Newest Literature Essays

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...

Although created in different eras, Oscar Wilde’s 1980 gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Damien Chazelle’s 2014 drama film Whiplash are comparable in the exploration of obsession, destruction and control by the text’s creators. Chazelle...

The tale of “Beauty and the Beast” is one of the best-loved and most persistent fairy tales in modern culture. Its universal appeal is due to its endearing message of ‘true love’ and the idea that ‘beauty is found within’. However the concept of...

One of the few illustrations depicting both the spendthrifts and the self-murders of The Divine Comedy: Inferno’s “Canto XIII” is Gustave Doré’s print entitled Spendthrifts Running Through the Wood of the Suicides. This work includes not only the...

Matigari by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o follows the eponymous hero in his search for truth and justice for his oppressed kinsmen, from the moment he puts down his arms to when another freedom fighter takes them up. The narrative is almost cyclical, and this...

Writing from the late 1880s to the dawn of modern Ireland in the first two decades of the 20th century, Yeats and Synge penned their works during a period of national liminality; or what critic Seamus Deane refers to as “the long process of its...

For many stories, the meaning changes drastically when read through different lenses. Looking at the context in which Thucydides writes might lead one to see it as a warning to the Athenians not to repeat the mistakes of the past, while looking at...

When the Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End descend over mankind, humanity is immediately awestruck and completely humbled by their scientific and technological prowess. As the Overlords become more active in human society and...

Suzan-Lori Parks once explained that her play Topdog/Underdog “isn’t just confined to a man’s experience,” furthermore, “I think it’s about what it means to be family and, in the biggest sense, the family of man, what it means to be connected with...

Through their choice of textual form and features, authors subjectively represent their views on the connection between people and landscapes. This is exemplary of Alain De Botton’s postmodern, multimodal text “The Art of Travel” (2002) which...

“Once upon a time, someone decided that we were the losers. But there are two sides to every story. And our side has not been told!” says Prince Charming to a room full of “villains” who are left to rot after their adversaries were given “happily...

T.S Eliot's The Waste Land begins with a latin epigraph that refers to the story of the prophetess to Apollo, Sibyl of Cumae. Apollo wanted to take the prophetess as his lover and offered her anything she wanted in return. Sibyl asked to live as...

The legends of Coyote go back hundreds of years, finding their beginnings in ancient Native American roots. In fact, the tales of Coyote have no real origin; many American Indian tribes have their own perspective of him. However, one of the most...

J.D. Salinger's novel Franny and Zooey features various members of the Glass Family, and, while the two stories were originally published independently, one cannot ignore their combined significance. Seven years after the suicide of their eldest...

In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, a variety of allusions to other works of literature arise, suggesting to the adept reader their significance to the plot and in our understanding of many characters and themes. Two books of special...

In “Cape Breton,” Elizabeth Bishop describes a landscape for the rigid cliffs and water that compose it, but also for its representation on a grander scale. The landscape is a representation of the peaceful world and how it is inevitably...

The climax of Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire occurs in “Scene Ten,” when Stanley ultimately rapes Blanche, his sister-in-law. Many audiences and readers have debated whether or not this act was premeditated or done impulsively, as to...

Both C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea tackle the idea of the child-protagonists having to go on a type of journey to defeat their respective foes and partaking in a search for their...

When it comes to works of fiction, it is always most interesting to see where the author draws inspiration for the major characters from and what the underlying message of the story at hand. Disillusioned from faith as a child, C. S. Lewis would...