Newest Literature Essays

Catherine Barkley, who predeceases the retrospective narration of her bereaved lover in A Farewell to Arms, has nevertheless transcended her untimely death to become immortalized as a frequent and much-debated subject of Hemingway criticism. Since...

The most compelling characters in modern literature and plays are the ones whose motivations tend to be complex, thus demand a deeper analysis of which part of their conscious their decisions arise from – the impulsive Id, the balancing Ego, or...

Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country Doctor (1884) is classified as a local color fiction because of the encapsulated elements of time, space, memory, romanticism, stock characters, language, and the predominant city versus country theme. Local color...

Encountering the Old Testament: A Christian Survey, authored by Bill T. Arnold and Bryan E. Beyer, set out a comprehensive analysis of theological theories, while exploring the themes of the Pentateuch, the Historical books, the Poetics and the...

Literary experimentation has a tendency to alienate writers of color due parameters of experimentation privileging apolitical identities and valuing the inward voice. These avant-garde literary traditions arguably favor the white, male voice and...

“If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you've given it away...

“The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” is a confessional poem by Anne Sexton, in which she explores her intimate feelings about masturbation during a post-break-up era in her life. The poem is noteworthy because of its ability to bring forth the...

Many critics would define Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper as being aligned with feminist politics. Her decision to satirize the patriarchal, domestic-centred expectations of 1930s women, and the media that propagated said expectations, arguably...

While Beowulf is structured around its three key confrontations between man and monster - Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the Dragon respectively - the plot is punctuated by a series of digressions that recount other heroic, or culturally...

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was the best fulfiller of his own call for an ‘immenser’ poet who would write ‘great poems of death’ (Democratic Vistas). His poetry, as much as it celebrates and endorses sexual liberation, consciously ‘beat[s] and...

Butterworth, through his use of dramatic method, makes Scene One significant, particularly the extract where Ginger recounts Johnny’s antics at the fair ‘twenty years’ ago, by his characterisation of Johnny and his implicit comment on society....

There is an incomprehensible secret embodied in the highly intimate affair of someone else’s emotions. Even when the thoughts of others come fully into the orbit of one’s concern, they are often difficult to dissect and subsequently understand....

When contemplating Sappho’s illumination of the role of the woman in Ancient Greek society in her poetry, it is equitable to concede that there is an underlying tone of patriarchal oppression woven throughout; in which femininity is reduced to...

Susan Glaspell’s one-act play called Trifles can best be described as a feminist drama. Having first been performed in 1916, and having been written by a woman, the play itself is one of a kind, which is why it is still taught to this day. There...

Scientific investigation as a motif in Victorian literature served as both a source of inquisitiveness and terror in its youth as an ideological school of thought. Both Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells take time to scientifically dissect these facets...

Kings Abbot is described at the beginning of the novel as being “just like any other village”. However, as the plot develops and the reader learns more about the secrets and pasts of the characters who reside in Kings Abbot and, more importantly,...

Amanda Ngoho Reavey’s Marilyn chronicles her survival and transformation following transnational adoption and the shifting of her identity. She asserts that “survival is not about hunger. Not nourishment. Not hope. Nor anger. Nor love. It is about...

In his essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), Henry James writes ‘the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting’. Here, and elsewhere in his writing, James eschews the constraints of textual...

In ‘The Thought-Fox’, Ted Hughes explores the transformative power of the imagination through the extended image of an imagined ‘fox’’ roaming through foliage post-midnight. Indeed, the poem might be read as an ode to beasts through putting a...

In Fernando Meirelles’ film City of God (2002) the audience is introduced to and follows the life of Rocket, and his affiliation with Li’l Zé (formerly Li’l Dice), a gang leader in the City of God. In one of the final scenes of the film, a...

Beckett is fundamentally anti-logocentric. Throughout his work, he rejects the view that there is an essential order that can be discovered through reason. This is nowhere more clear than in Three Dialogues (1949), in which he deplores centuries...

Lovelace is clearly representing in the poem ‘The Scrutiny’, that the speaker is convincing women to sleep with him, when he has no intentions of being in a relationship with them. Selfishness is really conveyed as he’s speaking throughout the...

A defining characteristic of William Blake’s poetry is that his poems are intended to be in conversation with one another. Blake allows his poetry to speak by using dialectically opposite images. Blake prominently uses Christian images in his...

Though it is a book of children’s literature, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit still deals with issues of great moral complexity. In the novel, Bilbo Baggins debates whether or not he should kill the creature Gollum, who stands in his way of escaping...