Newest Literature Essays

The opening scene of each the novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and The President by Miguel Angel Asturias, is important to the reading of the book because it sets the overall tone and form of the narrative. It does...

The narrative of the novel Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley follows the coming of age story of Marie and her struggle against the almost overpowering social forces of both sexism and classism to find her own sense of self-respect and autonomy....

Much as the often-flooding rivers of Mesopotamia shaped their cultural beliefs in demons punishing humanity and the open grasslands and calm weather of central Asia shaped the Mongols’ cultural beliefs in the afterlife being the eternal blue sky,...

America’s inability to conceptualize the possibility of sincere African American nationalism and loyalty towards the United States after WWI prompted a disillusioned community, who yearned for validation, to look towards radical politics as its...

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli and Socrates proposed radically different ideas on how one should live their life. On one hand, Machiavelli deems it foolish to follow a life of justice and truth as he believes that it will ultimately lead to...

While both political philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau contend that every individual should be free and no one should be forced to give his or her rights to a king, they propose radically different conceptions on how laws...

One way that Shakespeare uses structure to present the character of Juliet in Act 3 Scene 2 is by dedicating most of the lines in the scene to Juliet. In pervious scenes with just Juliet and the Nurse, Juliet has had less lines and has listened...

Hitchcock and Van Sant's “Psycho”s, in theory, should have accomplished the same, or at least very similar, enunciative effects. Van Sant said himself that he wanted to experiment by creating a near “shot for shot” remake, but the cinematic result...

Woman of Colour refutes Barbauld's idea in her Epistle to William Wilberforce that the mistreated and oppressed become viceful. Barbauld writes her epistle in the eighteenth century when former and current slaves were not considered whole people....

Vampire tales, Navajo mythology, and contemporary life in New Mexico, come together in Aaron Carr’s multifaceted, novel, Eye Killers, juxtaposing contemporary elements with the traditional. This juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary is...

Trey Edward Shults’ transcendent It Comes at Night opens with a startlingly brutal death. Bud, Sarah’s father and Paul’s father-in-law, has fallen ill and died from a mysterious disease ravaging the Earth. In fear of succumbing to the illness,...

Marxist philosophy believes that society views the world through a completely economic lens. Marxism dictates that society is separated into two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie utilizes ideology to suppress the...

Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel is an eloquent description of the futility of the American Dream, highlighting the anger, desperation, relentlessness and loneliness of the situation. Written in 1930, the start of the Great Depression, Dos Passos...

Expressionism is a term which refers specifically to an artist tendency that became popular in the early 20th century. Expressionism itself was not founded by a solo artist; instead it formed from the influence of other artistic movements, paired...

John Milton’s first encounter with death sent him reeling and kept him off balance for a long time. He found an escape in poetry, pouring out his confusion and frustration and sorrow in the now-famous poem Lycidas. The young Milton was struck with...

In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance tells of how he advanced from a hillbilly to a relatively wealthy author. From a family and culture of drug abuse and instability, Vance made his way to one of the country’s most elite law schools and...

In children’s literature, supernatural elements can be found throughout many novels and short stories. The definition of supernatural according to merriam-webster is “attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature”...

Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd features a young, caucasian girl, Lily, who lives with three African American sisters, the Boatwrights. The novel takes place in Sylvan and Tiburon, South Carolina during 1964: high time for the civil rights...

In Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy explores the theme of the self and she tells the story of her struggle to create a positive perception of herself in spite of the ridicule and bullying she endures because of her disfigured face, the result...

Throughout the novel Thérèse Raquin, it is apparent that Zola has chosen a particular light in which he wants the reader to view each of his characters. He did so with the theme and idea of naturalism with the focal points being temperaments and...

John Steinbeck incorporates disabilities within his stories with characters like Johnny Bear and Lennie Small from his works and “Johnny Bear” Of Mice and Men. Lennie from Of Mice and Men is a mentally handicapped giant of a man who has the very...

In the novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the character Lola experiences a traumatic event that changes the way she perceives herself in a strict Dominican society. At a young age, Lola discovers a tumor in her mother’s...

Roald Dahl and William Faulkner explore the curious connection between love and death through their tales of passion-induced murder. Dahl's "The Landlady" and Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" are remarkably similar, but diverge on key elements of the...

Scenes involving food and male characters from both Dee Rees’ Pariah (2011) and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) help to elaborate on and explain relationships that both Arthur (Charles Parnell) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) hold with other...