...

René Girard’s theory of mimetic contagion can be seen the public, extralegal execution of innocent Black victims, lynching, starting in the 1880’s. Girard claims that humans are mimetic, meaning they have a habit to want what others desire. As...

Martin Luther King Jr. states in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” that “If this [non-violent] philosophy had not emerged, by now many of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood”, and the non admission of whites would drive Black...

Andrew Marvell wrote his poem “Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax,” while he was serving as a tutor to the daughter of Lord Fairfax and living in his home, Nun Appleton Hall. The poem was written specifically for Lord Fairfax. In historical...

The identity of Native Americans has been challenged by cultures other than their own. The different races in America have created a challenging environment for Indians to find their identity and idea of belonging. Two ways in which an identity...

Tom is one of the earliest characters Fanny, and consequently, the reader is introduced to at Mansfield Park. He is the eldest son of the Bertram family and has been raised accordingly. Although he is not the most present character in the novel,...

Ranjan Bandopadhyay, in the eighth chapter of his book Bishoy Satyajit, makes a comparative study between Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) and Satyajit Ray’s Nayak (1966) and puts forward his proposition that the role that Bergman’s Wild...

When French Renaissance humanist Thomas More placed the isolated island society of Utopia in the recently uncovered New World, it was not an arbitrary choice. More’s decision to locate this newfound and model world in the Americas endorses the...

Being a princess is every little girl’s dream from the charming princes to the beautiful and elegant dresses. As the girl gets older, that dream slowly dies out but not completely. A tiny part of that dream is still there until she learns the true...

Because of the belief in early modern England that women were more susceptible to sin than men,[1] any literary depiction of a witch – the epitome of a woman who has fallen to sin – is a manifestation of, and an example of pandering towards, this...

As Beatrice Battaglia rightly notes, Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night is not exclusively a “premonitory warning” about the threat of Nazi Germany on the eve of the Second World War (183). Rather, it confronts the discursive construction of a...

To bridge the gap between the inner and outer self, Heaney in "Badgers" evokes a sense of fear through the use of various techniques - namely, through the symbolism of the badgers themselves. What the badgers truly represent is open to...

Romantic poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and this essay’s focus, William Wordsworth, are all drawn to a particular theme in their respective work – the imagination. Imagination is a concept that defies easy analysis and one...

Both Pierre and The Blithedale Romance are structured around what Lucy would have called, if Hawthorne had written her, exhibiting secrets. Since he didn’t, she prefers the slightly less libidinally charged “disclose,” but this moment of...

Wim Wenders’ film and essay- poem can to be considered as ‘highly self conscious works’ simply due to the fact that they both raise issues about American culture and make a conscious effort to solve them. Did the fact that Philip suffered from a...

When soldiers are faced with war, they can have many feelings overtake them serving their time. One of those feelings is revenge, that “inflicting hurt or harm on someone for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands” so says Webster Dictionary....

Why do a lot of kids feel the need to do bad things to be cool? Kids feel the need to do bad things to be cool because someone is pressuring them to do that and the just want to fit in. In the short story, "On the Bridge" by Todd Strasser, the...

Lucy Sheehan rightly asserts that Mary Barton is one of a set of mid-century Victorian novels which “document the social problems arising from industrialization, urbanization, and extreme destitution” (35). She also notes Elizabeth Gaskell’s...

With the defeat of Jefferson Davis’ confederacy in 1865, the American South became a region marked by poverty. The Civil War not only destroyed large amounts of Southern infrastructure, but also devastated the demographic that would typically be...

In Filling Station, Elizabeth Bishop presents her readers with an image of urban life that at first seems filthy and repulsive; however, through subtle manipulation of techniques including tone change, connotation and structural shift, she...

The desolate winter setting of “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens symbolizes society’s emotional alienation. Published in 1923, the modernist poem proposes that one’s individual experience influences how they process audiovisual information. In...

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” the main character Robin bears a wooden weapon called a cudgel. Throughout the short story, the cudgel comes to define Robin’s relation to the conflict between his expectations and the reality...