Newest Literature Essays

Fourteenth and fifteenth century England saw significant social changes in the rise of the merchant class, the expiration of feudalism, competition over nobility, and in the nation’s struggle to form a cohesive national identity and security. All...

"Insufficient facts always invite danger" declared Spock to Captain Kirk as the U.S.S. Enterprise was on deep alert after discovering a sleeper cell in space with seventy-two unconscious super-humans inside (Coon, 1967). His tone cautionary, Spock...

Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a story beloved my many, and Ichabod Crane is a highly debated character. Some believe he is merely a man that helped to tell the tale of the legendary Headless Horseman, and others see him as...

Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer depicts the constant tribulations of Yakov Bok during the pre-Russian Revolutionary era. The plot follows the life of Jewish repairman: Yakov Bok, in finding an occupation that will allow him to venture off into a world...

In ‘Daisy’, Alice Oswald uses the evolving imagery of a narrator considering her actions towards a daisy to symbolise the meekness and conformity socially linked to womanhood- and the poem’s progressively aggressive tone mirrors her desire to...

Throughout the collection Skirrid Hill (2005) by Owen Sheers, nature is presented as a significant factor to both the development of personal and cultural identity and to human relationships. In "Mametz Wood" and "Father", the speaker's attachment...

The Zahir is a kind of novel that helps the reader deeply understand what life is and what it has to offer to the loved, unloved, and the people helplessly searching for love. Although the word ‘love’ is repeated numerous times, the central theme,...

Humans are innately social creatures who group themselves together to satisfy their hierarchical need of belongingness. Within these groups, individuals find comfort in surrounding themselves with others who share similar beliefs, values,...

There is a reason people are afraid of the dark. For anyone who has ever seen a single horror movie, it is clear that when the lights go off the bad guys and monsters come out, and all one has to do to make them go back into hiding is turn the...

Following a foray into third-person omniscience in her second novel, Shirley, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette returns to the first-person narration for which Jane Eyre remains famous. Unlike that novel’s immediately vivid and feisty eponymous...

Is the cause of fate an attitude toward life, or is it the people or places one has known? Edith Wharton shows within her book, Ethan Frome, how choices determine one’s fate. Ethan Frome is a story about a man who marries a woman whom he does not...

Author and historian Barbara Tuchman said “Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.” In the German macabre novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer where, for author Patrick Suskind, The Third Reich, ''was for my generation...

At first glance, Flannery O’Connor’s work seems to begin and end with despair. In many of her works, she paradoxically uses styles that are grotesque and brutal to illustrate themes of grace and self-actualization. The use of violence returns her...

The works of Ernest Hemingway are often criticized by feminist critics because of the way he writes about women. Hemingway is often described as the “poster boy for archaic masculinity that many would love to see eradicated” (Haske). Many believe...

Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, Midaq Alley, is a story about a group of people living in an alley in Egypt in the 1940’s. Already, from that description, the reader can see that the women of this tale have a significant disadvantage in equality....

There is an astonishing relationship between “Exiles” (1914) by James Joyce and “The Story of An Hour” (1894) by Kate Chopin. They indeed share different themes - For the former, themes such as suffering, betrayals and personal freedom are...

Out of all of the poems written by Carl Sandburg, an early twentieth-century poet of the Imagist school, “Fog” may be his most famous. This may seem surprising; it’s a deceptively simple poem, only six lines long, with no real discernible meter or...

The River Between The novel by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, The River Between, tells the story of two tribes that hold very different beliefs central to themselves. However, though they agree on very little, there are still people that believe in peace and...

Strachey, in ‘Eminent Victorians’ reflects on the character of infamous historical heroine Florence Nightingale to cast the past lives of ordinary citizens, primarily women, as unsatisfactory and unfulfilling, and through this negative depiction...

Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, sets the foundation for most of his future works. According to the scholar Danielle A. St. Hilaire, throughout the whole play, Shakespeare uses quotes from Greek and Latin works of literature both to...

The opening of The Haunting of Hill House introduces three main elements of the book. In terms of mood, the first paragraph is intentionally vague, with ominous undertones which set the atmosphere for the book. The first line introduces many...

On the surface, it appears that the Underground Man is no more than Dostoevsky’s attempt of a fascinating and contradictory refutation of Chernyshevsky’s proposal of rational egoism as a solution to an emerging hyperconscious culture. Fascinating...

The poems under study are Neutral Tones ("NT") and I Look Into My Glass ("Glass"). Both poems focus on loss of a different kind: "Glass" expresses the loss of Hardy's youth; "NT" focuses on the death of Hardy's estranged wife, it grieves the loss...

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying tells the story of the Bundren family when the matriarch of the family dies. Faulkner alternates perspectives between each member of the family and their neighbors. While most characters focus on their thoughts...