Newest Literature Essays

The city was the popular expression of writers such as Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and João do Rio (1881-1921). Despite having lived in different periods and places, they thematized the city, exploring its social spaces, and promoting a...

The poems in the Ellesmere manuscript facsimile of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are accompanied by a portrait of the storyteller. Based on the miniatures’ attire, accessories, and horse trappings, the pilgrims can be classified into...

Though rhetoric may have a long history of doubters toward the profession, suspicious of its claims and ability to persuade, it still pervades nearly every area of scholarship. After all, anyone who engages in writing which is geared toward a...

How would a son feel if his father abandoned him, only to love another woman aside from his mom? This is the story of Dark Sons as two young men, Ishmael and Sam, living in two different settings in the story, deal with this conflict. Although Sam...

Influential African novelists have long focused on tackling difficult issues occurring in their respective countries. One enduring issue that writers have explored is gender. Common questions are: how are gender norms established? Why are women...

Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring follows the adventures of Frodo, Pippin, Merry, and Sam, who set out on a journey to destroy the One Ring. When the party finally leaves the Shire, they encounter many dangers as black riders, and other...

Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant,” is a 40-line poem first published in The London Magazine in 1963, then later republished posthumously in Plath’s second poetry collection, Ariel, in 1965. Her poem describes an unknown, presumably eligible male who...

The Symbolism of Nature, Biblical Lessons, and Tests of Faith in Silence

Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence has confounded and conflicted critics ever since it came out, due to the challenging combination of simple writing, rich symbolism, and...

Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy by William Shakespeare, was first preformed in 1612. The play is set in Messina, Italy that follows the couple Hero and Claudio. Hero is unjustly accused of unchastity that results in her and Claudio’s separation...

Though Agatha Christie has been enjoyed by millions in the last century since she wrote her widely popular detective novels, little serious scholarship has been written on her works, despite their ingenious craft and subtlety. In fact, there is a...

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates is a short story that was published in the 1966 Fall edition of Epoch magazine. Connie, a fifteen-year-old girl, who frequently picks up boys without her parent’s knowledge at a local...

e.e. cummings’ idiosyncrasy can largely be attributed to his situation in the modernist United States as he lived through World War I, World War II and the Great Depression. His works largely divulged a need for love within society to resolve its...

In both Seamus Heaney’s 2004 play The Burial at Thebes and Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire, strict borders are heavily enforced by oppressive governmental institutions that seek to homogenize collective identity through restrictive forms of...

In Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story, “Carmilla”, innocent love and deceitful lust are intertwined throughout the tale, so much that it is difficult for the narrator, Laura, to distinguish between the two, even years after the events of the story....

Throughout The Book of the Duchess, we are urged to tackle the question of whether the Dreamer or the Man in Black is the more hopeless lover. While both the Man in Black and the Dreamer are hopeless lovers, the Man in Black is closer to...

The original German fairytale “Snow White” was published in 1857 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm that features the 7-year-old Snow White, and her evil stepmother who the king marries after the child’s biological mother dies from childbirth. This tale...

“Parkinson’s Disease” by Galway Kinnell was originally published in 1994 in his collection of poems titled Imperfect Thirst. This poem describes a man with Parkinson’s Disease who is being cared for presumably by his adult daughter—the whole poem...

I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson published in 2014 is a split non-chronological narrative of twins, Noah and Jude, that follows their separate perspectives during adolescence. Although Noah and Jude are incredibly close at thirteen, they...

Banned and challenged books and their explicit content for adolescents have always been a controversial topic of debate among education and relating communities in which certain texts may be challenged or banned due to their content being “...

Confronting new phases and experiences assist in the development of growth, maturation and internal progression. This concept is undoubtedly evident within J C Burke’s novel ‘The Story of Tom Brennan’, the interview titled ‘2 of us’ by Dani Valent...