Newest Literature Essays

Kamikaze, written by Beatrice Garland, is focused around the Japanese soldiers who self-sacrificed their lives during WW2, whilst flying missile planes into enemy ships. This act was perceived to be one of great bravery and honor, reflecting a...

William Shakespeare’s King Lear recounts a tale of a father and his three daughters as he decides to divide up his kingdom based on who loves him the most. Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres is a modern day King Lear farm with Larry Cook’s three...

In The Consolation of Philosophy, the main character and author of the work, Boethius, faces the hardest time in his life when he is imprisoned and sentenced to death. Boethius is mourning the loss of his privileges, influence, and freedom, and...

Since 1945, German literature has met the challenge of evoking mental processing of past events by exploring by what means we access the past. As literature depends far more on individual production and reception than film and television, which...

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” is a twenty-one line, three-stanza poem that metaphorically compares African-American life to that of a caged bird. The author suggests that African-Americans are trapped in an inescapable cage. It is interesting...

During the 1830’s, the cultural movement of Russian Romanticism evoked a multitude of intense feelings amongst the Russians, in particular a fervent sense of nationalism. This inspiration occurred incongruence with an enormous Russian victory. At...

In the Song of Songs, the narrators are a man and a woman who appear to be lovers. Throughout the poem, they make references to nature and natural landscape which reflect the concept of traditional gender roles. A clear distinction between the...

“Hamlet will be Hamlet, a fabled tragedy of the human spirit that still resonates, even today (Slings and Arrows, 1.2).”

Hamlet by William Shakespeare is one of the very few plays that have survived throughout the ages and is still referenced in...

In Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, Piscine Molitor Patel, an Indian boy who is living in Pondicherry, is the main character of the story. From an early age, he is exposed to three different religions: Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. Due to...

Sir Thomas Wyatt, according to Peter Hühn, is not only recognized as one of the most important poets in the revival of the sixteenth-century English lyric, but he is also remembered for establishing the conventions of Petrarchan love in the...

Despite the notion of a utopian society, absolute perfection ceases to exist simultaneously with the human race. Mistakes have inevitably plagued humans since the commencement of civilization, but it is the accountability for these failures, not...

The 19th century philosophy of transcendentalism, championed by the profound literary figures of the century such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, was an accumulation of ideas built on the principles of individualism and...

Kazuo Ishiguro’s An artist of the Floating World is a novel ripe with scenes of introspection, indeed the past is one of the principal devices in order to further many of the work’s central themes. Regardless of the oftentimes stringent, even...

Composed by Ariel Dorfman, Death of the Maiden is regarded as a compelling play where a woman, Paulina, sought justice for actions that happened to her fifteen years ago. She blames a man named Roberto Miranda, a doctor that had visited her and...

"My Oedipus Complex" by Frank O'Connor is a short story in which the reader has extremely mixed feelings towards the main character, Larry. The story begins with Larry and his mother having a normal day. Their incredibly strong bond is clearly...

Society has been fascinated by the power struggle between men and women since the conception of gender. Movies and television shows about the battle of the sexes intrigued both men and women, but the real life version of the battle of the sexes is...

Despite being one-hundred-fifty years old, Frederick Douglass’s speech “The Hypocrisy of American Slavery” and Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” have survived the tests of history as some of the most influential speeches of their time. Both...

Letters from an American Farmer by French-American author J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur can be considered one of the first propaganda pieces for the service of the newly formed United States of America, the purpose of which being to attract...

To read Johannes de Silentio’s account of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling is to understand the paradoxical nature of the single individual and how there are internal and external forces that define the individual in the...

Many of the great modern works of literature and film find their inspiration in the classical works of authors such as Homer, Chariton, and Xenophon. While modern authors may not even realize they are imitating the characters and generic...

In Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s “A Spirit in A Raspberry,” the main character, Baron B. has always been in his comfort zone: he has all he needs, and he is content with existing only in his small corner of the world. The young baron is unaware that life...

Throughout history and literature, utopias usually materialize as attempts to fashion a more perfect society, typically catalyzed by a disagreeable quality of the current civilization. Having an understanding of the purpose for the creation of...

In her essay "Dispelling the Myth of Strong Female Characters," Megan Leigh deconstructs the phrase “strong female character”, and argues that it is too often a positive attachment given to two-dimensional female characters. The stereotypical...

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is hailed as the first novel of the Gothic genre. Accordingly, the novel contains many tropes found in gothic literature, such as the pious princess and the evil prince. In the novel, male characters do...