Newest Literature Essays

The conflict between good and evil is a prevalent theme in literature. Graham Greene incorporates the conflict throughout the text of his novel Brighton Rock. In order to do this he uses two prominent characters, Ida Arnold and Pinkie Brown. Ida...

The act of revisiting the past is akin to responding to the texts that exist there in a particular culture. Since this culture is ever evolving, so is the understanding of the text. The socio-cultural changes that are brought with time lead one to...

Despite the varying contexts with which they wrote their work, as well as the vastly different tone and content, both Chaucer in ‘The Merchants Tale’ and Webster through ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ explore the theme of forbidden love- or forbidden...

Thomas Keneally’s 1987 novel The Playmaker follows the career and personal life of Ralph Clark, a British lieutenant (and prospective playmaker) recently relocated to penal Australia. The storyline is based loosely on true events of the late...

George Farquhar’s 1706 play The Recruiting Officer delves into the careers and personal antics of a male ensemble cast in Restoration era Shropshire. Among these men are the two competing officers Plume and Brazen, the tough Sergeant Kite, and the...

The critical necessity for mutability as part of the human condition, and the risks associated with lack of comprehension of it are exhibited and scrutinized closely in George Orwell’s novel Coming Up For Air, his ante-penultimate novel, and Of...

Throughout Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos and Luis Buñuel Los olvidados, it is apparent that the overall sense of unease, horror and despair are ingrained within the ambiences of each of these films, with the backdrop of the city playing a vital role...

The Romantics sought to distinguish their work from the Enlightenment Era’s prioritisation of logic and reason by rejecting and, in effect, redefining literary convention. Coleridge’s conversation poems are considered hallmarks of Romanticism for...

Don Pedro is a very important character within Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare, both within his own right and in terms of how he draws Shakespeare's other characters together. Often referred to as “the Prince” from Aragon (“No Fear”...

The novels Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Moby Dick by Herman Melville feature two uniquely different characters who similarly strive for fulfillment amidst uncertainty and danger, completely devoid of moral qualms about extremities taken...

Is being an intellectual dangerous? If having more knowledge than another person can cause trouble in 2014, then exceptional intelligence certainly brought even more risks to its bearer in Flannery O’Connor’s society. O’Connor, one of the most...

In September of 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published directly to alarm the public of the harmfulness of chemical pesticides. Those pesticides include DDT, dieldrin, chlordane, and more that were being used by a way of aerial...

In her work, “To Name is to Possess”, the author, Jamaica Kincaid, vilifies the possessive mentality that has captured human minds for centuries. While disparaging this class of conquerors, Kincaid connects human conquest to our dominant...

One can argue that The Sixties began with the end of World War II. After all, life was never quite the same again for people all over the world after the war. A new world had emerged: a scary world where millions of people had just died from...

Poetry has many legs that take readers places and forces them to see things in different perspectives. Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Allowables” articulates subliminal meanings that revolve around the death of a spider. This poem illustrates someone...

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is heralded as a science fiction classic. The winner of several science fiction awards, Heinlein’s novel explores the spiritual journey of Valentine Michael Smith, a Martian who is brought to Earth and...

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, there is an undeniable chemistry between the two main characters, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. While some may see this relationship as just a strong friendship, there is evidence to believe that...

In Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, both protagonists face difficult, if not deadly, circumstances. Liubóv Andréyevna Ranyévskaya, a self-indulgent member of the declining Russian...

In a literary text, imagery enables the author to appeal to human senses through the use of vivid and descriptive language. Kurt Vonnegut incorporates this rhetorical device throughout the text of his novel Slaughterhouse Five, through the use of...

Many people, especially Southerners, willingly deceive themselves when referring to race relations or the way we remember the past by voicing their opinions in the form of “It was not that bad during segregation” or “The Civil War was fought over...

Aristotle dedicates the first book of Politics to discuss households, and argues that to study the larger political community of a city-state, we need to first examine households as its building blocks (Politics, 5). The three major household...

Literature can be viewed as a manifestation of the context it is composed in, whilst retaining universal elements such as the human experience. Whilst human emotions such as jealousy remain universal despite context, attitudes and values must be...

Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road unveils the emptiness of suburban life by incorporating a play into the opening paragraphs and then continuing a metaphor of theater throughout the rest of the novel. The novel opens with theatrical failure that...

In his critically acclaimed collection North, contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney reveals a very personal side of himself and of his identity as a writer. Although each individual poem explores its own storyline and employs its own metaphors,...