Newest Literature Essays

Tarr is a novel that describes reality as deplete of an inherent moral code, and Lewis articulates the world as hostile, set in direct opposition to the romantic, Rousseauvian vision of “wild nature and unspoilt man”. Within this world Lewis...

Although still a global issue today, misogyny in the time period of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady stemmed from the quantification of a woman’s value from what she can contribute to males rather than her character. The author explores this...

To enhance the cultural significance and direct their characters’ journeys, Gene Luen Yang and Leslie Marmon Silko include the presence of legends traditional to each culture in their works American Born Chinese and Ceremony, respectively. With...

In the play Top Girls, Churchill presents women with power as cynical as it is portrayed that they have abandoned their feminine attributes and womanhood to reach success through the use of male qualities. This idea is particularly evident in the...

Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon is easily one of her best-selling novels and is often credited as contributing to her winning the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. However, despite its popularity Song of Solomon is in many ways radically...

William Shakespeare’s 1600 comedy A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream tells the story of lovers who become woefully confused and actors who were woefully confused to begin with. Magic and fairies play a large role in the play, as they both move the plot...

William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is widely regarded as one of the English language’s greatest plays. It captures the attention of audiences like few other plays can, and it has held their attention for over...

Both Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun and Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved are works that deal predominately with race, but feature vastly different subject matter. Beloved features a group of people haunted by the memory of...

Contemporary reviewers who referred to Charles Lamb as imitating or affiliated with the ‘Lake School’ mocked what they perceived to be a taste for simplicity or childishness; his 1802 play John Woodvil, for example, was mockingly called ‘the first...

The introduction of the Italianate sonnet form into Spanish poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries brought with it both the versification and elements of one of the most influential collections of poetry of all time - Francisco de Petrarca’s II...

One difference between the slave and neo-slave narrative is the relationship of the audience to the text’s protagonist. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs cannot address her audience from equal grounds; because of her...

Point Omega by Don DeLillo is a short novel that consists of three narrative parts delivered by two different narrators. Although the general emphasis is on the middle part where we hear the story from Jim, it is also important to give due...

When discussing the relationship between humanity and the wider natural world, the biblical work of the book of Genesis and Robert Burns’ adjoining poems To a Mouse and To a Louse arguably offer a possibly insight into the development of mankind -...

According to Joseph Campbell, the hero’s journey is comprised of many different stages that test the hero’s ability to overcome obstacles, as well as find their sense of identity along the way. In the book The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Ying-Ying...

Aristotle, in his 335 BCE work of dramatic theory, Poetics, wrote several observations on the nature of ancient Greek theatre and poetry, and also gave his opinions about the qualities he thought theatre and poetry ought to have. Poetics was...

Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech in 3.1.56-90 of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is perhaps the most famous section of dialogue in the English language. It has been quoted an innumerable number of times in all...

The moment that mankind became advanced enough to ridicule the society that it had created was the moment that it began doing so. This form of societal ridicule known as satire has been around since the time of the Egyptians, though most modern...

Mothers are known for being steadfastly supportive of their children’s work. Even if the finger painting their three-year-old brought home from preschool is not the Earth-shattering masterpiece they make it out to be, mothers are known for taking...

In the late 20th century, a push and pull existed within the black community, the likes of which had rarely been seen before. People were celebrating the successes of the civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow, but oppression and racism...

Carole from What Now My Love by Floyd Salas and Ruth from People of the Whale by Linda Hogan are both strong women who are symbols for feminism in their time. They both showed that woman can be equal to men by showing their independence, showing...

Heroes are supposed to embody society’s ideals as an individual, but they do not always manage to live up to expectations. There are numerous circumstances that cause a person to act in a way that is dissonant to what he or she believes. The short...

If Thoreau were to retreat to Walden Pond today, would he bring along the internet? This question, suggested by a recent Christian Science Monitor headline, gets to the heart of important aspect of Thoreau's project. Readers of Walden would be...

Although the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Myth of Inanna were written around the same time period and in the same civilization, the characters portrayed and their viewpoints on death, life, self, identity, and nature couldn’t be more different....

From its first performance in Ancient Greece several centuries ago to present day, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon remains a quintessential example of the definitive Greek tragedy, continually captivating audiences with its progressive depiction of feminine...