Newest Literature Essays

“Bearded Barley” is a poem written by Tacoma Community College professor Allen Braden. The speaker of this poem is an observer, and the audience is commoners or those who under-appreciate the barley plant. The poem goes into detail about the plant...

According to the Dalai Lama, “all religions try to benefit people, with the same basic message of the need for love and compassion, for justice and honesty, for contentment.” The need for love, compassion, justice, honesty, and most of all...

Throughout Blood River, the Congo is presented as a place of immense wild natural beauty, but to a point that it is intimidating, and dangerous. Butcher describes it as a place that corrupts men, and a place in which there is always a battle...

The corruption of innocence and the gaining of experience are common aspects of Carter’s stories in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, which are applied to many themes such as sexuality in The Tiger’s Bride and The Bloody Chamber, self-awareness in Wolf-Alice...

Even from the humble beginnings of modern Western society, the wilderness has gripped the collective imagination of Americans. Through Manifest Destiny and, more recently, expansion into the American Northwest, modern minds have been captured by...

In Carmen Laforet’s Nada, the orphan Andrea arrives in Barcelona full of optimism about her new life in the city. Many critics claim that the novel is a ‘bildungsroman’, a coming-of-age story where the protagonist, an adolescent, matures into...

The deliberate manipulation of textual form definitively reveals the significance of people’s experiences of landscape in shaping individual identity and the values of social groups. Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn, a unique blend of historical...

Faith has always played a role in human society. Some put their faith in a divine being, while others put their faith in more physical things. In the historical fiction novel A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines, a reader can see the...

In Medieval times, women were usually forced to be dependent on a man for her safety, prosperity, and guidance. Yet, in Marie de France’s fictional tales of courtly love, men are in fact victims to women’s charm. Men are unable to live without...

In a society where the purity of fact is venerated largely by the vilification of bias, and subsequently defended by the equation of bias with fiction and fiction with falsehood, the attention of an audience is held only through a taxing balance...

Survival in Auschwitz is a memoir written by Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who was sent to and worked in the Auschwitz-Monowitz labor camp during the later years of World War II. Levi’s memoir is significant for its...

In the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, after two failed attempts at seducing Gawain, Lady Bertilak grants the knight a gift in response to his disinterest and inability to give her a keepsake of any sort. As Gawain refuses the gift...

Within Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “Young Goodman Brown,” the presence of laughter is used repeatedly across both narratives, often for dramatic effect, showcasing the act’s many facets and qualities. Most...

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the titular ruler undergoes multiple trials in his wish to pass the kingdom on to his three daughters and their betrotheds. After the disownment and banishment of his youngest daughter Cordelia, Lear’s elder daughters...

Homer’s Iliad tells the tale of how Achilleus, the all-powerful warrior of the Achaian army, turned the tides of the Trojan War following a dispute with Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae. While this story does not serve as a telling of the...

The Aeneid by the Roman author Virgil is an epic poem that tells the tale of the Trojan prince Aeneas’ journey to Italy and the eventual founding of Rome following the events of the Trojan War. This epic is often compared with two well-known...

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn share a number of parallels in terms of character and setting, namely between Edna Pontellier and Huck and Jim, and the significance of the sea and river to the...

In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Richard Gloucester is portrayed as a twisted, calculating, and conniving individual who will stop at nothing to obtain the crown. From betraying his brother George to wooing the widowed Lady Anne, Richard is highly...

Ernest Hemingway remembers his time in Paris fondly in his memoir A Moveable Feast. The book tells about his writing process and other fond memories in Paris with his wife, Hadley. Hemingway often refers to Hadley strictly as his wife, but he...

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury is the story of Douglas Spaulding during the summer of 1928. Douglas realizes he is alive in the beginning of the book, and this experience shapes how he views the rest of the summer. As the audience continues to...

Racial discrimination represents an issue which damages the foundation of any civilized society – it turns people against each other and has no basis except ignorance and thirst for power. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” approaches this problem...

Within any system of oppression, the oppressed, once they realize their treatment is a type of oppression, oftentimes have the impulse to resist. This resistance, sometimes exceptionally dangerous, often bucked by popular opinion and those who...

Since feudal times, class has played a distinctly formative role within social structure in England. Whether a person resided within the upper class, middle class, or lower class could determine political influence, economic success, and social...