Newest Literature Essays

In the two texts, the notion of family is greatly influenced by an external factor, which is the political party in control of the population. In Persepolis, this would be the Iranian government in power during the post Cultural Revolution, while...

In recent years, the age of maturity in Western cultures has been pushed higher and higher as more education becomes necessary to pursue job opportunities. Crashing economies increasingly force children to rely on their parents after graduation....

When faced with injustices, it is far easier to say one would act against them than actually physically or verbally doing so. In Franz Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony,” when invited, an explorer is subjected to observe an inhumane execution where...

Writing on nineteenth-century London poetry, William Sharpe comments that ‘Regardless of shared reference to sublimity, fog, of Babylonian blindness, each poet’s London is different. Each time we read ‘London’ we have to begin again.’ For poets in...

In his writing on the physiology of reading in Restoration England, Adrian Johns recalls a story concerning the natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Finding himself with a ‘tertian ague’ whilst at school, Boyle was encouraged to divert his melancholy...

Since its first publication in 1667, Milton’s Paradise Lost has continued to exert its influence over literature, having particular resonance with the romantics, Wordsworth citing it as among ‘the grand store-houses of enthusiastic and meditative...

Although Hannah Webster Foster names her book The Coquette, there is ambiguity in who the true coquette of the story is. Eliza Wharton, named the coquette by Foster and the other characters of the story, does not follow the rules of coquetry....

In Louise Glück’s poem, “Mock Orange” (Glück 1995) the female flesh interferes with the speaker’s search for a desired full presence or wholeness. Through her representation of the mock orange flower as the female genitalia, Glück attempts to...

The novel The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer is an introspective work in that it urges the readers to look amongst their own lives and determine what makes them who they are. Throughout the course of the novel the protagonist, Jacob experiences a...

Renowned psychotherapist Alfred Adler once said, “Man knows much more than he understands.” This means that although we might be rich in education, we do not understand much of what we know. The Silence of the Lambs brings insight to this quote on...

‘Black No More’ by George Schuyler is a satirical race novel that is set during the 1940s America, a time when segregation and racism were highly prominent among white and black Americans. The plot of ‘Black No More’ narrates the consequence when...

Oftentimes when writing historical fiction, authors take creative liberties in their works. William Shakespeare was no different when he wrote his history plays. In Shakespeare’s English Kings, Peter Saccio discusses such discrepancies. In the...

The time that Frances Trollope spent traveling the United States, would prove to be the most tumultuous era of cultural redefinition in our nation’s history. As the years unfolded, the United States firmly rebuked its colonized heritage and...

Throughout the Old English poem Judith, the poet goes to great lengths to paint a clear and decided picture of providential history. A providential view of history leaves no doubt that God is involved and that He clearly favors one side over the...

Violence and other cruelties are such a large part of the world that they can never be fully rooted out, no matter how hard the effort is to remove them. A common coping mechanism of handling the tragedies of everyday life is to ignore or to...

Humans have instincts. However, some are often suppressed and viewed by society as immoral and unnatural because not all of them have pure intentions. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Milton retells the story of Adam and Eve and their fall from...

‘A blush overspread Anne’s cheeks. She could say nothing.’ (JANE AUSTEN, Persuasion)

‘There’s a blush for won’t, and a blush for shan’t— And a blush for having done it. There’s a blush for thought, and a blush for naught, And a blush for just...

Aesthetic critics and writers of the 18th century wrestled with a number of questions regarding beauty, nature, mimesis, art, and the sublime and how they all related to one another. One of these queries concerned mind and matter – that is,...

‘From Pope’s perspective as satirist’, writes Michael Seidel, ‘London is stuffed with the bodies of dunces and awash in printer’s ink’, hitting upon the early 18th century’s proliferation of print culture and its wider implications that Pope was...

Small towns are often considered a safe place to grow up. Many who are born into these small towns never leave, perhaps because they are too frightened to leave all that they have ever known. These towns, however, are not without their problems....

The moral message of a piece of literature reflects the culture which the author belongs to. The three pieces of work here progress in chronological order. The Epic of Gilgamesh is from the early days of human civilization, by the ancient...

When reading The Battle of Maldon, I found myself attempting to grade the noble Byrhtnoth using the heroic code as a rubric. Initially, I doled out poor marks, labeling Byrhtnoth as a failure according to the heroic code. However, after...

The epistolary novel structure, first produced by accident in The Persian Letters by Charles Secondat de Montesquieu, is a series of fictional letters or other forms of communication. The structure allows a writer to present different people’s...

The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Waddell Chesnutt utilizes inequalities tied to the era of the American South where the Wellington Insurrection of 1898 occurred as a result of growing racial tensions coupled with the growing divide of economic...