Newest Literature Essays

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...

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...