Newest Literature Essays

Famous Romantic era poet Percy Shelley once noted that “a poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds”. In his 2008 poetry anthology Behind My Eyes, IndoChinese-American author Li Young Lee...

Contrary to common belief, slavery as broadly defined was not abolished after the Civil War and is still around to this day. White lawmakers in the postbellum South strived to create a system in which prisons could lease out inmates, especially...

‘The art of the storyteller is to hold the attention of the reader.’

One of the ways in which author Lloyd Jones holds our attention in the novel Mister Pip is through the use of Matilda’s innocent narrative voice. Matilda’s traumatising...

The concept of an entire race being born into a system subconsciously and socially degrading them is appalling. Underprivileged and undeserving, these unfortunate people groups are cast into mediocrity and suppressed under the unbearable weight of...

In many cultures, wind has taken on its own personal identity. Through story telling wind has been given power of the supernatural in order to be used by the gods to influence or punish the heroes of Earth. The supernatural power of wind can be...

There are many different ways to describe the mysticism that pervades Willow Springs in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. Most people would call it magic, but every character would describe it differently. Mama Day would call it seeing. Dr. Buzzard would...

Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is commonly understood to be a coming of age story that deal with the theme of racial discrimination in the American South during the Great Depression. Close inspection of the novel reveals many...

Published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein remains a revolutionary literary achievement whose iconic monster continues to captive modern readers. William Shakespeare, hundreds of years prior to Shelley, also cast a monster at the center of his...

Thirty-six middle-aged people lean in simultaneously, a collection of ears trained intently on the speaker. He clears his throat before addressing the smattering of adults comprised mostly of teachers, a handful of parents, and an empty-nester...

In the short story, “Roman Fever,” Edith Wharton portrays a daily life situation between two wealthy middle-aged women talking in Rome. The morals and struggle of upper-class women to succeed and stand out at that time period are revealed in the...

History has been, and always will be, a matter of perspective. Wars, for example, will be viewed and taught differently by each respective country involved. Some things will be written off and forgotten, while somewhere else they are made sure to...

Perseverance is the hardest but most necessary quality for success; in fact, perseverance is a hard-earned characteristic for Richard Wagamese’s protagonist, Saul in his 2012 novel, Indian Horse. Saul is able to persevere through residential...

Keats is able to portray love in many different lights throughout the poem by linking ideas and meanings, like symbolism. His different uses of structure within the poem, come considered unusual for a ballad, also have connotations towards how...

Through examining the intertextual connections between two texts, the effects of context, purpose and audience on the shaping of meaning is made evident. Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ (Penguin, 1925) and Stephen Daldry’s...

In Literary Theory: The Basics, H. Bertens asserts that even in the works of culturally and sexually liberal male writers such as D.H Lawrence and Henry Miller, male characters are “denigrating, exploitative, and repressive in their relations with...

Oliver Twist is a novel that evades easy categorisation; what begins as a political satire of the 1834 Poor Law morphs into a detective novel which in turn becomes a melodramatic thriller with a surprisingly tidy ending. While Dickens juggles...

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known as Bell Hooks, is a prominent figure not only in literature, but also in feminist and civil rights movements. She seamlessly weaves both of these issues into Killing Rage: Ending Racism in order to address the...

In the novel The Wave by Morton Rhue (the pen name for Todd Strasser), a history teacher conducts an experiment to understand Nazi Germany's influence on its people. However, students turn against each other and terrorize those who are not part of...

Seven-hundred and fifty acres of preserved greenery in the heart of New York City, Central Park has long been a refuge for those wishing to escape their hectic Manhattan lives and is arguably one of the most famous parks in the world, enjoyed by...

Love is one of the fundamental principles of humanity. It is what ties humans together as a people, and is vital to society. As such, it has influenced the world in countless ways, just one of which being through literature. Les Misèrables tells...

In the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1940, an array of concepts and ideas is introduced. Hemingway places images of nature within the text to contrast the destruction that is war, and to create a visible...

Chris Ware’s box of fourteen printed works, Building Stories, follows the inhabitants of a brownstone apartment building in Chicago. Mainly following the building’s third floor resident, an unnamed woman with a prosthetic leg, Building Stories...

In the poem, "El Viento en La Isla," Pablo Neruda develops the theme of internal struggle by using vocabulary and images of nature and love. This allows him to illustrate, rather than simply tell of, his own inner struggle: to stay with his lover,...