Newest Literature Essays

While Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is, for the most part, a heroic poem about a heroic knight who resists temptation, the story also has an interesting dialogue on sexuality interwoven in its lines. From King Arthur’s “ebullience” (line 86) all...

‘Some religious texts seem to find it relatively easy to disengage from the material world. Many more, however, derive their dynamism from the difficulty of doing so.’

‘Behold not the earth, but lift your eye up’, [30] Mercy sermonizes in the...

A dream, as we conceive of it in modern thought, is considerably different to the dreams which featured in Middle English dream vision poetry. Where today we might generally think of one’s dreams as an abstract, introspective reflection of...

Gina Berriault’s “The Stone Boy” follows the story of a young boy facing the aftermath of a terrible accident and trying to understand his responsibility in the matter. When Arnold does not respond emotionally, the adults’ false assumptions...

Shakespearian comedies often address the widely-accepted notion in Elizabethan England that suggested that order and balance should prevail both in the world and in performed representations of the world, even if the form of the plays often...

The feminist reader would enjoy Lucrezia Marinella’s The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, written in 1600. In her work, Marinella ridicules men’s arguments for the defects and vices of women by making equally...

The Victorian depiction of the masculine is divided by not only class factors but also by degrees of gender conformity and morality, it is this conformity and morality that shapes the role of the masculine narrative in Victorian literature. In...

‘Qhua wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?/Nor I wait nocht gif this narratioun/Be authoreist’.

In his Testament for Cresseid, inspired by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Henryson’s narrator presents an almost immediate challenge to the...

In Dr. William Harris’s Carnival of Psyche: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, an analysis of Rhys’s 1966 postmodern “prequel” to Jane Eyre, Harris attempts to evaluate the significance of “intuitive myth” on the novel’s psyche. “Attempt,” however, is...

Equus and Gattaca correspond in their development of similar ideas surrounding the societal and behavioral connections between power and control, although Shaffer and Niccol differ in their approach to these concepts through filmic and theatrical...

Sexism is, at its core, a product of gender roles. In the early twentieth century, discrimination against women through the overt use of gender roles was highly prevalent amongst men and women. In a patriarchal society, women are expected to...

How fragile is identity? “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys challenges this question through the eyes of two characters, Antionette Cosway and Edward Rochester. Set in post-emancipation Jamaica, the novel follows the story of young Antionette, a...

There is a common symbol found throughout ancient culture, the triumvirate. From the Christian Holy Trinity, the Islamic Wudu and Salat, the First Triumvirate of Rome, etc., the number three is important. This matters to us why? Because in...

Afghanistan translates to “Land of the Afghans” and is a nation with a strong culture, including diverse subcultures and Islamic traditions. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is the story of a young boy, Amir. He lives in an affluent neighborhood...

How often does the average person hear the truth about war? See the destruction and lives it takes? Does the media show the bodies lying on the roads lifeless and dismembered? Or is it only those who fight the wars and are on the frontlines that...

In Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 science fiction, dystopian novel Station Eleven, a majority of the world is deceased due to the Georgia-flu pandemic spread unknowingly by a passenger on a flight from Russia to The United States causing an...

Gender studies is the interdisciplinary study based around ideas of the masculine and feminine. It also looks at sexual differences and the more fluid definitions of gender which have arisen over time. This theory can also be broken down into...

Social hierarchy is a civilization's categorization of people into ranks of political power and social influence based upon factors such as one’s occupation, wealth, and social prestige (Oxford). The Arabian Nights: One Thousand and One Nights is...

Leslie Marmon Silko’s poem, “Ceremony,” is a prime example of how poetry, even simpler to understand ones, can be productive. The poem is productive because it conveys a message: stories are powerful. The message a poem conveys can be used justly,...

Poetry, as a genre of literature, is broadly defined as “The art or work of a poet”, or “Imaginative or creative literature in general” (Oxford English Dictionary). With a definition so broad in context, poets are able to conceive their own...

Throughout the middle ages, “romance” was the genre that dominated the market. However, as time progressed, the genre of romance began to alter, essentially changing into something different altogether. This alteration in genre shifted to what the...

In the essay Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown, Virginia Woolf proclaims that human character changed around the year 1910, a statement that serves as the jumping off point for her insights into the modernist movement. Much of her later writing explores...

The Divine Comedy: Inferno’s “Canto XV” begins with the reader joining Dante pilgrim and Virgil as they exit the wood of the suicides on their way to the third ring of the seventh circle of hell: the burning sands. This is where the blasphemers,...

In Doris Lessing’s short story, “To Room Nineteen” Susan and Matthew Rawling seem to be the perfect couple, until Matthew begins to have affairs and Susan is left alone to her own thoughts and eventually goes mad and kills herself. An underlying...