Newest Literature Essays

Gender and sexuality have become so deeply rooted into society that we apply them to most anything without ever giving it a second thought. The portrayals of gender in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Bharati Mukherjee’s...

In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, gets accepted to a summer internship at a prominent magazine in New York City. There, she meets Doreen, her co-worker. Esther is different from her. Doreen goes against the...

Jane Austen’s novels perform multiple functions individually as moral tales. However, they also occasionally work together to explore propriety in early nineteenth century England. Proper behavior for women often centered on their interactions...

In ‘Monarch Exodus’, Roger Robinson uses the image of a travelling host of butterflies in order to draw attention to the plight of the immigrant who similarly must flee from home and venture onwards to a setting both unfamiliar and hostile....

The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margaret Atwood in 1985, is a complex novel, where it is clear that countless other texts have influenced its writing, creating a rich multi-layered narrative. Atwood borrows from or alludes to a wide range of...

Hunting birds like hawks are not meant to be tamed. They are just starved enough to make them listen and come back to their master for food. Women during the time of Shakespeare had to be silent, obedient, and pleasant to their husband- it was...

During the medieval ages, there was a set of rules and customs the knights referred to as the Code of Chivalry. Leon Gautier condensed the Chivalric Code into the ten commandments of the Code of Chivalry that was expected of the knights to follow....

See the Cat? See the Cradle? These two all-important lines ring throughout the book, constantly confusing both the characters in the book and the reader themselves. It is used in comparison to Angela’s marriage and religion as a whole, although...

In Recitatif by Toni Morrison, the theme of racism is addressed extensively which is rather common in American literature during the late twentieth century. However, Morrison’s approach is fairly different from other literature that tackles the...

The book Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut utilizes satire and parody to comment on the critical issues of religion and science. The story takes place in fictitious settings, first in a town in New York, Ilium while the rest takes place in the island...

Medieval British women had few choices in regards to how they chose to spend their life: marriage to a man or marriage to God through joining a convent. The limitations set upon them by society, even in only this example, show a societal female...

In the 1890s, realization that new knowledge and vast technological innovation created the potential for our own ability to shape the future of humanity, for better or significantly for the worse, prompted the existential crisis of a decade. ...

As a soldier in WWII, J.D. Salinger did not write about the war like his counterparts. He wrote about tragedy, but from a teenage perspective in the shape of Holden Caulfield. Through the psychological theory of trauma in J.D. Salinger’s The...

Carol Ann Duffy’s sinister dramatic monologue, Havisham, is a skillful interpretation of one of literature’s most infamous women. Throughout the text, Duffy deals with the idea of conflict – both in Havisham’s relationship with men and with...

The issue of religion is a prominent theme throughout Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. It is the driving force of the events of the play, as Barabas’s quest for total revenge is kicked off with the Christian governor Ferneze singling out...

Since its publication in 1973, Toni Morrison’s masterpiece Sula has awed readers with its thought provoking imagery and themes. Sula tells the story of the Peace family, which consists of Eva, Hannah, Plum, Pearl, and Sula. The Peace family faces...

In The Little Knife, by Michael Chabon, the main character, young Nathan Shapiro, and is his family travel to Nags Head, North Carolina for an unforgettable summer getaway. Throughout the entire trip, the narrator slowly comes to the realization...

“I am malicious because I am miserable… if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear” (Shelley 129). The creature in Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, is speaking to his creator when he says this line. His “maliciousness”-- his violence and bad...

An antagonist is essential to any story. Establishing a clear “bad guy” gives the story more emotion, uniting the reader with the protagonist(s) against a common enemy that is easy to hate. Every story has an antagonist, but only some are evil....

Historical evolution of literary periods catalyzed significant shifts of schools of thoughts in literature over the centuries culminating into a wave Realism in the late 19th century. American Realism movement interconnects through a wide web of...

More so than any other Modernist writer, William Butler Yeats’ life and work reveal themselves to be intricately connected and draw on each other in multifarious ways. What makes Yeats’ poetry achieve so much power is the conscious employment of...

Neal Cassady is the quintessential beat character who seems almost fictional because of how fantastical he is depicted. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac illustrate Cassady as if he is an unattainable concept. However, he is just as real as they...

In one of the first detective stories, “The Purloined Letter”, E. A. Poe creates an extraordinary character with a powerful personality, a master of ratiocination, and he lets the reader take part in the intriguing process of finding a missing...

“Leaving the Motel” and “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” present exactly different intimate relationships; the former illustrates what happens to the lovers after they had a secret affair, while the latter portrays a married couple...