Newest Literature Essays

Although race discrimination exists as a major theme throughout the entirety of J. K Rowling’s Harry Potter series, it is in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that Harry, our protagonist for all seven books, becomes acutely aware of the...

Voltaire’s Candide presents two theorists Dr. Pangloss and Martin in the novel about the travels and quest of the titular protagonist Candide. Both are described as philosophers in the text, notably, Martin is a philosopher whom Candide meets...

Many southern writers are known for obscuring the boundaries between human and nonhuman--especially in regard to African Americans. When executed properly, authors are capable of conveying to the reader how African Americans were not typically...

Despite the passage of time, core values have prevailed as timeless and defining characteristics of human beings. Among them, friendship plays a pivotal part in the development of a person, making it stand out as one of the most valued. Friendship...

In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus explores the absurdity of the human condition, and attempts to find a way for man to reconcile himself with such an inherently meaningless existence. It is not something that is particularly hard,...

Throughout the text of "Babette's Feast," Martine and Philippa are described only as beautiful and fair, unlike their father who is portrayed as a dean and prophet, acknowledging his accomplishments directly to his worth, where as the sister’s...

William Shakespeare is not well-known for presenting perfectly typical, well-functioning, Leave It to Beaver-esque families, which made his work much more appealing to audiences who were enthralled by unpredictable drama. His representations of...

As art mirrors life, so too does George Eliot’s Middlemarch attempt to replicate a realistic world, particularly in the interactions and relationships between all the characters in the novel. Whether the relationship between the characters and the...

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster answers the question: What makes a character real? According to Forster, “it [a character] is real when the novelist knows everything about it” (Forster, pg 77). Esther Waters, the title character in George...

George Orwell’s ‘Reflections on Gandhi’was published in Partisan Reviewa year after Gandhi’s assassination, in January, 1949. There is an undeniable admission of admiration with which Orwell writes about his reception of Gandhi’s writings and...

In Stephen King’s novel The Long Walk, 100 teenage boys walk the border of Canada and the United States in the ultimate game. If these boys slow down too many times, or stop walking, they are shot until only one is left, upon which he is the...

The Fate Vs. Free Will debate has long been adapted within literary texts, but Anne Carson’s Antigonick puts a spin on it by transforming it to be a debate between two texts. Antigonick is an adapted version of Sophocles’ Antigone, which tells the...

Scholar Carl Malmgren describes the common science fiction trope of alien encounters as “inevitably broach[ing] the question of the Self and the Other…The reader recuperates this type of fiction by comparing human and alien entities, trying to...

Thinking about the sun will likely produce similar thoughts in any person: heat, energy, light, life. Albert Camus though, in his novel The Stranger, utilizes the sun to serve a much more abstract purpose. Meursault, the narrator, naturally finds...

The stories, “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”, are written with very similar plot lines despite them taking place more than two centuries apart. The forest in “Young Goodman Brown” and the wallpaper in “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be...

In order to understand the Allegory of the Cave, you must first have a clear understanding of how Ancient Greek democracy functioned. Ancient Greece was the first experiment of direct democracy in human civilization. What direct democracy entails...

In the case of Robert Browning’s two poems ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘The Laboratory’, victimhood is complex – in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, the victim is very clearly Porphyria, but in the case of ‘The Laboratory’, whether there actually is a victim or...

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Morrison interestingly creates a chilling, gothic narrative through strategic use of the supernatural and return of the dead elucidating the history of African American slavery in the United States during the 1860’s....

In the novel Beka Lamb written by Zee Edgell, we see that the character Beka Lamb, a young Belizean girl through various flashbacks, has been through many eye opening experiences, which allows her to cope and experience meaningful change, which...

The modernism movement has paved way for the present and future of writing in a lot of ways. After World War I had ended, life had changed drastically in contrast to before it had begun. After society had been exposed to the horrific realities of...

Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, disguised as a children’s allegory to sinful pleasures, is a warning about the false promises and perils of marriage. Comparisons to the divorce laws close to that time period and the metaphors of the injustice...

Poe’s How to Write a Blackwood Article portrayed a symbiotic relationship between the soul, the body and money that drove the Victorian audience to search for an unattainable form of happiness in literature. Poe described the sought-after...

Vexation and disillusionment are prevalent themes in many of the stories in Dubliners, but male frustration is arguably strongest in two of those stories: Araby and Counterparts. In these stories, Joyce portrays male frustration in different...

Setting and character portrayal play monumental roles in conveying themes as well as the author’s purpose in literature. In The Assault and Chronicle of Death Foretold, Mulisch and Marquez use these techniques to illustrate the dynamic within...