Newest Literature Essays

When pride is prioritized, morality is compromised at the expense of others. Despite this being a desparingly unfortunate scenario, this case appears more often than one would think. As shown in the bildungsroman The Kite Runner by Khaled...

Narrative techniques are a powerful tool that authors use to impart their themes and messages on their audience. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, is the story of Jane Eyre, a girl growing up in 19th century England, and her battle to find a balance...

Technology and other aspects of daily life are constantly being improved, not only to better our knowledge and power but to enhance the quality of life of many, which lowers the level of discomfort that most encounter. In today’s society, most...

Ismail Kadare’s Broken April features the tale of a region in rural Albania where members of rival families take turns killing each other in an endless cycle of blood and revenge. In this region, the High Plateau, the laws that dictate this...

In The Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna, a skilled warrior, faces a dilemma in the midst of battle. He ceases to fight and admits that he could not live with himself if winning this battle meant conquering his own family. He turns to his charioteer, Krishna,...

Throughout great works of literature, an underlying message helps to give depth to the story and allow the reader to take away a moral lesson from the story. In literature, this underlying message is often referred to as the theme of the story....

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...