Newest Literature Essays

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) explores repression and projection of identity through the voice of the suffering, confusing, and often unreliable Lucy Snowe. This novel emerged after Brontë’s acclaimed Jane Eyre, exemplifying a newfound...

In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie uses witch imagery to depict Indira Gandhi as the Widow. Critics have discussed the historical context of this decision, with some finding it problematic. However, by interpreting the Widow as an element of...

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles, written in a double narrative form alternating between the Victorian era and the present day. Currently, some literary debate surrounding the novel...

New York: the place where one’s dreams come true. At least, this is how it appears to outsiders. However, upon a closer examination of New York, a harsher truth comes out. As seen in the play Thoroughly Modern Millie, the social class one is born...

Four braids wrap around the cover of Americanah, binding the stories and experiences of race within. Stories of realising one’s own race and how it changes your mobility in different places. Stories of understanding power. In Americanah, Adichie...

In Spartacus, director Stanley Kubrick and Music Director Alex North utilize sound, including music, sound effects, and dialogue, in historical drama Spartacus to emphasize the types of romance the characters offer. Gladiator and slave revolt...

There exists an entirely different dimension, where illusion and deception form people’s personalities and rule their lives, and that dimension is exists here, everyday of our own entire lives. We all live lives only according to what is in our...

“Man is a social animal, distinguished by ‘culture’: by the ability to make tools and communicate ideas. Employment of tools appears to be his chief biological characteristic” (Oakley).

Directors Stanley Kubrick and Franklin J. Schaffner maintain...

Throughout D H Lawrence’s The Fox, the protagonist March is repeatedly represented as ‘a shadow’. This not only suggests March and Banford’s marginal status as unmarried women in a 1920s society, but represents a tension between what can be seen...

It is not uncommon for the pain of physical trauma to transcend into mental trauma as well. This can be seen in Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky, in which she describes the aftermath of a brutal rape. Although she was physically hurt by the man that...

Lennie is a central character in Of Mice and Men, and though many believe he is a flat character, he does in fact evolve as the story goes on, with Steinbeck making him progressively more human. The reader strongly empathises with such a...

In a play, characters are rarely isolated, as they must interact to progress. However, in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the protagonist, Brick, is indeed isolated. This isolation leads to self-knowledge and self-destruction....

The passage of time is something that we all see as inevitable. Eventually in time all things will fade; specifically as noted in the twelfth sonnet beauty, but also that all humans eventually die. Shakespeare’s twelfth sonnet tries to explore the...

Within the poetry of Hughes and Plath, the theme of human relationships is written of in varying and diverse manners. Plath’s work details relationships, such as the parent-child relationship, using powerful and intricate imagery, while Hughes...

It’s impossible to determine all the complexity of a character just based on first impressions. This is especially true for the character Kolya in David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves. On the surface, Kolya appears to be a fearless, comedic,...

Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya portrays complicated relationships between several characters with rather distinct personalities. Staged at the nineteenth century, Chekhov's drama of everyday life stresses conflict amongst his characters through...

‘Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousnesses’

Above is an extract...

Lao-Tzu, from his work “Thoughts from the Tao-te Ching”, offers political protocols for the leader through the abandonment of action and guidelines on how people should live their lives. Although Mary Wollstonecraft, from her work “Of the...

In Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien, one abundantly clear theme is disjunction. Much of the text is fragmented, split up and moving between locations, characters, and time periods. Coupled with what often seems like magical realism, this...

Early on in his Jungian analysis of Japanese female folk archetypes, Hayao Kawai posits that dangerous supernatural creatures can either represent misunderstood and marginalized people or inscrutably villainous forces of (human) nature, depending...

Jiri Menzel’s 1966 film Closely Watched Trains, with its plot that follows a young slacker’s daily routine and its extremely languid pace, at first seems to cast a lazily nostalgic eye toward WWII-era Czechoslovakia. However, during pivotal...

Telling a story through the eyes of a child is by no means a new literary technique. Fantastical novels such as Rowling’s Harry Potter and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Cabin in the Big Woods use the younger generation for their central points of...

In her two decades as a playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks has tackled American history from many angles; while she shuffles themes of race, family, death, and time between each of her plays, they are all linked by the common structure of what she calls...

Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians is a bold experiment of a performance whose successes and failures stem from the same aspect of the show: its tendency to blur the lines between the audience and the performers....