Newest Literature Essays

When the Civil War ended, the Southern countryside and its people were crippled nearly beyond all hope. Of the most dramatic decline, Southern aristocrats took the cake. Before the war, the first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a...

'The telling of a story of seduction is also a mode of seduction.' (Ros Ballaster)

In our contemporary world, to 'seduce' or be 'seduced' often has a sexual connotation, of a person persuading another, using various techniques, to engage in a...

Karl Georg Büchner (17 October 1813 – 19 February 1837) was a German playwright, natural scientist, poet, and writer, who was a member of the literary group Young Germany. To this end, he was also considered a revolutionary, as the liberal...

‘Oh London…. Thou hast all things in thee to make thee fairest, and all things in thee to make thee foulest: for thou art attir’de like a Bride, drawing all that looke upon thee, to be in love with thee but there is much harlot in thine eyes.’...

Ha Jin’s In the Pond is a tactful yet an oscillation between subtle and violent upheaval delineation of the decadent post Mao-China in a pro communist setting repleted with shades of corruption. Jin meticulously captures the panoramic view of the...

In Book VIII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates details the degenerative process of regime change, which transitions from kingship to timocracy to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny. Each regime has its analogue in the soul of man, which is structured...

Aristotle’s reasoning as to why he believed the Greek polis to be superior to other forms of associations can be found in Book 1.2 of his teachings in Politics. It contains an analysis of the individual components which make up a polis, the...

In St. Augustine’s Confessions, language was necessary on Augustine’s path to conversion, but also caused him to deviate from the same path. By being able to speak and read, Augustine first learned about God, while his final conversion in the...

In the Inferno, Dante teaches readers about the role of reason and emotion in the Christian life. On his journey through Hell, Dante the Pilgrim shows unregulated human emotion through the different reactions he has towards the sinners. Virgil...

Aristotle’s definition of the virtue of high-mindedness in Nichomachean Ethics, and of what constitutes the excess and deficiency of this virtue, poses a problem when applied to Socrates' in Plato’s Apology. On one hand, Socrates is high-minded...

'Annihilating all that's made/To a green thought in green shade.' -Marvell

'I am re-begot/of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.' -Donne

'Nothing,' as a concept has plasticity; it can be used in a number of different ways and refer...

‘[T]he modern period […] begins really with the late nineteenth [century], when the sense of the passing of a major phase of English history was already in the air.’ Indeed, when we discuss ‘modern’ in terms of literature this tends to be a...

Edgar Allan Poe’s unusually common usage of orangutans in his short stories is no secret. In The Murders of the Rue Morgue, the orangutan turns out to be the murderer who deprived Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter of their lives. Its actions are...

William Shakespeare is an author who is known best for his tragedies, such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar: plays in which the heroes lose. However, Shakespeare also wrote comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of...

‘Silence’ in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is integral to the text not only in a literal sense, but also figuratively; the gaps that are purposefully left in the plot and the reader’s knowledge also act, powerfully, as “silences”. Whilst...

In her novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison explores the burdens society places on its weakest members and the adverse effects they have on the individual's mental stability and self worth. Society has expectations of beauty and worth that teach...

When it comes to innovative stylistic and thematic techniques in We, Zamyatin does not disappoint. Every detail of this novel is deliberate, from the colors of objects to characterization of names. While a heavy emphasis is often placed on the...

Throughout the novels – Iain Bank’s The Wasp Factory of 1984, and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin from 2003 – the authors depict the protagonists as subversive outsider figures, as they each have only one friend – Frank’s Jamie, whom...

In the third and final play of The Oresteia trilogy, The Eumenides, Apollo testifies for Orestes and the Furies testify for the late Clytemnestra in a trial that will decide whether or not Orestes is guilty. In this play, a new system of justice...

Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred details the harrowing journey of 26-year-old Dana Franklin. A modern black woman from 1970s Los Angeles, Dana is continuously jerked back through time to the land of her ancestors: early 1800s Maryland. Her task?...

Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, written in 1982, emerged from the appearance of Feminist writers in the 1970s, when specific gender issues were no longer being suppressed by a patriarchal society. This allowed for the growth of personal freedom...

‘The long history of English elegy is a pouring of fresh tears into ancient vessels,’claims Rosenberg in ‘Elegy for an Age.’ Indeed, the elegy seems the best literary form to exemplify Eliot’s famous claim that “No poet, no artist of any art, has...

Harsh climatic conditions, no food and hard work; all of these aspects symbolize the daily life of a prisoner inside the Gulag. The horrifying treatment of the prisoners is very well documented in many prison novels. However, the way that the...

Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography “The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano: or Gustavus Vassa, the African,” presents a created identity of the “enlightened slave,” as a means of appealing to the pathos of the British and American people...