Newest Literature Essays

"To express yourself needs reason, but expressing yourself is the reason." These words of Ai Weiwei perfectly describe how the character Equality feels in the novel Anthem by Ayn Rand. Equality searches for a reason, an excuse, a chance, to...

To some extent, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two figures who are manipulated unfairly by both Claudius in the scheming, and Hamlet in his tricks, and one can therefore see them sympathetically as victims to more powerful people; nonetheless,...

It is a cynical statement, but it is frighteningly valid: contemporary liberal societies are little more than disciplinary dystopias. Many different phenomena reveal this, especially when understood through the framework of Michel Foucault’s...

An individual’s context exerts a significant influence over the journeys they take and the ways they make discoveries. In Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, John's personal context led to his journey of combating loneliness, through which he...

The Wife of Bath by Geoffrey Chaucer was written in the late Middle Ages, a time in which women possessed little agency and were perceived as inferior individuals. However, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath presents a female character that is vibrant and...

Women holding onto their youth plays a significant role in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire which opened on Broadway in 1947 and in Notes on a Scandal published in 2003 by Zoe Heller. In both texts this theme is caused by many...

Gambling, envy, pride--each represents a specific anti-thesis to one’s general concept of virtue. However, each of these vices dwell within the pages of the Mahabharata. If the Mahabharata serves as a teaching mechanism for its readers, then the...

The Ancient Greek society that birthed the Odyssey, written around the eighth century BC by Homer, differed greatly from individualistic modern culture. Whereas today civilization can be defined in terms of technology, wealth, or healthcare,...

The concept of transformation appears in a variety of ways within A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Transformation within plays written by William Shakespeare often takes place as the changing of either a characters outward appearance or a denoted...

The tradition of elaborate mourning was already a burgeoning custom in the 19th century but it was Queen Victoria's public mourning of her beloved Prince Albert's death that popularized the customary funereal rituals practiced throughout the...

Rossetti famously defied Victorian ideals by ending her engagement to James Collinson in 1850 on religious grounds, as she was a devout Tractarian and he had become a Roman Catholic. Her faith coloured every day of her life, even supposedly...

Rossetti, labelled the “queen of the pre-Raphaelite school”, and Ibsen, a great perpetrator of the Realism movement, were separated by artistic styles in writing, but shared a time period and similar social climates. Therefore, the ways in which...

Dracula’s abrupt opening declaration that Jonathan Harker “left Munich at 8:35 p.m. on 1st May” does very little in terms of setting the initial scene, though readers find the brief nature of Harker’s diary peeling away to reveal the superstitious...

Tragedy and romance are two genres that often go hand-in-hand to effectively enhance the qualities of each throughout the text in which they are present. Two texts that we have read this semester, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Voltaire’s Candide, are...

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was written and performed in London at the very end of the sixteenth century. During this time, as during much of history, the Jewish population was not the most popular, especially in London where...

The Sympathizer, the name of the novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, successfully depicted the main character in the book-- the “narrator” himself. The storytelling was in a quite vulgar yet concise style, which best describes the life of “a spy, a...

One of the most powerful aspects of Philip Roth’s novel Everyman is how relatable it is, just as the title would suggest. This is particularly vividly portrayed in the aspects of the novel dealing with Everyman’s relationship with his brother,...

Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers is an exemplar of the 1990s. This is because of several reasons. First, the film utilizes editing techniques that are evocative of the heyday of MTV (itself a 1980s phenomenon, although that is a topic for...

A Marxist reading of the graphic novel V for Vendetta reveals much about how to understand and interpret this graphic novel, particularly through the character of Evey. On two levels, a Marxist reading helps illuminate both the struggles of the...

Within Steinbeck’s oeuvre, the 1942 novella The Moon is Down is far less renowned than works like The Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flat or even Cannery Row. However, The Moon is Down is an excellent novella and can be used as a meaningful...

In Orhan Pamuk’s masterful 2004 novel Snow, one major theme is that of aesthetic creation or production. This focus on process pervades the book, which itself is an aesthetic object. On a broader level, however, it complicates the aesthetic nature...

One major flaw in the human condition is the inclination to habitually dwell on things that we desire rather than what we actually need to attain genuine happiness. Easy fixes towards desires are humanity’s forte until one realizes that what we...

In "The Historical Novel Today: Or, is it still Possible?", Frederic Jameson considers the various difficulties which face the historical novel today. Especially relevant to the essay, are his ideas on imagined time in the historical novel....

The movie titled Divergent (2014) can be seen and analyzed as a groundbreaker if considering the gendered readings in connection with it. The movie is based on Veronica Roth’s bestseller book series and follows the increasing tendency of having a...