Newest Literature Essays

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...

Both historian Herodotus and playwright Aeschylus adopt the central subject matter of the Persian Wars- a series of conflicts fought between Greek and Persian forces, which roughly began in 499 BC, and ended in 480 BC in Greek victory at the...

In a traditional Mexican household, the women tend to personify a maternal character in which they nurture, provide for, and maintain the unity of their family. Throughout the novel Pedro Páramo, the protagonist Juan encounters three significant...

In today’s world, Western society has grown incredibly desensitized to violence. Children play video games such as Grand Theft Auto in which they murder civilians and sexually assault women without a second thought in order to win the game. Turn...

A fragmented narrative challenges readers to piece together the jumbled components of a narrative in order to make sense of the story (Hamilton). Although hard to follow at times, the narrative presents an alternative form for storytelling. In his...

In a last, desperate attempt to gain support and exercise free will in a society that condemns her, Seneca’s Medea calls on the gods for help. Medea finds herself in a country with an oppressive government that despises foreigners, and her foreign...

Maxine Hong Kingston’s No Name Woman explores the life of Kingston’s aunt, who had a child out of wedlock in rural China. As she doesn’t know the exact circumstances of her aunt’s story, she’s forced to imagine different versions of her aunt’s...