Newest Literature Essays

The turn of the 19th century was a morbid, dark time period: death was a common visitor, as plagues and diseases diminished the children, and the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars diminished the overall population. In response to such loss,...

Created in the Victorian epoch, Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield is one of his most famous masterpieces scrutinizing how a person transits from childhood to adulthood. On the example of the protagonist, the author explores different...

Ambiguity is present within every language as every word can be interpreted slightly differently. In literature, complex ideas are often indirectly depicted through the use of metaphors and symbols. Likewise, images also possess a sense of...

To the heedless reader, Dante’s Inferno and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are generally interpreted as mere works of fiction designed and created for the sole purpose of entertainment. To fully glean the authors’ intended message, though, one...

Gender and economics were no less intertwined during the eighteenth century than they are today. In the world of emerging paper currency and capitalism, many issues were coming to light for the first time, and so it comes as little surprise that...

Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy illustrates in beautiful and haunting prose the oppression black citizens of South Africa faced in the years preceding apartheid. The country’s white minority imposed its power over black South Africans in several ways,...

As a popular and widely loved novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and, Through the looking Glass and What Alice Found There has been translated to well over a hundred languages and is a household tale that most people have enjoyed in their...

Arthur Miller’s allegorical play, The Crucible, illustrates the parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and the HUAC communist crisis, highlighting the injustice of McCarthyism. Alternatively, Geraldine Brooks intertextually takes a cue from the...

T.S. Eliot once said that Titus Andronicus "is one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written, a play in which it is incredible that Shakespeare had any hand at all." This was an amusing choice of words on Eliot’s part, as one of the...

Composers represent the ultimate powerlessness of ordinary people through the ways in which they explore the complex and dynamic relationship between people and politics. Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” written in a communist fearing period...

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, humanity was beginning to discover and explore the connections and differences between the mind and the body, the body and the soul, the body and the surrounding world. It was during this period...

Scottish novelist James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner opens with a narrative by an unknown editor describing the Colwan family and the feud between the Colwan brothers, Robert, later known as Robert Wringhim, and...

Virgil’s Aeneid is one of the seminal works of the antiquity which offers us a lens into the life and art of ancient Romans in the era of 1 BC – the year the epic was written. A reading of the epic shows that Virgil’s attitude towards fact and...

J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World is a three-act play which follows Christy Mahon’s escape to a rural community of Western Ireland after striking and presumably killing his father. In the small Mayo village, authority presents itself...

Born in New York City in 1930, Gregory Corso became one of the leading voices of the beat movement. In his signature works, there are the wild thoughts of Gregory Corso himself, flowing out of his head. Having a conversation with himself, coming...

In the novel Paradise of the Blind, Duong Thu Huong tells the story of Hang, a native Vietnamese girl, following the establishment of independence in Vietnam and the imposition of Communism. Vietnam, with a historical background of invasion by...

From the beginning of Metropolis, there is a stark divide between the upper class and the working people. We see working people walk like soldier into huge elevators, heads hanging in clear misery, descending into what we can only assume is their...

Consumer culture has been discussed by many authors and philosophers as long as the human race has been consuming. Consumerism is often referred to as a negative force in society, specifically in the United States, due to America’s image of...

French author Marcel Proust once stated “Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.” What this quote means is that while names merely are words, they hold...

Hilda “H.D” Doolittle uses heavily-allusive imagist poetry to redefine gender-roles and contradict the characterization of women as delicate and fragile. H.D pulls from ancient Greek literature to write strong not-traditionally-feminine women into...

In Barbara Ehrenreich's investigative memoir Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Ehrenreich herself attempts to investigate whether minimum wage is truly a livable wage by taking up low-paying work in three different locations across...

The idea of romantic love being presented as invariably negative in 19th century literature is questionable to some extent. Romantic love is often characterised as being damaging and hurtful in Rossetti’s poetry through the contrast with divine...

Societies are formed by a mixture of several cultures and people from different countries, as well as cultural backgrounds. But in some cases, the unity of society gives way to culturally hybrid societies that causes identity problem and creates...

The Renaissance Era was a period when theatre, among other forms of art, bloomed in its adolescence, as it outgrew old, traditional characteristics of the Middle Ages, and gradually evolved into what would later become known as modern history....