Newest Literature Essays

Readers of Frantz Fanon’s work The Wretched of the Earth often find themselves conflicted regarding the message he conveys concerning the use of violence as a means of achieving liberation from a colonizer. His inherent requirement of violent...

Throughout his illustrious career, E.E. Cummings produced some of the finest poems, plays, and paintings the world has ever seen. While many are masterpieces, few are as unique as his leaf-style poems. Perhaps his most famous – and arguably his...

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams presents desire as an overwhelmingly destructive and negative force. All of the characters grapple with their desires: both Blanche and Mitch desire companionship, Stella desires to upkeep her life with...

There are a copious of characters that play some vital role in Chronicle of a Death Foretold – minor or major – that individually pose as an example or symbol for a theme or idea. Consider the bishop, who only appears momentarily in the beginning...

The French philosopher Jacques Rousseau had a great influence upon Romantic writers with his radical yet traditional views on education; where he believed that women’s education was considerably different to that of a man. He famously said; ‘the...

Sylvia Plath, the author of The Bell Jar, once said, “Is there no way out of the mind?” (Sylvia). Like her protagonist, Esther Greenwood, Plath struggled with depression and mental illness. This aspect of her life became a very prominent theme in...

As is suggested in Armfield’s 1986 version of Twelfth Night, Orsino is certainly in love with the idea of love, at least at the beginning of the play, as his opening soliloquy is spoken as a performance to the party guests, suggesting that his...

A same story can be perceived differently depending on who reads it. Indeed, depending on our cultural background and the historical period in which we live a story can take on different meanings. Similarly, our perception of a story may change...

“Antigone”, by Jean Anouilh, is a political allegory written during the Nazi occupation of France in the early 1940’s. The play served as a way for Anouilh to subtly persuade the people of France to rebel against the Nazi regime and state power....

The American identity in James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and Ralph Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game” is depicted by the respective protagonists’ visions of individualism in contrast to the concept of fate. In both texts, Thurber...

In the dystopic society of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report,” prophetic data regarding potential crime is obtained by Precognitive beings, or “Precogs,” in an effort to abolish the ineffectual post-punitive justice system initially in place....

In the anonymously written, late 14th century Middle English Arthurian poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, human instinct intersects with chivalrous codes in Gawain’s conflicting tests of integrity. While the narrative promotes chivalrous...

The novel The Case Against Satan was written by Ray Russell in 1962 and follows what is believed to be the possession of Susan Garth, a sixteen year old girl. Whether she is possessed or is suffering from a psychiatric illness is disputed...

Woven throughout Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ are intertextual references, used to not only enrich the reader’s experience but to present the love affair between Robbie and Cecilia as indeed, all too familiar, classic and timeless in its...

Classical tragedy is renowned for the dynamics of its plot, and richly ordained language of its narratives, explaining Aeschylus use of both plot and descriptive narratives in tragedy ‘The Persians’ to create an impact on the audience. Descriptive...

In the novel Kindred, Octavia Butler tells the story of Dana and Kevin, an interracial married couple living in 1976 who repeatedly travel back to the time and place of Dana’s ancestors. Butler’s plot brings up agency, which can be defined as one’...

In concert with the Modernism movement of literature in the early decades of the 20th century, T. S. Eliot was a British writer whose works functioned as social commentary. In reaction to the superfluous and lush styles of preceding Victorian and...

In ‘The Crown’, Carol Ann Duffy explores the prestige and catalogue of duties entailed by queenship through an extended description of a crown. Whilst it cannot be denied that monarchy in the poem is presented as deserving of both awe and respect,...

Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Bees’- through the extended metaphor of a swarm of bees used to represent the process of writing a poem- focuses on the capacity of words to excite and invigorate the reader and author alike. Indeed, poetry is presented as...

In Jon Krakauer's personal account of the 1996 Mt. Everest Disaster called “Into Thin Air”, Krakauer expresses his disbelief for the fatal accident through various shifts in tone from somber to solemn, or even a journalistic tone. Krakauer places...

In order to affirm one’s personal identity in the context of social structure, we often seek affirmation through relationships with other people. While these identities are constructed by our society, they play an influential role in the...

The poem “The Black Walnut Tree” by Mary Oliver poignantly dramatizes the conflict a mother and daughter face between sentiment and money. The conflict arises over the choice of whether or not to cut down the eponymous walnut tree to “pay off the...

Social norms are the expected rules that determine what is acceptable or appropriate behaviour in particular social contexts, the resistance of which puts an individual at risk of prejudice. Jez Butterworth and Christopher Isherwood explore the...

John Milton and William Shakespeare both address topics of love and death in their respective sonnets, but do so in radically different ways. They employ different structural techniques and subjects within the realm of love and death, and in doing...