Newest Literature Essays

Heaney's autobiographical poem 'Mid Term Break' details how a younger Heaney reacted to the death of his four-year-old brother, as well as how he dealt with suddenly being seen as an adult by his peers. Heaney takes on a numb, almost clinical tone...

How far can our ecosystem impact our lives? According to ecocriticism, the environment influences society in almost every way possible. For instance, in Bressler’s Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, he states that...

Like many other movies from the 1980s, The Breakfast Club has become a timeless classic. Directed by John Hughes, The Breakfast Club focuses on five students in an Illinois high school, who each come from very different backgrounds. The five of...

The ultimate irony of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is that the apparent good circumstances protagonist Moll arrives in by the end of the novel - the accumulation of money and materials - are precisely the results of the criminal practices of those...

The etiology of Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Creation story, imagines the world's creation as an event of divine sacrifice and ordered beauty. The tale tells the anecdote of how the queen of chaos, Tiamet, and her consort Quingu go to war against...

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed: How is Affects Us Now

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian philosopher who focused on the art of teaching and creating literacy for the lower-class socioeconomic groups among his people and the world of education...

The author of the text from The Story of Sinuhe is someone who worked under the Egyptian pharaoh as a servant and someone who knew Sinuhe well, during the second to third millennium BCE. Evidences are found from the passage when it mentions that “...

The Sorrows of Satan is a controversial novel often regarded as an influential fin de siècle text in spite of the mixed critical responses it has received. Published in 1895 to its author Marie Corelli - who had enjoyed then a period of great...

The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, despite their vastly different settings, both emphasize the effect of community on an individual. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, set in Boston in 1642, the rigidly Puritan society criminalizes a young...

The theme of delusional love and its consequences is explored throughout the play, being overtly introduced when Chance reveals to Princess his motive for returning to St. Cloud. In this essay I will touch on the complex concept of ‘love’ as it is...

In All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman paints modernism as destructive and volatile. He discusses the role of the bourgeoisie in furthering modernism and concludes that while it has indeed (to quote Marx) “played a most revolutionary...

The poem Enterprise is one filled with thoughts. Its didactic tone and the sense of spirituality it alludes, makes the foremost of its analysis to be that of a spiritual journey to God. Another significant perception is that the poem showcases the...

If Charlotte Brontë’s character of Miss Temple in Jane Eyre could be distilled down to one word, perhaps it would be “perfect.” At a cursory glance, Miss Temple seemingly represents a paragon of conventional, Victorian femininity. Brontë...

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book deals with the complexities of the ongoing colonisation of Australia, the loss of traditional stories and the horror that continues to be inflicted upon Indigenous Australians. Much of this is achieved through the...

Henry James’ 1903 novella, The Beast in the Jungle, has long been debated by readers and critics alike. Central to the narrative is the status and understanding (or lack thereof) of a secret, a ‘crouching beast,’ (James, 1) that haunts...

A confrontation with death, even if just in thoughts, always generates uneasiness, for death, as described by American existential psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom, is “a primordial source of anxiety and the primary source of psychopathology”. Most...

Sensation fiction emerged as a large bracket of literary genres that dominated the English market between the 1860s and the 1880s; two decades during which the sensation novel -which dealt with crime, horror, mystery, and forbidden love- came to...

The Graduate and Sunset Boulevard are two films that follow young men who, though clearly talented and intelligent, cannot seem to succeed in the way they wish they could. In The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock, an accomplished twenty-one year old...

From the very beginning of The Road, Cormac McCarthy, in his post-apocalyptic world, makes it very clear to the reader that this is a place of no hope. He treats happiness and excitement as useless acts, which will lead to the characters’...

Adam Bede published in 1859 is George Eliot’s first full-length novel but not her first fiction. At the time of its apparition, she had already published a collection of three novellas and established herself as an editor, reviewer, and essayist....

In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved she tells the story of an escaped slave and her desperate attempts to lead a somewhat normal life after her horrific experiences at her former plantation, Sweet Home. The protagonist, Sethe, at the threat of being...

Crome Yellow is Aldous Huxley’s first novel, published in 1921. Many critics suggest that the story with its characters is a satirized image of the Bloomsbury group drawn by Huxley himself. Regardless of the factual evidence concerning this view...

Objects can affect character, setting, and plot in a story, and, when they symbolize something, can help give the reader a hint at what is going to happen next. In “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, the black box symbolizes the perplexity of the...

Justin Torres’s We the Animals features an unnamed narrator who struggles for love and recognition from his family members, only to fail in the end when his taboo sexual identity creates a rift too vast to mend. In particular, the narrator tries...