Newest Literature Essays

Victorian England was a historical context in which masculinity prevailed. Men were celebrated for their adventurous and explorative accomplishments. The same cannot be said for the women of the era. While men were encouraged to go on adventures,...

N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain narrates the creation and history of the Kiowa tribe through three distinct voices, each separated by a different font and position on the page. The fragmented nature of this structure reveals Momaday’s...

Throughout the novella Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, there is a struggle for David to be understood not only by society, but by himself. By showing an internal struggle in David between being able to be completely honest with the events taking...

In ‘Mother, Summer, I’, through a mother and son’s shared distaste for summer weather, Larkin focuses on the dangers of ‘perfection’ which works to hide underlying issues and faults of any given situation. Larkin, through the extended metaphor of...

The Lais of Marie de France give outstanding examples why true love cannot exist in the real world. “Lanval” and “Yonec” both focus on the theme of true love existing only in the imagination because it has no foundations in the human world. True...

Sons have long been taking after their fathers. Such is the case in Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 collection of short stories, In Our Time. In the stories, we see that the character of Nick has internalized his father’s traditionally masculine ways of...

The natural human response to evil is to react with evil. In many cases, the original evil is inspired by fear. This is often the case in the stories in Krik?Krak!. Two of the stories, “Nineteen thirty-seven” and “Between the Pool and the...

In the lives of all, one will inevitably have a figure or figures in their lives to whom he or she looks up to. This may be a parent, educator, older sibling, or even peer. While it is always beneficial to have role models, at one point or...

The Death of Ivan Ilych is more than a novella about death: it is a text dedicated to life. Leo Tolstoy diligently paints an accurate portrait of the 19th century middle class and everything that is wrong with the philosophy of life of the people...

Never has there been a character quite so open to interpretation than that of Bartleby in Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener. In the position of the reader, it is simple to blame Bartleby for an initial lack of understanding...

Catch 22 is an outrageous novel, one designed to provoke the reader and to evoke a sense of uneasiness and disturbance. Its complexity can drive one completely mad with frustration. A lot of people fall in the trap of believing that Catch 22 is...

The autobiographic novel, Left to Tell composed by Immaculée Ilibagiza, is punctuated by legions of demonic allusions and enveloped in an almost impenetrable shroud of evil. Although Immaculée’s halcyon childhood days appear untarnished and...

Sylvia Plath is known for being a prominent female poet of the 20th century whose work often focused on feminine aspects of life such as motherhood, as well as the challenges of being an educated, aspiring female author in the patriarchal 1960s in...

Throughout history, America has often been depicted as a land of many freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of petition, thanks to the First Amendment. Slowly but surely, these...

Within The Comedy of Errors by the venerable William Shakespeare, there comes a hectic bit in the first scene of the fifth act whereupon a lowly messenger brings disturbing news to Adriana: “Mistress, upon my life I tell you true / I have not...

Unlike the author, whose job it is to write the story, the role of the narrator is to tell the story. The narrator provides the window through which the reader looks, framing the discourse, and deciding what is, and what is not, important, where...

In Perilous Kinship by Zafer Şenocak, the protagonist Sascha grapples with his intersecting German-Jewish and Turkish identities in the wake of the German reunification. Coming from a family of migrants, coupled with his own nomadic character,...

Issues regarding social class often tend to stem from innate human desires for power and influence. Throughout history, power has been shown to be a very dangerous tool for those who are not fit to hold it, and this topic is extremely prevalent in...

In seeking to define the post-modern moment in his essay ‘Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?’, Lyotard uses and extends the Kantian theme of the sublime to serve as an entry point to conceptualize the ‘unrepresentable’, that which is...

During the nineteenth century, prominent thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson shaped the American perspective through the philosophy of transcendentalism. Emerson decried tradition and emphasized the pursuit of individual values, encouraging social...

'Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year' and 'Friends' Photos' both reminisce and compare the past with the memory and newfound perspective that their speakers have gained from the present with photographs as a medium. However, while...

As the biggest literary phenomenon of 2012, Gone Girl, penned by former television critic Gillian Flynn, was at one point a household item, commonplace among coffee tables, airplanes, and offices alike. Ubiquitous among both the older and younger...

In The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, Tristan and Iseult surrender their will to a powerful love potion that bonds them for eternity. The potion makes them betray their loyalties to King Mark and commit sinful acts in the name of chivalry and...

Two of the most profoundly influential and respected figures of the American Revolution are Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin. Both held views about religion and morality that defied orthodoxy, giving rise to the new emphasis on the individual’s...