Newest Literature Essays

Melancholy leaves an engraving on the individuals who encounter it. Some can survive its profound distress, others can't. In the Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, she investigates the impact of distress on the primary characters. The novel...

Okonkwo is a character in Chinua Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart” who attempts to conform outwardly while questioning inwardly, although he definitely might not appear to be at first glance. Okonkwo’s inner conflict caused by the tensions of...

Celie has been a victim of female oppression throughout her life, never believing in herself, and living in fear of men. However, when Shug Avery enters her life, Celie’s quality of life starts to improve on the whole, and her newfound self-belief...

According to Joseph Cummins, a researcher on teenage rebellion in the 50’s and 60’s, in 1946, 3.4 million babies were born in the U.S, which is more than ever before. This was followed by 3.8 million in 1947. After 1954 4 million babies were born...

The theme of color is very broad, and reaches strands out to many different emotions and feeling of Alice Walker's The Color Purple such as sadness, desire and hope. Color also is central to the society that the novel is set in – the color of your...

In 1925, American author Anzia Yezierska wrote the book Bread Givers. The story follows a poor immigrant family living in the lower east side of 1920’s New York. Throughout the novel, the family’s four daughters are treated merely as wage-earners...

Unlike the spectacle and indiscriminate destruction of early disaster films, modern disaster films take a more personal and internalized look at disaster. Films from the golden age of disaster, like Guillermin’s The Towering Inferno, set the...

In his “Review of Twice Told Tales,” Edgar Allan Poe argues the superiority of the short story form. In doing so, Poe compares the short story to the poem and novel, speaking about the features of the short story which make it better than other...

Beckett condemns humanity that’s ailing from positive schizophrenic disorder, whereby the symptoms are hallucinations and delusions. The protagonists are in a treacherous illusion that their “personal god” (30) can resolve their existential crisis...

Ian McEwan’s controversial, macabre bildungsroman, ‘The Cement Garden’, and Arthur Miller’s Ibsen-inspired domestic tragedy, “All My Sons”, both profoundly explore societal and familial demands and expectations laid upon men in these epochs-1946...

Dalit literature, to which "The Life We Live" belongs, is essentially a type of Indian literature that voices the angst of the subaltern in India. The works of Dalit Literature are known for their stark portrayal of reality. They depart from the...

Thomas More’s Utopia involves circumlocutory ways of distanciating the author’s self from Hythlodaeus’s delineation of the exemplary city. More wanted not only to obfuscate his agency as the author, but also lend a unique credibility to the...

Through the overcoming of past obstacles, a journey may be a catalyst towards the broadening of one’s understanding of the world. Gwen Harwood’s poem Father and Child explore new understandings of mortality engendered by a transformed perspective,...

“Live or die, but don’t poison everything”. These words were said by Anne Sexton, a 20th century poet, whose poems dealt with the complexities of her tragic personal life, including the dysfunctional and often disturbing relationships with her...

The MaddAddam series by Margaret Atwood can best be described as a commentary on every aspect of society. One of the most prevalent themes in Atwood’s series is religion, which is apparent in the names she assigns to different aspects of her...

Charlotte Smith’s late poem ‘Ode to Death’, published in 1797 in her collection of Elegiac Sonnets, draws on the idea of accepting death as a ‘friend’ (l.1) rather than fearing it. The ode carries a deep sense of desperation and sorrow, as it...

Judith Plaskow is one of the leading scholars of feminist theology. Her book, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, was the first book of Jewish feminist theology ever written.[1] She has also written an additional book, a...

The Tin Flute by Gabriel Roy is a Canadian fiction set up in the early 1940’s during the Second World War when Canada was going through the great depression. The book revolves around characters who strive to find romance, alleviate poverty and...

Tennessee Williams’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire, illustrates the struggle of power between economic classes and the changes taking place in America at that time, regarding social status. The constant tension between Blanche and Stanley...

The genre of the detective story is one of the most remarkable categories of short fiction. The Sherlock Holmes stories are genuine masterpieces created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the usage of the detective stories elements has contributed to...

Throughout the novel Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, Paton uses suffering and the quest for the son together to add to the tragic framework of the novel. Paton uses suffering, an element derived from Greek tragedy in which the main...

Perhaps the most iconic scene in Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) begins at 11:38. When Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) and going to meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) to spend the evening together, and Catherine excites the scene...

Upon entering the United States, the Statue of Liberty welcomes incomers with “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, / Send these, the homeless, tempest tost...