Newest Literature Essays

Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona is, if not a love story, then a story about love as represented through various characters, primarily Proteus, Valentine, and Julia. The reader sees their attitudes towards love change throughout the plot,...

Robert Lowell’s writing style changed a great deed throughout his life. Some critics have discussed the reasons and impacts of these changes.[1]In Robert Lowell’s poems, there is a contrast between the strict rhyme scheme of his earlier poems and...

Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen is a play, primarily, about reversal: reversal of circumstances, reversal of relationships, overwhelming emotion juxtaposed against a complete dearth of emotion. The plot is an interplay of these reversals from...

The language of the body in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure furthers one of the main tensions of the plot, namely, the manifold nature of having a body. First, that one’s state as a person is determined by one’s physicality, and vice versa. One’...

A central focus of Pearl is perfection; ‘my precious pearl without a spot’ (1.4.48), ‘that gem so clean’ (1.4.47) – the titular pearl is rarely mentioned without some corresponding description of its flawlessness. The language describing the...

Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica is an emphatic piece of literature that explores the differences in the systems of government in China and America. The way in which images are presented are crucial to the development of the story, which begins and ends...

Katherine Kallinis and Sophie LaMontagne graduated from respectable colleges and began leading stables lives, working steady jobs in areas they enjoyed. Then, one day, after saying to themselves ‘We have to stop thinking about what other people...

Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter deals with compassion and surveillance, as well as religion at the times of the World War II. The main character, Henry Scobie, who is a middle-aged man working as an Assistant Commission of Police,...

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is told through three narratives: Utterson’s, Lanyon’s, and Jekyll’s. Each narrative is crucial to understanding the overall mystery, none of them standing on their own. This...

A Respectable Woman is a short story by Katie Chopin, which explores the themes of perception through the main character: Mrs. Baroda. The story revolves around Mrs. Baroda, wife to Gaston Baroda, who conflicts with her inner desires to fall in...

As children, one often admires some parental figure throughout life, whether related or not. The desire for guidance and affinity from these esteemed figures are inherently necessary in a child’s rearing; they depend on a solid foundation to...

Thomas King’s novel of First Nations, Green Grass, Running Water, intertwines the lives of several Blackfoot Aboriginals with the existences of the Elders. The connections among these characters emphasize the way reality is viewed in society. As...

The destruction and anxiety caused by the political upheaval in Europe in the 20th century, (especially World War II) resulted in the mass disillusionment among the people. There was a feeling of fear, doubt and pessimism all over Europe. The...

In Peter Pan, the play by James M. Barrie, the human characters in the city of London consider animals as soulless and inferior. However, in the Never Land, the relation towards animals shifts constantly and it becomes more complex: characters...

Foils are common in Shakespeare—a pair of characters, usually very different but sharing certain commonalities, each highlighting the other’s qualities by contrast. Ariel and Caliban, despite both being servants of Prospero, act as foils to each...

“Epic theatre’s basic effort is to make familiar strange, show the world as alterable, hold events at a temporal distance and as Bretch writes, reveal the human being as “as the sum of all circumstances”.”Alisa Solman

In response to the political...

“Athena, [in pursuit of her] adventures as a woman, [tied to an immortal and moral world that is] dominated by a male ethos”, is used to highlight the importance of gender in an unforgiving society. As a woman, Athena is enslaved to her gender, in...

Robert Frost is one of the most widely-read poets in the American literary tradition. His poetry and themes have been profoundly impactful, garnering readers across national boundaries and inciting generation after generation of critics, fans, and...

The human intellect is often perceived as confusing because of the way it presents unimaginable truths and outright lies to people. One repeatedly mistakes truth for lies and vice versa, often resulting in a conundrum that pits half-truths and...

We live in a violent world. One only needs to watch the nightly news to find this to be the truth. Theft. Murder. Rape. Fires. Car crashes. Natural disasters. All of these forces bring violence into our lives, and it should come as no surprise...

Lauren Groff’s short story “Above and Below” tells the story of a woman engulfed in misfortune after losing her lover, her university funds, her home, and anything included in what was previously perceived as her normal life. This powerful, short...

The phrase, “you’re not supposed to be here” echoes throughout the lives of undocumented Americans. Immigration discussions dominate the media with the so-called border crisis at its forefront alongside the question of who deserves to have a place...

A prominent feature of dystopian literature is the ability of certain individuals to capitalize on the fear of others in order to gain power. A novel that this is evident in is William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which we see how power is...