Newest Literature Essays

“Evening Hawk” by Robert Penn Warren is, despite its name, not about a hawk. It is about time, the ineffable qualities of that which is past, and the ways in which light and darkness relate with time. And skirting above all of this flies the hawk,...

Both The Hate Race and Othello explore identity as a core facet of human nature by considering the consequences of a strong versus weak sense of identity. The idea of a society’s perception of an individual’s identity as opposed to the individual’...

Throughout “The Prose of the World,” Michel Foucault establishes himself as a conceptual archaeologist, one who seeks to uncover the history and theories behind what he calls “the human sciences.” It is a method in which Foucault reexamines...

Racial identity resides at an unfortunate intersection between social construction and real-life consequences. That is, while the concept of race—Black, White, Asian, Latino, etc.—may be nothing more than labels assigned to groups of varying...

Penned against the backdrop of the 1608 corn riots, William Shakespeare’s highly political Jacobean tragedy, Coriolanus, explores and oscillates between three inter-woven domains of the civil, political and military – in order to exploit a complex...

William Blake, a 19th century romantic poet, wrote poetic arguments in Songs of Innocence and Experience filled with rich imagery and symbolism to convey his, at the time, idiosyncratic views surrounding the church and its negative impact on...

The play Tartuffe has many aspects of reason and foolishness. It was written during the Age of Reason, so Moliere writes this play to teach us about morality and the importance of developing a good character. Throughout the play we see that reason...

“The whisky on your breath could make a small boy dizzy;”. This is how renowned poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) opened up his poem “My Papa’s Waltz”. A exuberant child, a mother whom is unamused, and a powerfully intoxicated father are just the...

In Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi, the protagonist, Trudi Montag, takes the form of a dwarf, or zwerg. Trudi's dwarfism makes her an outsider and she is ridiculed by the people in her community as they view her as less than human and look...

Voltaire’s work L’Ingenu follows the main character, the Ingenu, across the Atlantic into England and then shortly thereafter chronicles his travels into the province of Brittany in northern France. There are various examples of the spirit of the...

Phillip Sidney’s sonnet, ‘Because I oft, in dark abstract guise’, was published posthumously in 1591, and occurs as part of Sidney’s most critically acclaimed work, Astrophel and Stella[1]. Consisting of 108 sonnets and 8 intertwined songs, the...

“There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth” (Twain, 3). When a novel is told in first person perspective, as evident in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Handmaid’s Tale, the knowledge of the reader is restricted...

The mythical norm impacts female characters Dana from Kindred and Hermione from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Since these characters are female they are both impacted differently by the mythical norms within their societies. While their...

Drama is the performance of a narrative by actors on stage, and differs from prose fiction in that it is interpreted and presented by others rather than the individual viewer. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, is a drama that illustrates a...

Governments are not always on the side of the people. Throughout history, there has always been a group of people who are oppressed by their country. This was the case for South Africa during the later half of the twentieth century. A time when...

Voluntary manslaughter is defined by as a killing preceded by, “a circumstance that may cause a reasonable person to become emotionally disturbed or considered as a murder fueled by passion or impulse (Jackson 2018).” In Jen Sookfong Lee’s novel,...

The childhood of Suleiman is portrayed as lacking in many elements that should be fundamental to the healthy maturation of an individual. Hisham Matar’s novel In the Country of Men explores how the lack of political justice within Libya translates...

Love and despair do not look alike at first, someone could think that when you are in love you do not feel despair and when you feel desperation is because you may have lost the one you loved. Although for Pablo Neruda, love and despair go...

"The Tuft of Flowers" by Robert Frost, a pastoral and ambiguous poet, is a narrative poem structured in the form of heroic couplets. The speaker is a haymaker that looks for a mower, only to find mowed grass, but later discovering a butterfly...

Dust is a vital element that supports the overall themes of innocence and sin in The Golden Compass, connecting to the religious and moral philosophy in the world and how it may be more harmful than beneficial to humanity. Throughout the story, it...

For many African Americans post-American slavery, and especially post World War I, Europe was a place widely talked of as a utopia for young black men. Historical figures from fugitive William Wells Brown to Dubois, from Frederick Douglas to Mary...

Australian poet Les Murray’s poems often reflect his own belief and value system, as well as provide a new outlook on social issues, such as homelessness and drugs, as shown in ‘Midnight Lake’. He also highlights the importance of rural Australian...

Religious Deception The primary purpose of religion is to promote morality and peace within its followers, and its fundamental principles are based on the spread of such peace in the hopes of unity. However, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie...

At first glance, the settings of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News and Richard Russo’s Empire Falls are wildly different. What could Proulx’s bleak Mockingburg and remote Newfoundland possibly have in common with Russo’s decaying Empire Falls and...