Newest Literature Essays

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...

The graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is a bildungsroman, a novel that deals with the coming-of-age of the protagonist which happens to be the author herself. Marjane develops from an ignorant child to a mature adult as she struggles...

In Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, navigating the American establishment as an African immigrant is a constant struggle for Ifemelu and others like her. Ifemelu soon starts to experience that the power in America is held not by the few,...

In Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, the blank white space occupies more area than all of the black text and pictures combined. As a relatively short American Lyric, one must assume that this half of the book – the parts where nothing is said – has great...

Pope Francis said, “He -Jesus- does not stand a safe distance and does not act by delegating, but places himself in direct contact with out contagion”. In this quote, Pope Francis notes how Jesus selflessly gets directly involved in the earthly...

Aravind Adiga adopts an epistolary form in The White Tiger, depicting the plight of a low caste servant, trying to escape the physical and mental chains that forge his destiny. Adiga initially presents a protagonist in Balram, who is engaging,...

For characters in The Great Gatsby, rendering delusive illusions of one’s self may be fundamental to climbing social hierarchy, but compromising the tension between their painted picture and concealed canvas may be internally agonizing. From the...