Newest Literature Essays

A lifetime of self-hatred that refuses to heal. Friendships based around jealousy or pity, hating or needing each friend because of how wide or narrow you look when standing next to her. All culminating in a life lived in willing captivity,...

In J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, Kerans, the protagonist, decides to remain on Earth despite apocalyptic rising temperatures and dangerous levels of solar radiation. Kerans believes staying will fulfill some kind of spiritual purpose, as he...

A child can feel lost and alone without motherly love. Marian Anderson’s “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane each detail isolation in light of separation from a mother. Anderson’s timbre,...

In Austin Reed’s The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, Reed uses religion to explain his various emotions and opinions, especially ones related to justice. The two passages in this paper highlight how his attitude towards religion and...

Michelle Alexander’s introduction to “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” helps readers understand the larger context of the theme of imprisonment in James Baldwin’s “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Baldwin’s novel...

As the popular statement goes, the hero is as good as his nemesis, this applies to multiple superhero films; however, Black Panther accomplishes this feat on a profound level. Presenting Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger as the main antagonist...

Ernest Hemingway’s “the snow of Kilimanjaro” (Moreira 1) is modernistic. It has a number of characteristics common for modernist art. The poet switches between the traditional and the modern. The italicized passages reveal the memories and...

The influence of the gods is often seen in Greek literature. Civil law and divine law were important ideals that cause opposition when they are juxtaposed. In the Greek tragedy Antigone by Sophocles, the juxtaposition of civil law and divine law...

Syncretism is the combination of elements from many different cultures to make something more extravagant (Loewen, J. W., 2017). Syncretism is be based off of religions, stories, poetry, and a lot more. Not only this, but syncretism is also used...

Following the story of Genesis, John Milton’s Paradise Lost gives insight to Adam and Eve’s Fall from Paradise and Satan’s war against God in heaven. While all of the characters add crucial detail to the storyline, Eve is arguably one of the most...

J.K. Rowling explores the expression “blood is thicker than water” in her novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The expression leads many to believe that its message is that family is stronger than the relationships that we build in our...

Virginia Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall as an archetype of the stream of consciousness literature explores the mystery of the unconscious through a first-person thought process and self-reflection. The story which centers on the narrator...

Loyalty is a character trait which is held in high esteem throughout the world, and even people who do not explicitly value loyalty still have loyalty to certain ideas. Whether it is to people, ideas, religions, or objects, most people carry...

German playwright Bertolt Brecht developed his theory of epic theatre as a response to the renaissance of Aristotelian tragic theatre in the latter part of the 1920s (Hecht, 40). Where Aristotle allowed the audience of his theatre the purgation of...

Plagued with poverty in the rural Texas area, homophobic cowboy Ron Woodroof spends the majority of his time on his electrician practices and cheap sex. Through one of his sexual partners, Ron is infected with the AIDS virus, which at the time had...

All humans face the struggle of aging. With the passage of time, one must grow old and eventually perish. Aging is something we fear, as it brings on a variety of physical, psychological, and socially constructed ailments. Often there is the idea...

In the stereotypical high school hierarchy, jocks always reign over the band kids, theater geeks, and math geniuses. These athletic students separate themselves from the others, and as this occurs, the geeks, nerds and other social pariahs must...

When we examine two different films made more than fifty years apart from each other, we may surprisingly be able to find a lot ideas shared between them. The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Robert Wise, tells of an alien in human form...

Narration style plays a significant role in the way an audience receives and interprets a story. An intrusive narrator can manipulate a reader’s understanding of a specific character or event based on the narrator’s personal biases and imposed...

Walt Whitman begins his poem, “Song of Myself,” with: “I celebrate myself /And what I assume you shall assume/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (lines 1-3). In these lines, Whitman shows that everyone is equal. Equality is a...

In the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, there are many interesting characters who often perform heroic or important actions. Instead of focusing on one of these characters as the protagonist, the play revolves around multiple...

In Hal Ashby’s cult classic Harold and Maude, we follow Harold (played by newcomer Bud Cort), a morose and eccentric teenager who enjoys pretending to kill himself to annoy his mother. His mother is Mrs. Chasen (played brilliantly by Vivian...

Both “It Had to Be Murder”, written by Cornell Woolrich, and Rear Window, the film directed by Alfred Hitchcock based on the book, tell a strange tale of a nosy protagonist in a story about the occasionally blurred line between fantasy and...

Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment” and Eliza Haywood’s “Fantomina” both imply a strong relationship between sex and power. Yet, the ways in which their characters understand this relationship is dependent on their gender. The male protagonists,...