Newest Literature Essays

Almost completely opposite the beautiful, grave, and love-struck young Athenian nobles are the awkward, ridiculous, and deeply confused Mechanicals, around whom a great deal of A Midsummer Night's Dream's most comical scenes are centred. They are...

Alexander Crummel once said that “a sense of responsibility which comes with power is the rarest of things” (n.d.). This is a concept which is explored within Heinrich Boll’s 1975 novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum as Boll demonstrates the...

The process of overcoming different challenges faced in a journey has the potential to transform an individual’s identity and morality. Peter Skrzynecki’s ‘Crossing the Red Sea’ (1975) recounts the journey taken by the refuges from the horrors of...

“Better for some never means better for all.”

In everyday life we encounter people who can be nice, moderate, or are just monsters. Those monsters are corrupt, inconsiderate, or badly-behaved people. In literature this person is called the...

Linda Pastan’s To a Daughter Leaving home and Margaret Atwood’s Death of a Young Son by Drowning both apply imagery and symbolism to exemplify the difficulties of being a parent. These poems describe the moments and instances that no parent wants...

Ludicrous car chases, intense hot pink hair and a world where Prince songs are sung as hymns; is this what Shakespeare wanted when he wrote Romeo and Juliet over 400 years ago? Baz Luhrmann’s film adaption of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, is a...

In All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy reveals what happens when one learns the truths about the world through John Grady Cole’s journey as he leaves home and experiences the realities of the world in a country foreign to him. Unsatisfied with...

Amy Tan’s “A Pair of Tickets” and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “Volar” both use symbolism and distinct settings to portray the lives and feelings of two young girls that originate from a different cultural background. Although these girls are different in...

While some of the damage suffered by totalitarian governments appears to be only temporary, most forms of harm are shown to be more permanent and long-lasting. As explored in the figures of both Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 and Funder’s...

Since its publication in 1860, Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations has garnered a reputation as one of the most powerful and moving works of the nineteenth century. Great Expectations follows the story of a poor young boy named Pip into his...

One aspect of 1984 that is consistently dominant, is the theme of manipulation, and how even the most overt and simplistic forms of manipulation manages to keep the citizens of Oceania so loyal so successfully. One way in which manipulation is...

This paper will explicate The Iliad, Book 21, Ll. 99-127 with respect to syntax, diction, and figurative language. This passage is the scene of Lycáon’s death at the hand of Achilles, who is on a killing spree after the death of Patroclus. The...

In Brave New World, the dystopian world is made up of levels of humans who, from the making, are told what to think and how to act. Literally. Bernard, an Alpha male who doesn’t fit into the society, is unhappy with his life. John, a “savage” who...

We all have secrets and insecurities and we all make mistakes. Many of us do our best to hide our imperfections with the hopes that no one may ever know of our flaws. Problem is our biggest enemy already knows. You see, we can hide from the rest...

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is unique in that the narrator and arguably main character of the story, Chief Bromden, is not the protagonist. Instead, McMurphy fills this role, and Bromden acts as both the main character, providing...

Wilfred Owen’s poem Disabled forms a narrative following an unnamed soldier through six stanzas, containing vignettes of fragments from his life, contrasting his consciousness, and therefore knowledge, throughout. Focusing on the consequences of...

Romantic love, a universal issue many writers grapple with, consumes most of one’s life: it is constantly exalted as the loftiest of virtues in Christianity along with the notion of true love. Durrenmatt, however, satirises and distorts...

‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’ - Henry James

It can be argued that a person’s character and individual nature is affected by exterior incident. This occurs in both Henry...

Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters Remix reflects multiple theories presented in Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read. Throughout Palahniuk’s episodic novel, the reader is taken, nonlinearly, through the life of protagonist, Shannon...

In The Bear, William Faulkner uses specific depictions of the wilderness and the main characters of Ben, Ike, and Sam Fathers to represent much more than just a group of guys going on a bear hunt once a year. At first, this book seems like a...

Author Shannon Alder once said, “Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks.” Essentially what Alder is saying is that the things we find fault with in other people are really the things that we do not have and therefore...

The 1970s in the U.S. was a pivotal time in politics and social change. Second wave feminism was characterized by the sexual liberation of women. As women began to become familiar with their sexual identities there was also the desire for them to...

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic work, “The Birth-mark”, the central character, Aylmer, expresses his disgust with the mark’s ability to diminish his wife’s aesthetic beauty, as well as betray her mortal tendency to sin. The hand on Georgiana’s...

The relationship between Gandalf and Saruman in J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous trilogy The Lord of the Rings is not only a depiction of good versus evil, but a depiction of the corruption of magic and power. Gandalf and Saruman are two incredibly...