Newest Literature Essays

Written in 1884, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a tale about a young boy’s journey to freedom from society, and his struggle with his conscience during a time in the past when slavery was the norm for society. Huck, a...

The foundation text of English literature, titled Beowulf (meaning “man wolf” when translated into the modern language), presents readers with a hero named Beowulf who fights three different battles, each with its own monster. Beowulf’s first...

In many novels that depict the story of relationship, a woman meets a man throughout the plot in social institutions such as school, at a party, at the mall, or even online. Soon this couple falls in love, and eventually decides to tie the knot;...

Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves is a different adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood where, instead of the little girl becoming the victim to a villainous wolf, she embraces the wolf as an experience beyond anything she has known or been...

One of the most fascinating characters in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is the grotesque, blind beggar, who first accosts Emma during her travel from Rouen to Yonville. The beggar reappears in the presence of Emma near the end of the novel: as Emma...

The backbone of existentialism states that individuals are just that-individual, unique, independently conscious beings; rather than the varied labels, stereotypes, or any arbitrary preconceived notions that the individuals may fit into, the...

Suicide is a dark subject, usually avoided in every-day conversation and in Youth Literature. This is understandable. Some topics require a developed level of maturity in order to be fully comprehended. However, the darkness of a subject, while...

Through discovering a new perspective, an individual may become able to re-evaluate the values of their world and gain a new insight into their own beliefs or morals. These discoveries are meaningful on a personal and societal level, as they...

How do we describe an emotion? Happiness, sadness, and fear, all simply words which we tie to certain “feelings,” observable by bodily functions -- flushed cheeks, tears, goosebumps, the production and distribution of certain hormones. As humans...

In order for a successful society and government, true emotions and feelings must be expressed at the essential times. Manipulation is constantly used worldwide in areas such as advertisements to movies. They act as unfair persuaders to make a...

“Leningrad,” a poem by Osip Mandelstam detailing the harsh reality in post-war Russia, examines the effect of the changes on the identity of the narrator, who is forced to consolidate his old memories of his hometown of Petersburg and the...

“Everything centers around the bull and the bullfighter. The bull can represent anything we choose: the unknown, the “other”, fear, money, sex, work, romantic relationships, etc. It is something that you have to see to understand. The most...

In the text Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, the main character, Antoine Roquentin, experiences both struggles and triumphs when it comes to understanding existential philosophy. The author has been famously quoted regarding his own existential views,...

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway seeks to address changes of life and attitudes following World War I through the disjointed lens of the narrator, Jake Barnes. Told through his stream of consciousness, the novel investigates psychological...

Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847) is commonly read as a feminist metanarrative of women’s writing in which a young English woman rises out of class-based oppression and finds her independence. There is a tendency to read Jane Eyre as an...

By the time she speaks her famous closing line about depending on the kindness of strangers, it has become apparent that the ability of Blanche DuBois to survive in a world of men—and not just animalistic throwbacks like Stanley Kowalski, either,...

Upon its initial release, few moviegoers could possibly have predicted that The Truman Show would not remain pure fantasy for decades to come. The very concept that millions of Americans would ever sit around 24/7/365 watching what essentially...

An opening title card introduces the 1996 movie Fargo as one that is not only based on a true story, but with the exception of name changes made at the request of the survivors, a film that proceeds to present the events of that true story exactly...

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and first published in 1848 [1], precedes the writing of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty by more than a decade. Although Mill and Marx were both living in England by the time On...

A House for Mr. Biswas, written by V.S. Naipaul, is an epic that tells the story of Mohun Biswas, a poor boy believed to be a bad omen from birth, and his life in Trinidad. The life of Mr. Biswas is presented in the form of an epic, narrating his...

In the novel Reef, there are a series of events that mark Triton’s (the protagonist's) coming of age. To understand Gunesekera's novel, a reader should heed these events and consider how these occurrences have shaped and affected the protagonist’s...

In Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), the main character Jane is an up-and-coming documentarian. She is offered a job on the set of a new television show called My American Wife! and happily takes it. The show is sponsored by a special interest...

Most people do not focus on the writing style of a novel and tend to pay more attention to the broader contours of the story line. When reading Gary Schmidt’s Trouble, the reader should pay attention to writing style because it is different from...

Gwendolyn Brooks's poem “The Bean Eaters" highlights the loneliness and poverty of an old couple, people who have been forgotten by pretty much everyone. They have been forgotten by their kids who have grown up and moved out; they have been...