Newest Literature Essays

We face moral dilemmas every day of our lives—whether it’s giving money to a homeless man or taking a peek at a peer’s chemistry test. Fortunately, the stakes aren’t high. The tragic figures of Hamlet, The Once and Future King, and Oedipus...

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman explore the themes of magic and the supernatural. Harry Potter is a story about a young, seemingly ordinary boy, finding out that he is in fact a...

From telling scary stories to teaching multiplication tables, a mother takes on a myriad of roles. Yet, as a mother fully devotes herself to her child, she loses connection with other facets of herself. The consumption of maternity subjects the...

Kim is a novel about a young boy named Kim and his maturation into an adult. He goes on many adventures all the while playing the “Great Game” and tying to help the Lama attain “freedom from the Wheel of Things” (Kipling 12). A bildungsroman is a...

Gothic literature uses gender to discuss social norms and explore stereotypes while commenting on whether gender stereotypes should be upheld or disrupted in society. In this essay, I will compare two female characters and two male characters in...

Both texts highlight and effectually foreground, the need for humanity to learn from its mistakes for its ultimate survival. The social, cultural and historical milieu of a composer’s era, significantly molds construction of their text and the...

As much as we like to think we forge our own identities, much of who we are is determined by outside forces. Oppression is a powerful force in shaping the identities in Maya Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and in her poems “When I...

Tennessee Williams’ 1955 play ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, explores the avant-grade realities in which facades appear to dispel. Through his iconoclasm of the patriarchal normalities of 50s society, William’s embellishes characters as catalysts for...

Euryalus’s mother always stood out among the others. She left the other mothers behind to stay with her son while most of the women decided to live in Sicily instead of traveling this arduous journey. She also was highlighted in the battle in...

Humans are complex beings, each with individual traits, and an individual set of traits that they value in others. Despite this individuality, cultures are formed, in part, by the values they possess and nurture in their society as a whole. In the...

In the novel The Smell of Apples, written by Mark Behr, Behr uses a first-person perspective through the main character Marnus, an eleven year old boy. The book uses a first-person narration, through Marnus, to relay both the events of when he is...

Robert Frost’s petrarchan sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, “Design,” questions the role of God in the world through predestination and divine intervention with the use of tone, juxtaposition, imagery, and symbolism. He does so by narrating a...

Hanif Kureishi’s well known short story “My Son the Fanatic” (1997) explores themes of friendship, religion, fanaticism and identities. In a detailed discussion, this essay will discuss the significant relationship between the father, Parvez, and...

Kambili and Jaja live in a strict, quiet household where everything revolves around their father, Eugene Achike’s, intense religious beliefs and the family’s need to constantly impress him. However, when they visit their Aunty Ifeoma’s house and...

Pirandello’s Six Characters is a play that tries to explain the creative process to the audience. The author used his characters to personify the various stages of a playwright’s writing process, while framing the action against the convenient...

Most teenagers go through a time when they believe that their parents are too overbearing and strict with them. Although this is a normal feeling to have on occasion growing up, Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy reveals the intense situation of an...

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late 14th Century, featuring several tales loosing linked together that revolve around typical medieval lifestyles, virtues and preoccupations with many modern day parallels. In the Merchant’s...

The roles of women in Middle Eastern culture have varied throughout the decades, ranging from being delicate creatures in need of protection to becoming blind soldiers suddenly dedicated to a misleading cause. This is most noticeably depicted in...

Eavan Boland is an Irish poet and author born in Dublin, Ireland in 1944 who focuses much of her work on the national identity of Irish people, the role of Irish women throughout its history, as well as Ireland’s rich and, at times tragic, history...

The idea of what constitutes legitimate scientific proof is one that is subjective and varies from one circumstance to another, but compiling various types of evidence to support a claim has long been an accepted, respected, and even encouraged...

While Miss Bates, in Jane Austen’s Emma, may initially be perceived as a minor character from afar, upon deeper analysis it can be noted that she is of capital importance in this novel. Serving as a representative of Highbury’s lower classes, Miss...

When it was released in 1937, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children was heralded as one of the great anti-war plays of that still young century. But while martial and religious themes are certainly visible through the narrative,...

In Paradise Lost, John Milton endows angels with magnificent qualities, both positive and negative. Through symbolism, he shows their greatness. In a meaningful shift from earlier ideas of his time, Milton’s angels are shown to possess full free...

Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies is a book of philosophical and logical refutations and arguments. It is a direct response to several writings in which the male authors make claims against women’s purity. These books, according...