Newest Literature Essays

In the poem “The Bean Eaters”, Gwendolyn Brooks illustrates the image of a simple elderly couple, whose lives have become rather mundane and routine. The first two stanzas in the poem serve as the exposition of the story, as Brooks paints a...

In her essays “That Crafty Feeling,” “F. Kafka, Everyman,” and “The Rise of the Essay,” Zadie Smith writes about the universal experience of writing using her own personal experience as the standard writing experience. Smith completely blends...

Among many of the themes in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, one of the most prominent is the theme of suffering. Arguably, suffering is one of the largest themes within all of Dostoevsky’s works, particularly because of the difficulty and hardship...

Anthem by Ayn Rand encourages readers to delve into the possibilities of a society devoid of human characteristics. The story is based in a society that worships collectivism, causing everyone to be the same, and raised as if they were livestock....

Thomas Hobbes concludes his great treatise on politics, Leviathan, saying he composed the work “without partiality, without application, and without other design than to set before men’s eyes the mutual relation between protection and obedience,...

In response to the horrors of World War I, the modernism movement rose and rejected previous movements like romanticism. Alienation, fragmentation, and shell shock influenced modernist writers to create complex characters, stream of consciousness,...

“And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli’s first adult oath, one that would follow her to the states and beyond. I will not serve. Never again would she follow any lead other than her own. Not the rector’s, not the nuns’, not La...

Throughout history, every generation sees its fair share of change and innovation, but when James Joyce first made his literary debut with Dubliners, shortly after the turn of the 20th century, change was occurring with a rapidity never before...

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, family becomes the central theme that shapes the world in the novel. A reader follows the story of the single-parent family: the father and his son travel across the post-apocalyptic land and fight for their...

Setting is extremely important in Gothic literature: after all, setting really is the foundation of the story and can make or break the atmosphere the author tries to create. The same is true of film, and Psycho’s most used setting is arguably the...

Mark Romanek explores the difficult choices that people make when faced with death in his film Never Let Me Go (2010). He explores the raw human emotions of jealousy and forgiveness through the characterisation of Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Kathy...

Whether it be getting a cold or losing a loved one, suffering is something everyone will experience. Ironically, suffering is one of the main reasons we have happiness; although we suffer, eventually our pain will be resolved. Many stories have...

Set in a dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, Blade Runner follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), an ex-policeman brought out of retirement to eliminate a group of renegade replicants who have illegally arrived on Earth. During this anti-hero’s quest, he...

Virginia Woolf’s revolutionary novel To the Lighthouse provides an incredibly in-depth psychological study of its many characters. Family and friends pass through the Ramsay’s summer home in the Hebrides, all of whom carry characteristics,...

Browning’s dramatic monologues Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess critique Victorian society’s restrictive patriarchal values which suppressed a female’s endeavors for individualism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House condemns the pretense...

In the novel Watership Down, Hazel, leader of the Sandleford Warren escaped rabbits, demonstrates many ways in which he is similar to the bunny-famous mythological hero “El-ahrairah”. To rabbit-kind, El-ahrairah is a rolemodel, a leader and an...

American culture has a notoriously rapid pace and obvious state of exhaustion which accompanies an overexertion of the mind, body, and spirit of a person. In this hustle and bustle it becomes easy to lose sight of the ideals set for happiness and...

The Lambert family, the protagonists of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, view the world through a lens which attaches monetary value to people, objects, and actions. Money is a constant presence in their lives, whether there’s plenty or not...

Charlotte Brontë’s novel, “Shirley” was written in 1849. Although this novel is secondary in both quality and popularity, it addresses many social issues and dilemmas of Bronte’s time period, such as business, religion, and most importantly the...

Often, the elements of the mind and past developments play a key role in understanding events and writings. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe crafts tales that reveal the inner cravings that...

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a groundbreaking piece of literature in which an audience is able to experience an autobiographical piece unlike any other. Through the illustrations in this graphic novel as well as the utterly human words and...

In Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, Christian Linden (or Linde) must give up her own life to provide for her mother and younger brothers, and finds herself a newfound freedom once widowed. However, Ms.Linden is unhappy having no family to work...

Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic weaves together history and fiction to create an extremely personalized account of actual events. Two of these stories, that of Frederick Douglass coupled with those of Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown, are particularly...

One of the major themes of The Merry Wives of Windsor is the change in gender roles that was happening in Shakespeare’s time. Gender roles were changing to allow women more freedom and power. In the play, men are depicted as fools, delusional,...