Newest Literature Essays

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler reflects the life of the eponymous protagonist against the backdrop of a wealthy upper middle class Norwegian city in the nineteenth century. During this time, there were clear social structures and traditions shown...

“No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man” (Achebe 45). Throughout Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, gender and cultural norms of the Igbo tribe...

“Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones” -- Keith Richards From the beginning of time music has been a staple for mankind. Suzanne Boothby in her article “Does...

Directed by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window is a striking portrayal of the social and political issues facing citizens of the time. Set in Greenwich Village of 1954, Rear Window displays a dense apartment block, a microcosm...

In her 1773 poem, Thoughts on the Works of Providence Phillis Wheatley considers God’s power through the solar system of the Sun and Earth’s rotational relationship. Almost a hundred years prior to Wheatley’s neoclassical poetic style, Anne...

James’s Moloney’s Kill the Possum is an intriguing and detailed story set in Australia about a girl "desperate to live a normal life" although her family is "tormented by a monster’s cruelty." (Penguin Australia) During the story, we see how the...

The rise of the novel in mainstream 18th century English society, and the potential for complex identity formation through its narrative structure, provided a new medium for pornographic writing and consumption. Intersecting this rise, the word “...

“Jamesian” is a term frequently used by literary scholars to describe the psychological assemblage of individual identity, a realization of consciousness and selfhood through knowledge and action, credited at times to both Henry James’s literary...

Fictional characters are created to either reflect the authors’ personal experiences or address issues prevalent in or overlooked by society. Mental, physical, and emotional issues often plague characters created by Stephen King. Disturbing events...

Andrew Niccol is a New Zealand born director who has found his fame through his grim movies that highlight a great many flaws of human society. 'NZOnScreen' states that his movies famously "...take contemporary modern-living concerns and stretch...

The undertaking of a transition from one phase of life to another can prove difficult and there may be obstacles to overcome along the way. In order to transcend adversity, an individual will often need to maintain diligence and perseverance to...

In Death and the King’s Horseman, Wole Soyinka tells the dramatized version of true events that happened in the Yoruban city of Oyo in 1946. A Colonial District Officer interrupted a traditional ritual suicide which then led to the death of both...

“The Final Patient”, by Rachel Naomi Remen, encapsulates a real-life story of a mother and her son eventually becoming her final patient as a pediatrician. The anecdote follows Dr. Remen in her concern for her coworker’s immediate...

Second-wave feminism was incredibly significant in shaping women’s rights. Women were fighting for their right to be equals with men, as they were sick of being stuck in the house, being made to raise a family; while their husbands got to have...

Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night epitomizes the patriarchal society of the 17th century, rooted within the comedic elements customary to plays during the era. Its modern film adaptation, Andy Fickman’s She’s the Man, encapsulates the essence of...

Livy’s Rise of Rome is a history of Rome’s early years, bringing to the modern reader a glimpse of the civilization’s vast mythology. Its stories are populated with a rich cast of mystical kings, heroic champions, and malicious villains, who come...

Discoveries envelop the process of individuals making profound changes from previous walks of life to new unearthed possibilities. This process occurs at the convergeance of introspection and examination and its impacts can be transformative and...

The English language contains more words than any one person could ever hope to know, and they all have slightly different meanings. Detest, dislike, and hate are all similar, but one would never want to use the wrong one. By comparing three...

Anti-War Sentiments in Trojan Women

In the year 415 B.C.E., the Greeks had been fighting a long and bloody war with Sparta for over a decade. It was in this year that Euripides, a well-known playwright, wrote Trojan Women, a tragedy about the...

Death knows no age, culture, social class, or gender. It is the inevitability that defines equality between every soul and meaning to every life. This idea is prominent through the poem, “Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun”, written by William...

In his Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor writes of the epiphany, by which he means the “notion of a work of art as the locus of a manifestation which brings us into the presence of something otherwise inaccessible” (419). Epiphanies occur in...

Gender may be defined as ‘the personal traits and position in society connected with being male or female’.[1] The binary genders then, are the male and female which John Carl contrasts simply: ‘wearing high heels is associated with the female...

Profuse similarities between texts are often exposed by examining the way that authors react to their surrounding society. This notion is regularly expressed between Jane Austen’s novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’, (1813) and Fay Weldon’s text, ‘Letters...