Newest Literature Essays

One of Shakespeare’s legendary plays, Hamlet, conveys a significant conflict between a parental figure and their respective child. One theme that is embedded with this particular conflict is perception versus reality. This theme comes into play in...

The Color Purple is arguably the most influential and well-known book of Alice Walker’s literary opus. It won the Pulitzer Prize; it was adapted into a successful film; and it has continued to spark controversy and debate since its publication....

…[V]aliant to fight, and sober to toil, and pious to pray”:

The Physical Danger of Capitalism and Colonial Power in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” most critics claim, is an allegory of the...

Gone with the Wind opens with a grandiose description of the South: according to the opening text, this is the region where “gallantry took its last bow” and “knights and their ladies” took a stand against the onslaught of Northern aggression....

Identity is crucial in understanding our values and morals and is shaped by societal expectations and the choices we make. Thus, it is ultimately an individual’s choice to relinquish temptations of deception, in which often eventuates to the...

Christina Rossetti’s most well-known poem, the “Goblin Market,” interested many literary and cultural scholars over the years, providing them an immense opportunity for writing down different, individual interpretations. Various topics were...

High expectations coming from the external world always happened to cause a carefully hidden diversity between what people really felt inside and what they actually showed at the same time towards the ever observing gaze of their community. At the...

In patristic thought, the philosophers St. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine agree on the philosophy that God is the exemplar of all created things likeness; that creation is an imitation of God’s image. According to their writings, St Thomas Aquinas’...

The Difference Engine, co-written by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, imagines an alternate historical outcome during the industrial era of Europe in the late 19th century. The book follows three characters with different stories that...

Ernest Hemingway was a brilliant author but he failed to portray women characters because of his male ideals. In his novel A Farewell to Arms, his female characters are shown as subordinate objects who are helpless without a man by their side. The...

Margaret Laurence's story ‘Horses of the Night’ centers around the meeting and interaction between Vanessa -a girl looking back on her childhood- and Chris -her cousin who lived up north. Throughout the text the character Chris utilizes his...

Does race play a factor in whether or not one succeeds in life? Bad Boy by Walter Dean Myers explores this topic in an unforgettable memoir about identity, racism, and the neighborhood of Harlem. His transition from childhood to becoming a man is...

Post-colonial theory divides the colonizer's point of view from that of the colonized; however, literature, with its promiscuous plurality of points of view can understand, contain, and even synthesize different cultural perspectives. Roberto Bola...

Stephen Crane, one of America's foremost writers of the realist genre, frequently used a sonic aesthetic to breathe life into his descriptions of poor urban environments. In both Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Experiment in Misery, Crane...

Time is more personal than the sequential ticking of seconds on a clock. We do not measure our lives in uniform progression: some moments drag on for days, while others disappear in meager seconds. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, wherein...

While both Harper Lee and Charles Dickens have parallels in the way they portray justice and the legal system in their respective novels, there are contrasts in the way they portray both Victorian London and the Deep South in the 20th Century....

“Marvin always gets the things he wants,” Miss Goldberg croons, in submission to her inexhaustible student. But what is it that he wants? Following the psychosexual torments of a teenage boy growing up in the American upper-class in the nineteen...

The change that has been brought about in the fabric of our day to day lives has at the hands of the technological revolution has been extensive, which remains especially so when it comes to the mode and manner in which individuals consume...

Sackville West’s "Envoi" reads as a celebration of the beauty and power of romantic love which is able to brighten the surroundings of those who experience it. Nonetheless, Sackville-West eventually reaches the same realisations of predecessors...

Marriage will always have its share of imperfections, subtle and explicit, but the espoused in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl suffer from a bundle of...

Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea develops an intertextual relationship with Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre by inventing a backstory that can explain the tragic fate of Bertha Mason – the most marginalized character. The oppressive binary...

David Malouf’s Ransom and Clint Eastwood’s Invictus signify the powerful force of storytelling through the portrayal of their characters. In his adaptation of Homer’s Illiad, Malouf and Eastwood concede that stories can be manipulated, alluding to...

Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name is a poignant realization of a unique coming-of-age story that centers around the love which blossoms betweenElio, the 17-year-old son of an archeology professor, and Oliver, the 23-year-old graduate student...

“Socrates is an annoying, egotistical braggart, who uses cynicism to masquerade as wisdom. He can’t craft arguments of his own, and must resort to creating superficial holes in the arguments of others in order to satisfy the condescending nature...