Newest Literature Essays

It doesn’t take very long for your life to change forever. The characters of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet are a testament to this, most significantly, Oriel and Quick Lamb, two individuals who had found their place in society. Oriel was the wife of an...

Zora Neale Hurston’s Filling Station is a short comic story written in the 1930s and also included as part of the African-American: Graphic Classics Volume 22 published in 2011 (Hughes, Bois and Hurston). Hurston has two stories in the book, ...

Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands transforms the real-life killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate into a modernist film that questions the purpose and belonging of youth in the suburban Midwest. Badlands philosophizes on the...

In Alejo Carpentier’s Reasons of State, the Head of State’s efforts to align his country’s culture with the intellectual culture of Paris completely breaks down any sense of national identity within his homeland and further agitates political...

In David Mckenzie’s Hell or High Water, we are introduced to brothers Toby and Tanner Howard (played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster, respectively). They have been poor their whole lives and are at risk of losing a piece of property to the bank which...

Aboriginal identity and the struggle to maintain it amongst other hostile forces is a major theme in Richard Wagamese’s novel, Indian Horse. The book charts the journey of Saul Indian Horse, a young Ojibway boy, as he is separated from his family,...

Shadowboxing, a series of short stories by Tony Birch follows the life of Michael Burn as he grows up in the inner suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s. Michael Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion narrates the life of Canadian Patrick Lewis...

From the first scene of Shakespeare's play Othello, readers are aware of Iago’s plans to destroy Othello by ruining his relationship with Desdemona, creating a situation of dramatic irony. Readers are therefore conscious of the purpose behind Iago...

Akhil Sharma’s novel Family Life is based on his life as part of an immigrant family and the struggles he and his family faced. Sharma, through the eyes of the narrator named Ajay, details the difficulty of assimilating into the United States...

Prior to the release of Blade Runner 2049 in theaters in October of 2017, I prepared myself for the film by re-watching the last – and best – version of Ridley Scott’s landmark 1982 film Blade Runner: The Final Cut. In the film, Scott portrays a...

In the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve disobey God by indulging in the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden, thus beginning the plague of Adam’s Curse on mankind. This belief postulates that in order to experience even the most minimal pleasures in...

Like many Coen Brothers films, The Big Lebowski has become more popular over the years. Where once zeitgeist grabbing films like The English Patient or Dances with Wolves have faded from the national conversation, The Big Lebowski has proven to be...

“Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?” (Burgess 86).

In his 1962 classic A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess explores the concept of dystopian societies by employing his 15-year-old rebellious anti-hero,...

The works of Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Junot Diaz have featured communities that are formed around a shared sexual identity: one that is either chosen to be empowering or one that is forced upon the community members. In some cases, these...

Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem, "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child," is a beautiful poem written to a young girl. The narrator of the poem notices the girl's youthful innocence, and cannot help but think of the future pains and heartaches she will...

Of the two modern critical objections to Uncle Tom’s Cabin – sentimentality and intrusive narrator – the first one is accurate while the latter objection is disingenuous; however, both criticisms belie the overtly political nature of the book. In...

In both “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, evil is something that the characters carry with them throughout the stories. The revelation of their personal evil is a journey that begins with the ostensible picture of faith and good...

The notion of love is something that evades language, yet has been a staple theme in literary works all over the world. Writers have struggled to express this abstract feeling in language and accord it with a definition so that it can finally be...

Winston Churchill, former British Prime Minister, argues that instead of having a definitive end, every journey “will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path.” When a journey qualifies as “completed,” there...

The nature of evolution is change, continuous instances of reaction to what has come before. Therefore, literary history is defined by change as well. The great authors are those who questioned the accepted conventions of their time and altered...

Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop focuses on the efforts of a priest and a Catholic Bishop to start a diocese in the New Mexico Terrain covering themes of religion, violence, hypocrisy, and race. The novel entails two intriguing...

Inspired by the 1927 Giorgio De Chirico painting of the same name, Sylvia Plath’s 1956 poem, Conversation Among The Ruins, is an ekphrastic sonnet structured as a story about author’s own failed relationship. The original painting, done in the...

A cymbal crashes in a room full of people. Everyone immediately turns and stares in interest. The incident starts and ends in a heartbeat, but the sound attracts an incredible amount of attention - one that can rarely be overtaken by anything...