Newest Literature Essays

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...

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a text that Jean-Dominique Bauby pens with an objectivity typical of a memoir, intimate introspection characteristic of an autobiography, and a critical understanding of the leniency afforded by fictional...

Chinese Cinderella is a memoir by Adeline Yen Mah of her life as an unwanted child and as a rising entrepreneur during the transformation of Chinese society while it was under Japanese and French rule. Adeline’s wealthy and influential family...

Religion and spirituality are significant facets in the African-American communities as the church has been an emblem of power and freedom from the period of slavery into the civil rights era. Go Tell It on the Mountain as a fictional...

It is a common fear that people have about whether or not they are wasting their lives with the limited amount of time they were given on earth. In “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” Henry David Thoreau explores what he thinks the true meaning...

Masculinity, especially in the context of the early twentieth-century, can be defined through the ability to dominate and control. Throughout Part 1, Barker draws our attention to the way in which the war itself has become responsible for a...

In Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, protagonist Guy Montag questions the rules and teachings of the society in which he lives. Throughout the story, his view of life and books changes. There are numerous differences between the novel...

Quentin Tarantino is known for his symbolism and hidden meanings throughout each of his films. Particularly, in Reservoir Dogs he uses color for an abundance of reasons. It is a major motif in the film, first introduced as a device to keep each of...

According to critics Alistair Rolls and Jesper Gulddal, the genre of detective fiction is “located in a field of binaries: structure versus innovation, stability versus mobility, the one final solution versus the many possibilities of the...

The quietly devastating works of Wong Kar-wai, the auteur from the east, have influenced the filmography of contemporary American directors, including Sofia Coppola. In the Mood for Love, in particular, is a reigning force of this influence. The...

Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, contained in three acts and set in the bogs of Midland Ireland, follows the tragic story of Hester Swane as she experiences abandonment, betrayal, and prejudice from the Bog’s other inhabitants. Here, authority...

Batman Begins, the first installment of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, offers a Batman that that reflects all the moral complexity and ambiguity of Gotham City’s society. Compared to the Batman of previous films, Nolan presents a...

Frantz Fanon, in his book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, states, “Decolonization is truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power: The “thing” colonized becomes a man through the very process of...

Communication plays a crucial role in Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” as the loss of communication eventually leads to the downfall and death of the novella’s protagonist, Gregor Samsa. Communication is of vital importance in order for a family to...

Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) is a thrilling murder mystery set in a small Mississippi town in the late 1960s, shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The story follows a black detective, Virgil Tibbs, who is...

When looking at various historical periods, it is always interesting to consider the social position of women at the time and reflect on how that position affects their actions. In “Andrea del Sarto,” Robert Browning blends aspects of masculinity...

Time is a very strange aspect of life. Because time is a manmade phenomenon created as a measurement system, the way it dictates our lives seems unrealistic. Most people view time as a constant force in life, a mechanism for humanity to create...

The girl who was on fire, the Mockingjay, the star-crossed lover, the fierce survivor, the cold-hearted archer...which of these really defines the hero of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games? Answer: all of them, and none of them. Below the much...

When comparing the way two mediums depict the same story, one has to take into account the limitations of each medium. Films are generally limited by length, while books are generally limited by each reader’s individual imagination. In the case of...