Newest Literature Essays

J.M. Coetzee’s 1986 novel Foe recounts the adventures and aspirations of Susan Barton, a fictional young woman who finds herself cast away on a most unusual island with the stolid Cruso and his tongueless slave Friday. The novel’s beginning takes...

Amongst the ideas presented in the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples, the theme of isolation is prominent. Although Coleridge’s poem departs from Romantic stylistic tendencies, it exemplifies many...

Intrinsically tied to Native American culture is the concept of the journey. For millennia, the indigenous people of the Americans took part in nomadism and often journeyed across miles of rough and challenging terrain to reach their destination....

Post-colonialism is concerned with the effects of colonization on the colonized. In fact, Richard Schur argues “that there can be no simple escape from the effects race, racism, gender, and sexism without some sort of decolonization” (277). One...

In The God of Small Things, Roy’s main characters Estha and Rahel Eapen face many tragedies during their youth. The non-linear plot of Roy’s novel causes readers to piece together the story once you get to the end. Many times throughout the novel,...

The search for purpose has been an infamous struggle for people throughout history. When traveling on the journey of self-enlightenment, many people face obstacles that hinder their ability to determine who they really are. People may ostensibly...

Upon arrival in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel and his companions are shocked by unspeakable atrocities, and quickly are reduced to instinct. “We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted...

The Brontë sisters utilized particular spaces in their novels as places of transgression and feminine power, often allowing characters to transcend the confines of civil society, and to commune more closely with the natural world. In Jane Eyre, ...

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette revolves around the myriad cycles and seasons of life. Lucy Snowe traverses from place to place, witnessing different stages of life and yearning for her own fulfillment of elusive experiences. Lucy’s introspections...

“But man is not made for defeat…A man can be defeated but not destroyed”. These eternal lines from Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea reflect the strong Christian motif of hope and resurrection that is present as a strong undertone in the...

Traditional Gothic characteristics were originally exemplified by Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto. This text was the first novel of its kind to introduce, a suspenseful atmosphere, ancient prophecies, and metonymy of horror. Novels and stories...

Every coming out story must deal with the characters’ struggles of being in the closet. The stage of not yet being able to be open about one’s identity can be the most difficult and turbulent point in dealing with their queer identity. It is a...

Arthur Miller confronts the “weight of truth," "weight of authority," and the "weight of law" in The Crucible. This play expresses the different complications that come along with having to bear each "weight." Many characters in the play conform...

“If I decide to be indecisive, that’s my decision,” is a famous quote from one of the most prominent poets of the Mersey Sound era, Roger McGough. Since the vast majority of the poets from this era were very close friends and performed their works...

For the Ancient Greeks, the concept of love was divided into six different categories: in particular, eros represented the idea of sexual passion and desire. While current societies tend to glorify this variety of romantic love, Greek culture...

Prozac Nation chronicles a bright 19-year-old woman’s struggle with depression. Elizabeth “Lizzie” Wurtzel is an aspiring writer and freshman at Harvard University. With a childhood plagued by divorce and abandonment, Lizzie has a history of...

The poem “A City’s Death by Fire” by Derek Walcott is a semi-autobiographical poem, a recollection of the Great Fire of 1948 in Central Castries (the capital and largest city of St. Lucia). The Great Fire attacked three quarters of the town and...

As conceptualized by Luce Irigaray, notions of self-affective touch are present in, and in fact are immensely important to, Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. Irigaray conceives of touch as necessarily constituting tact, which calls...

Many people believe that total equality for any race, sex, or religion is worth the effort. Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” focuses on individuals’ greatest qualities and the altering of them to exceed the average standard. For...

Reading a Dostoevsky book doesn’t give us any insight into the mind of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky almost never makes a blanket statement in his books, and, in general, very few opinions voiced by characters in his novels can be traced back to...

Through his work, A Mad World, My Masters, Thomas Middleton challenges the viewer’s perspectives on adultery by portraying it as comical, rather than starkly reproachable. During the first four acts of A Mad World, My Masters, the play seems to...

One of the most universally acknowledged beliefs states that there is no bond as strong, forgiving, and irreplaceable as a mother’s love for her child. On the contrary, poet Seamus Heaney challenges this conviction throughout his poem “Bye-Child”...

Of the consequences of maintaining an obsessive nature, its ability to cloud rational judgements and encourage humanity to surrender to his darkest, innermost impulses serves as one of its most tragic aspects. Robert Browning explores this concept...

Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner claim, is a newly invented field of study that address the unexpected questions that others fail to explore. As a result, their book discusses and relates a variety of strange yet important topics,...