Newest Literature Essays

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...

Typical of his work, Henrik Ibsen's ‘Hedda Gabler' challenges social convention through deeply flawed and simultaneously, progressive characters. Eilert Loevborg is one of the more unconventional characters in the play, and as a man who has solely...

‘My genius’, Henry James wrote to William Dean Howells in 1900, ‘I may…say, absolutely thrives [in ‘The Ambassadors’] - it is ‘exquisitely ‘pure’, exquisitely everything’. ‘The Ambassadors’ (1903) was considered by Henry James to be his crowning...

Like many gothic stories, the link between the exterior and the interior in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ becomes an exploration of into the human psyche. Critic Sara Wasson recently claimed that gothic fiction anticipated psychoanalysis – the...

‘Our experience of the world is through the transitory experience of embodiment’.[1] This statement by Marie Mulvey-Roberts exemplifies as to why the body is so prevalent when horror is depicted in the gothic; we exist only within our bodies and...

What makes up a positive and functional mindset? How should an individual behave, think, talk, or feel? Even more, what should they believe? The novel Brave New World bombards us with these unavoidable questions as we delve deeper into its...

Dwight McBride’s critical essay, Straight Black Studies: On African American Studies, James Baldwin, and Black Queer Studies, is a key contribution to the study of gender and sexuality in literature. In his essay, McBride identifies the absence of...

In it’s traditional sense, the natural world can serve to act as the utter antithesis of the man-made human world. It is possible to consider them to both be their own microcosms, circulating in their own introspective cycles, however, it may be...

To a great extent, Williams presents a clash between two cultures rather than one between two individuals. Witnessed in the play is the struggle between ‘Old Southern’ culture, whose values are embodied by protagonist Blanche Dubois and the new...

De Quincey’s dreams and visions as described in his work function as a different world, which exists in places of temporary darkness, and his attempts to capture them must function outside of that world, in a well-lit space of recollection and...

The way G]gender is conventionally defined and how it is divided and characterized orients the perception of masses. The two genders are different in terms of biological factors but language functions in such a way that some character traits and...

In A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, Craig Raine depicts a variety of everyday objects and events as they are viewed by an alien, making the perspective of the narrator odd, if not impossible, because we are not sure if Martians really exist. By...

Edna St. Vincent Millay centers her poems “Once More into My Arid Days Like Dew” and “I Think I Should Have Loved You Presently” around memories of past lovers, yet they have very different themes and focuses that, when put together, give a...

“It has been said in literature, excessive sexual behaviour always leads to corruption”

To present the significance of sexual behaviour in both novels is to link the psychological power of sexual impulses over the individual’s moral principles,...

Throughout Mr Norris Changes Trains, Isherwood utilises implicit, and sometimes explicit, queer coding. One can argue that Isherwood draws parallels between espionage and being homosexual during the 1930s, specifically through the coded language...

“A Call” Commentary“A Call,” by Seamus Heaney, traces the growing import of death, and therefore appreciation of life, on the speaker. By making a simple call to his father, he is thrown into a series of reflections on his father, as well as time,...

In his work The Death of Woman Wang, Jonathan Spence floats between the realms of reality and fantasy to supply the reader with an insight of the role common individuals played within late, imperial China. Spence weaves together a series of...

“Mid-Term Break,” by Seamus Heaney, traces the emotional progression of a teenage boy after finding out that his little brother has died in a horrific accident. The harsh realities of life force him into a despondent blur, and he is not able to...

Symbolism in literary works is used when one thing is meant to represent something else, in order to create meaning and emotion. In the first part of Dante Alighieri's three-part epic poem entitled Divine Comedy, there are many symbols the author...