Newest Literature Essays

Culture perceives ghosts as apparitions that appear in the dark to petrify the living. Adichie’s interpretation of ghosts, however, transcends the literal. In “Ghosts,” true phantoms are the memories that haunt us. James’ past trauma festers as...

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem "In Mrs Tilscher’s Class" expresses the poetic speaker's love for literature in the context of an intriguing personal narrative. Such a passion came from her primary school teacher as Duffy's protagonist grows into adulthood...

Today, the social structure and class turns highly fragmented based on the socioeconomic background of people. For instance, people who live in high-end suburbs in America cities are found upper-classes and those who live in cities with crumbling...

In J.M Coetzee’s Age of Iron, Mrs Elizabeth Curren recounts the life-altering events of her last days battling cancer in a letter to her estranged daughter. The novel is set in Cape Town, South Africa in 1986-89 - a time of division, injustice and...

How is it possible that the actions of a single institution can completely decimate the physical and societal structure of an entire town? In Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, this situation comes to pass in Salem, Massachusetts during the 1690’...

The 1,001 Nights, also known as Arabian Nights, has frequently and loudly been lauded as the quintessential storytelling experience. Although the actual number of tales varies by edition, there seems to be little doubt that not only are the...

Lust is defined as ‘a passionate desire for something’ although often associated with sex; lust can also be directed towards power and control. Isabel Allende’s novel The House of The Spirits unfolds in Latin America and follows the complex lives...

Emily Dickinson's 'A Bird came Down the Walk' and Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'To a Skylark' both utilise the bird as a symbol of nature, with Dickinson's poem being a violent and abrupt view of the natural world, and Shelley's poem being more...

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home challenges both established gender roles and heteronormative identities. Gender is shown to be constructed, assigned through Western standards, and then practiced through performance. Bechdel’s graphic novel explores the...

In Salome, Oscar Wilde’s short drama, the protagonist Salome is objectified into an idealized sex symbol by her male admirers. To see how, a reader must consider descriptions of Salome as an ethereal body, expressions of lustful desire directed at...

Throughout the book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis addresses the topics of Christian morality with a twist: it’s written from the perspective of devils. The Screwtape Letters is narrated by Screwtape, an elder devil who is teaching the ropes to...

Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last and The Year of the Flood are cautionary, post-apocalyptic novels that tell two different stories with many similarities. The Heart Goes Last follows Stan and Charmaine, a married couple struggling to stay...

In 1973, a 10-year-old African American boy named Clifford Glover was shot and killed by Thomas Shea, a policeman for the NYPD. In the days that followed, riots and protests tore through the surrounding area in Queens. Then, a year later, Shea...

Within the contents of a variety of different biographies, there are multiple similarities between the conventions that are typically used. However, there are also multiple differences between them in their features that set these works apart from...

Harriet Jacobs’ moving text Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an incredible narrative chronicling the story of a slave named Linda and her resilient fight for freedom. However, as she takes us through her journey, we come to see that the...

As some may know, Till We Have Faces is far from being C.S. Lewis’ most beloved work nor is it the most accessible. However with the central story of the broken protagonist, Orual, we get a glimpse into Lewis’s interpretation of how souls are...

During his life, C.S. Lewis writes a collection of seven novels that he publishes into his well-known Chronicles of Narnia series, which sheds light on Narnia’s history. These novels introduce similar themes with the first book in the series...

Fun Home is an autobiographical graphic novel by American author and cartoonist Alison Bechdel. It follows the story of her maturation, growing up in Pennsylvania, moving out of the house, and coming to terms with her sexuality. In the process,...

Throughout Nadine Gordimer’s short stories published in 1989, titled Jump and Other Stories, the South African author constantly combats the status quo with her controversially poignant content. In one of the short stories, Once Upon a Time, the...

It’s a common hope in the life of parents that their children will go on and live more successful lives. That their child will learn the lessons their parents taught them and the road their parents laid out for them to lead them to a more...

“I thought I could make my life into a room and choose what came into it.”

While influenced by others at times, one’s life is impacted the most by the choices they make and whether or not they decide to grapple the opportunities they are...

When Horace Walpole wrote the first ever Gothic novel in 1764, the world had never seen anything quite like it before. In an age we now call the enlightenment, where knowledge, science and philosophy had made huge leaps forward, this book dared to...

Dubliners was published in 1914 and written by James Joyce, who was born in 1882. When applying feminist theory to the Dubliners short stories, one must keep in mind that although feminism had its start in the 19th century, many of the formative...

Within “Dharma” by Vikram Chandra and “The Twenty-Seventh Man” by Nathan Englander, the concept of the journey forms the central structure around which the rest of the narrative is built. While the two stories are contextually very different—“...