Newest Literature Essays

Frank Chodorovm, an acclaimed libertarian politician, asserted after the Civil War, “The States acquire power…and because of their insatiable lust for power they are incapable of giving up any of it.” Chodorovm suggests that the reason the Civil...

Herman Melville’s iconic short stories, “The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids” are both rife will elements of human sexuality, which was a hot/controversial undercurrent in American literature at the time. Many writers such as...

Jeanette Winterson’s 1989 novel Sexing the Cherry, through postmodern elements of experimentation of literary forms and untraditional narrative structure as well as featuring elements of magic realism subverts the established notions regarding...

In his poem Christabel (1816), Samuel Taylor Coleridge revises John Milton’s Paradise Lost to create a version of the fall of humanity that is wholly feminine. Coleridge represents Eve though the character Christabel, an innocent young maiden...

The autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson explores the themes of religious tolerance and relationships affected by differences of beliefs. It tells the story of Jeanette, a girl who struggles to find her...

The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon is a book renowned in history as a useful tool in instructing leaders as well as illuminating the life of a noble king. It is also notable for another reason which lies in the title itself. The book focuses on...

A relationship of alliance between individuals and the landscape is one clearly represented within the poetry of Judith Wright and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, namely, through Moving South, Brother and Sisters, and This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison. This...

Intrinsic to the human experience is our innate desire to uncover and discover aspects about the world. Inevitably, this also means we understand ourselves and the others around us even more greatly. This notion is reflected to a great extent in...

The true power behind the intrinsic relationship between a text and its context lies in its ability to evoke different responses form composers to the same universal message, as a result of the concerns in their respective social and political...

The Holocaust was devastating to the Jewish community and millions died, yet some managed to survive. Among those which survived was Vladek, father of author Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman wrote Maus, a graphic novel about Vladek’s survival of the...

In the third Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry and his friends mature into teenagers, and the series itself also matures noticeably in both depth and tone. The series continues to mature in multiple ways in book...

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea aroused a lot of controversy in the world's literary society. As a classic example of Yukio Mishima's later works, it combined themes and motifs that were borderline acceptable and unusual for the...

The International Sanatorium Berghof is the setting where the entire story in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain takes place. Here, high in the Swiss Alps, the sanatorium houses a broad representation of medically ill Europeans from different countries....

Two years before Fathers and Sons was published, Turgenev gave a speech titled “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” in which he cross-analyzed Hamlet and Don Quixote as two antitheses of basic human tendencies. For Turgenev, Don Quixote represented the...

Known for his gritty and unvarnished portrayals of life in the American Midwest, author Richard Ford uses fiction to explore the ways that people react to loneliness, turmoil, and desperation as they struggle to move forward. These themes become...

Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah is a personal account (or memoir) of Palestinian displacement do to Israeli aggression and occupation. Barghouti recalls his experiences in different phases of displacement, and presents a testimony of his...

Nadine Gordimer’s novel The Pickup tells the story of one couple: Julie, a well-to-do white woman from a wealthy family living in South Africa, and her lover, Abdu, an illegal immigrant from an unnamed Arab country, also living in South Africa and...

The past is anything but mere history; it sheathes, surrounds, and encompasses us, as humans, as we forge on through life. Similarly, in two eminent American works of fiction - The Underground Railroad, The Cafeteria, and Sonny’s Blues - the past...

Suicide is a persistent enemy that affects thousands of young people across the country every year. Bullying is one of the main reasons young people decide to commit suicide. Many young adult authors are writing books that address these hard...

High culture bears a great significance in Eliot’s poetry and in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock he expresses its significance in life and the valuable lessons it can provide. He also manifests his concerns about culture’s influence on his...

Communist ex-Prime Minister of Cuba, Fidel Castro, resolutely declared, “I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating…because it causes war, hypocrisy, and competition” (brainyquote.com). Nonetheless, the vast majority...

Mad Scientists in Literary History

The figure of the ‘mad scientist’ is present in many literary works, and its influence as an irresponsible character with an uncontrollable intelligence can be found in many others. But before explaining its...

Of central importance to he short story “Gloria” by Suchen Christine Lim is the theme of inequality. It is a theme prevalent in the story ‘Gloria’, where a domestic helper experiences inequality while working in Singapore. As Gloria, who is the...

In the play Pygmalion, we get to know Mister Higgins as a man who knows what he wants, he is not afraid to say what he thinks and he acts like nobody can tell him what to do. But even though he looks a bit arrogant, self-assured and bossy, he is...