Newest Literature Essays

Of the six children that Patrick and Maria Bronte brought into the world, three of their daughters rose to become well-known and respected names in the literary world: Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. Anne, the youngest of both the three authors as...

The familial relationships navigated in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Lorrie Moore’s Bark are non-traditional and complex. In Never Let Me Go, the reader is introduced to characters who are copies of other human beings, made specifically to be...

Being a stranger in an unusual new land can be frightening and challenging, but the situation can also be prosperous and bring limitless opportunities for the future. This is relevant to Anh Do’s autobiography the Happiest Refugee and Shaun Tan’s...

Texts employ language to urge readers to think more thoroughly about people's cultural ties. Language is used in a variety of ways to communicate cultural differences and group identity. This can be seen in Rob Sitch’s 1997 iconic film ‘The Castle...

The Godfather is a timeless film set in the 1940s and based on the Corleones, a mafia family in New York. At its core, the film reflects the culture and the values of the Italian mafia. The Corleones are one of the wealthiest and most influential...

In The Graduate and Groundhog Day, we get to see two similar, but slightly different ways for a comedy film to reach the audience. In The Graduate, the director does this by developing empathy for Ben. In turn, this makes the audience want to root...

Through his exploration of narration in ‘Lord Jim’, Conrad can present readers with a novel which goes beyond the colonialist tropes of the seafaring tale. Marlow’s first-person narration orally relays the narrative for most of the novel, and his...

In Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, there is a passage in the novel which depicts one of the main characters, Sonja, leafing through the pages of a medical encyclopedia, only to find a surprisingly poetic definition: “Life: A...

The late 1800’s marked a shift in the views of life from a religious outlook to a secular outlook. Many scholars were turning their attention to financial and political force in their attempts to explain the world. For example, Karl Marx theorized...

Throughout history, humans’ fascination with art has sprung from the emotional response that a beautiful piece evokes. A sample of art’s effect on its viewer is conveyed in ekphrastic poetry, a medium by which poets, moved by works of art, attempt...

Empathy is about finding echoes of yourself in the eyes of others. The Shape of Water (2017) by Guillermo Del Toro is a magical realism film that follows mute heroine Eliza as she falls in love with a Fishman while facing the villainous...

In the late 1990s, French composer Gerard Presgurvic rewrote Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a musical with modern influences, while largely remaining faithful to the original plot. This musical play was hugely successful and was translated...

The mother of English-Fiction, is the stature of Frances Burney, according to Virginia Woolf. Her diary is rife with literary experimentation, and her first published novel Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance Into the World (1778),...

Both D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory and Enoch and Mailman’s The 7 Stages of Grieving explore communities defined by grief. Both texts provide a multifaceted examination of the personal, cultural and political aspects of grief and loss. The...

When Dr. Franz-Joseph von Leinsdorf first arrived ar South Africa, he never thought of falling in love with a dark-skinned woman during the time of apartheid. In the plot, this seems contradictory; courtship occurs in the inappropriate time and...

In short fictions “The Rocking Horse Winner” and “The Found Boat”, children are interrupted in both stories. While one takes place in England and another in Canada, some similarities still exist in the plots. Moreover, the fact that symbolic...

Throughout the interactions between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, Austen uses eye contact as a symbol for the literal blindness each has for the other regarding their true situation. This blindness regarding situational reality...

In his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, Derrida construes the idea of “play” as a decentering of structures within the structures themselves. The term “jeu” which translates to “play” has also been called “...

How do films articulate familial connection and cultural heritage through music? In his 1994 film Eat Drink Man Woman, Taiwanese director Ang Lee examines issues such as patriarchal structures and the increasing independence of women, focusing on...

Simone de Beauvoir’s belief that one “is not born” but becomes a woman holds most true in Jane Austen’s portrayal of her fictional heroines in 17th century England, such as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park – such ‘coming of age’, in a twist of the...

Whilst Snowball is used to convey an image of just leadership in Animal Farm, Orwell demonstrates how this leadership alone is inadequate. Orwell presents his views on leadership and governance through the characterisation of Snowball as the ideal...