Newest Literature Essays

In both Yonec and Laustic, Marie de France describes tombs that house the unfulfilled love of her characters. The tombs function to preserve the physical bodies of a love that could not be fulfilled during the characters’ lives. In both lais, the...

Krishan Kumar claims that HG Wells “never wrote a proper utopia, in the strict sense”. This may seem a paradoxical statement in regards to the author famed for being the leading apostle of science utopias, and lends itself to the question: “what ...

In an 1817 letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, John Keats describes a manner of thought that he calls “negative capability.” According to Keats, this is “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable...

In the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, directed by Danny Boyle, Jamal Malik features on the Mumbai version of the game show ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ where he is one question away from winning twenty million rupees by using past experiences to...

Individuals who have experienced an unconventional or life-altering event will inevitably face the judgments of broader society, hence dictating whether such individuals feel a truly valid sense of belonging. This concept of the significance of...

The conflict between Papua New Guinea and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army between 1988 and 1998 has been described as the largest conflict in Oceania since the end of World War II. The novel Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones examines the impacts of...

“We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours.” Karen...

In Emma, author Jane Austen uses third person narration and free indirect discourse to show the same objects from different perspectives. The detached narration provides an ironic perspective that criticizes the characters’ misreadings of...

Darwin’s theory of natural selection was influenced by the works of Thomas Malthus, an English political economist. In his “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, Thomas Malthus asserts that there are two fixed laws in nature: “food is...

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, author J. R. R. Tolkien creates a relationship between Frodo and Sam that people struggle to define in modern parlance because of its depth and complexity. Neither lovers nor merely friends, the essence of Frodo...

The film The Grand Budapest Hotel, directed by Wes Anderson, is based around a legendary concierge from a famous hotel in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, Gustave H, who is framed for murder. In a desperate attempt to prove his innocence,...

In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes investigates the thin separation between love and obsession and their tendency to become one. With a narrative primarily carried through the ramblings of Doctor Matthew O’Connor, the novel explores relationships (between...

The title of Beckett’s play, ‘Act Without Words I’, betrays an immediate awareness of its dual status as a text on a page and as a thing intended to be used for performance. The title, lacking an indefinite article preceding it, could be read...

In Right You Are (If You Think So), Luigi Pirandello questions absolute truth by presenting various and contrasting perspectives of the same objects. The practice of highlighting multiple perspectives by showing several angles of the same object...

Although raised near the ocean and fascinated by the power of nature, Sylvia Plath spent most of her life in the suburbs and the city. In July 1960, however, she and Ted Hughes went camping for a week in Rock Lake, Canada. Not only was she with...

Both within ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ by Chaucer and ‘An Ideal Husband’ by Oscar Wilde, the theme of power is explored, with various characters attempting to increase their power often by corrupt or deceitful means. Although corruption is explored...

“Salome” is a poem taken from Carol Ann Duffy's collection of poems The World's Wife; most of the poems share a common feature: a historically marginalized narrator retelling the story from personal perspective. Salome’s character originally...

Humans sometimes become infatuated with certain emotions, to the point of letting these emotions control them: a single force such as anger drives their motives and controls who they become. Anger, in particular, is a belligerent and dangerous...

In many of Shakespeare’s comedies, we see people from all social ranks being portrayed – from the highest of nobles, to the lowest of servants. In cases of male friendship, there is a common pattern to see friendship develop through master-servant...

While windows are technically supposed to show a viewer the outer world, in Broken April they are used to give the reader a peek into the inner feelings of the main characters. When ‘Bessian put(s) his head close to the glass’ and ‘stay(s) a long...

In the book The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, we are introduced to one of the most fascinating and puzzling characters in modern literature; Tom Ripley. Tom Ripley is a character who is both contradictory and simple in his desires. He...

In The Destruction of Semnacherib, Byron uses different types of imagery to illustrate contradictory feelings about victory in war. In this poem, the complete demolition of the Assyrian people is described in both a horrific and peaceful way,...

In David Ives’s Sure Thing, disagreements are avoided with a ringing bell, which serves as a device to shape consensus and allows the couple to fall in love at the end. Both characters are quick to judge and come close to giving up on each other...

A person’s development of identity is often influenced by the perceptions of the people around them. The novel Does My Head Look Big in This (2005) by Randa Abdel-Fattah explores how the beginning of discovering one’s identity leads to a personal...