Newest Literature Essays

Composers creatively explore the intangible nature of the American identity reflecting the flawed values of American exceptionalism and capitalism. Tennessee Williams’ symbolist play, A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947, inspects the destabilisation of...

The American dream, the belief that one will be able to achieve success through hard work and sacrifice, is an overly romanticized concept that people have been actively pursuing for decades. Many individuals set out in pursuit of their own idea...

John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), a verse satire based in Restoration England, has led Edward Albert to dub him “the champion of monarchy”. Indeed, the poet’s use of two Biblical narratives (the tale of David and Absalom and the fable...

Conflict is an unavoidable and fundamental aspect of human life. Favell Parrett explains how narrative is, and has always been, a powerful tool to express the impact of human experience on individuals in her gripping coming of age novel Past the...

The Other is often used to mean the hostile, the dangerous, the deadly. However, the term itself makes no mention of this, it can just as easily refer to the inexplicable or simply taboo, something that humans are notorious for attempting to...

H. G. Well’s ‘Tono-Bungay’ is a novel which explores the moral and social disintegration of the individual and society due to societal and economic shifts like the introduction of capitalism. Wells explores the disintegration of social classes,...

One of the most essential scenes in Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock is the scene that takes place at the very beginning of the film. Marion Crane is packing her bags to run away from her seemingly well-off life. She is in a steady relationship with her...

Utopia: a word many assume to describe a society without fault or suffering. Our definition of utopia is derived from Sir Thomas More’s written work Utopia, the originator of the utopian genre. While describing Utopia to illustrate the best...

Humans have acquired more and more power throughout history through scientific advancements, such as vaccines and cell phones. However, one thing that has proven never to be recreated is life. Both stories are about a scientific monstrosity going...

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...