Newest Literature Essays

Civil War. There are few things in life that can better quantify as morally gray. In these situations, difficult decisions must be made, and principles are put to the test. Is it truly right to undergo such a divisive and consequential action for...

In Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” many deep-seated issues of the South are brought to the attention of the reader. While on the surface Julian, the protagonist, seems to reject the ideas of the old South such as slavery...

“The Werewolf”, “The Company of Wolves” and “Wolf Alice”, three short stories by Angela Carter, recreate and transform, the traditional story of “Little Red Riding Hood”. The Company of Wolves, a 1984 film directed by Neil Jordan and co-written by...

Originally written by Euripides, Medea is an ancient Greek tragedy based upon the myth of Medea and Jason. After encountering Jason during his quest for the Golden Fleece, Medea falls in love and abandons her homeland to help him throughout his...

The trope of madness and the figure of the madman are notions that have for centuries fascinated, horrified, and perplexed Western culture. Considerations of madness have influenced myriad literary narratives, starting with the madness of...

Paulina’s participation in The Winter’s Tale offers a strong sense of feminism to the play, as her outstanding character stands out to men with high power like Leontes and she is the only character in the play that is not afraid to stand up for...

William Butler Yeats’ poem “An Acre of Grass” is from his collection called “Last Poems” published posthumously in 1939. In this poem, we find Yeats as a withering septuagenarian bedeviled by the inevitable decay of his body and the desolation...

In The Window, Chan presents a speaker responding to her mother’s disrespect for her sexual queerness not with anger but with an admirable grace. Through the metaphor of a ‘window’, Chan reveals a realm of concepts that the mother- and by...

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a novel that follows a penniless Lithuanian family surviving in Packingtown, the meat-packing district of Chicago, underlines the stark gender divide in destitute environments. Ona Lukoszaite, a meek and frail...

Jessie Pope and Wilfred Owen have both written poems about war, but each poet describes war from a different perspective. While Pope portrays war as a game in her poem, Owen illustrates the harsh realities of war by the use of diction and other...

Introduction

Author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling is best known for her children's books about a young boy who learns he is a wizard and goes on to have epic adventures. However, this book series is different from other children's books...

The scholar Denise Gigante described the great age of the English essay as “a vibrant gallery of personae speaking in a multiplicity of voices”[1]. This can be represented vividly by the two essays “On Gusto” by William Hazlitt and Richard Steele’...

Feminism is a movement about value and respect. It is a movement that is still evolving in our modern age to be ever more inclusive and aware of the experiences of all women. According to Robert Dale Parker’s book, Interpreting Literature:...

Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 production Tea and Sympathy evaluates the intricacies of accepted gender normativity in 1950’s America, providing a groundwork for understanding how human behavior is classified based on sex. The film further examines the...

Arguably, The First Casualty by Ben Elton presents the character of Captain Shannon as depraved and dehumanised by the effects of WW1, but perhaps the savage nature of war simply brought out a barbarous side to him that had always been there. The...

In his biographical introduction to Cane, Darwin Turner quotes William Stanley Braithwaite as saying, “In Jean Toomer, the author of Cane, we come upon the very first artist of the race, who with all an artist’s passion and sympathy for life, its...

There are two sides to everything, whether it be a situation, decision, or even a person, perspective is important when evaluating the positives and negatives of anything. For instance, on an extremely hot day the sun is viewed as a negative...

English sonnets often explore the theme of love and the lady’s eternal beauty. Edmund Spenser was one of the best known Elizabethan sonneteers during the 16th century. In 1595, he composed a total of eighty-nine sonnets in his sonnet cycle “...

Dystopian novels often focus on expanding certain fears of society to the extreme. Many times, at the top of these fears, is religion and the exploitation of it. It is often the case that dystopian writers will represent religion as a being that...

Despite having a multitude of tonally different and often interchanged narratives throughout, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a hotbed of repetitive sensory imagery. However, it would be a disservice to assume that these images recur as the result of a...

It becomes clear in 1 Corinthians 15 that Paul’s notion of death is not fixed to the permanent retirement of a being’s cell activity. The stopping of the breath, the failure of the pulse, the ceasing of the heartbeat is never the greatest...

Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth was the first book she wrote after graduating from Yale in 1984 and Oxford in 1987 as an English major and Rhodes scholar (“Naomi Wolf”). The book is a call to arms for women of all backgrounds with regard to feminism...

Although written through the lens of the Soviet prison system, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle can be considered a truly timeless classic Russian novel, in the sense that it asks many of the same great and immortal questions that...

Negative Capability is the ability to stay certain while feelings of uncertainty and doubt are persistent. It exists to guide those who are faced with troubling circumstances. In the novel The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu, a woman falls...