Newest Literature Essays

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...

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 “...