Newest Literature Essays

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and Identity and Intercultural Communication by Judith Martin and Thomas Nakayama are both concerned with identity and the effect it can have on the way someone’s life turns out. While Jesus’ Son is a book of short...

Russ’ The Female Man is a key text of feminist science fiction. Writing in response to Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Russ explores “gender, Utopia and the divided self” (xii) in her convoluted narrative that spans multiple...

If the Iliad were a simple war narrative with a clear bias towards the protagonist's side, Sarpedon would be portrayed as a two-dimensional enemy soldier who dies during the action. However, the Iliad is no such story. Complex and intensely human...

It is clear that William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece examines the psychological effects of rape. However, what is less clear is the effects of power that this poem portrays and how it interacts with sexual violence. Power plays a crucial...

In The Visit, by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the fictional town of Güllen is turned on its head by the proposal of immense wealth from benefactress Claire Zachanassian, who returns to her hometown for a visit. However, in order to receive this money,...

Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, published in 2009, received critical acclaim upon its release and it remained number one on the New York Times bestseller list for a year. By the time the 2011 film adaptation of the book went to theaters, The Help had...

‘The Tollund Man’, as is his ‘sad freedom’, seems tellingly paradoxical in death – ‘naked’ and exposed, yet somehow venerated as a ‘trove’ and a ‘bridegroom to the goddess’. He is destroyed, but elevated as a sacred symbol of serenity after this...

The universal image of childhood that is ‘rang[ing]’ frogspawn on ‘window-sills’, ‘wait[ing] and watch[ing]’, with a fervent curiosity and admiration, until the ‘fattening dots’ dynamically metamorphose into ‘nimble swimming tadpoles’ is one, very...

In ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, Heaney presents the reader with a stark image; the ‘broken wave’ that ‘soak[s]’ the ‘hillside’. The ‘broken wave’ evokes a sense of an anti-climax, as a wave may gather momentum, reach its peak, and eventually roll...

‘Funeral Rites’ examines the role of rituals and ‘customary rhythms’ in the ‘arbitration of the feud’ in an Ireland plagued by the incongruous notion of ‘neighbourly murder’. However, in preference to the sterility of ‘tainted rooms’ in which the...

Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mid Term Break’ and ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’ lament needless violence, as well as the one-dimensional and euphemistic way with which general society deals with the loss of innocent, pure lives, whether it be a personal...

In Jane Campion’s ‘The Piano’, scenes 112 to 118 depict Flora’s betrayal of her mother, Ada, as she takes the piano key intended for her clandestine lover Baines, instead to Ada’s husband, Stewart. This betrayal subsequently results in Stewart...

In elucidating a strong sense of time’s passing in ‘Persuasion’, Austen evokes the seething pain and angst that Elizabeth’s approach to ‘the years of danger’ affords in an era in which marriage and status were ultimately keystones of a successful...

The honest and compelling transformation of a simple flower girl from a disempowered ‘draggle-tailed guttersnipe’ to a ‘fierce’ woman who demands what she ‘want[s]’ and feistily laments the loss of her ‘independence’ is emblematic of the laudable...

In Jane Campion’s dramatic and societally informative film ‘The Piano’, scenes 112-119 are key in conveying Campion’s messages around the restrained society depicted in the mid-19th century era in which the film is set. These scenes act as the...

George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ is a play that is scathing in its attack on the pruderies, hypocrisies and inconsistencies of higher society in early 20th century London. Through the transformation of Eliza Doolittle, Shaw reveals to the...

It is within human nature that we find ourselves striving for something more for someone we love. The drive for the love and beauty of a relationship comes from the environment that molds who one becomes and what they strive for. In Hondo, by...

M. T. Anderson’s Feed offers poignant criticism on the technology and its apparent benefits. In a futuristic dystopia, seventy percent of humanity are embedded with the “feed”—a high-tech device which essentially acts as phone and a computer....

Many science fiction stories feature aliens, especially the interaction between humans and the extraterrestrials. These interactions from range from one-on-one encounters to merely experiencing the aliens’ culture from afar. No matter the nature...

A name is an intrinsic characteristic of an object: that is, a name represents the object and explains it most implicitly. This is the reason why people tell their names first when they introduce themselves, get little bit upset when their names...

The literary critics Alexander Pope and Immanuel Kant put critics to the test as they perform the task of critiquing critiques. In Pope’s Essay on Criticism, he provides the readers and critics with critique of critics in poetry form which in...

The true meaning of the phrase “the American Dream” is a topic that could be debated by Americans all across the country. For some, it is accomplishing the goals they set for themselves as children or teenagers. For others, it is simply being the...

Aura is a novel that explores the corporeality of aging, the eternal nature of desire and the struggle against mortality. What strikes the reader from the outset is the second person narrative in the present tense, a stylistic choice that is known...

For thousands of years, history has been kept alive through the written word; me and women of virtue, in particular, have recorded social struggles so that future generations can know about the events that transpired over the course of their...