Newest Literature Essays

In a first-person narrative reflecting on the past, like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Jean Rhys’ expansion thereof, Wide Sargasso Sea, the presentation of the memories which constitute the story immensely affects the thematic impact of the work...

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989, is a challenge to the novel as a narrative paradigm. The book is a collection of first-person monologues of four mother-daughter pairs, which delves into the generational divide. In it, the conflicts...

What happens when hypocrisy invades religion in the absence of reason? This is the very question that Moliere addresses as he establishes the characters in his work of political and social satire Tartuffe. In satire, characters are usually...

In 1742, Jonathan Edwards undertook the task of crafting a sermon that would be powerful in the eyes of both believers and unbelievers. The result exists today as his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The sermon differs from...

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson and Blankets by Craig Thompson are coming-of-age stories that primarily focus on the religious beliefs of their respective authors. Winterson grew up in an Evangelical household. Her mother was...

In Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis: A Story of a Childhood, there is a constant theme of exploitation of heroic concepts to legitimize political movements. The dissenters of the Shah used martyrdom, even exploiting a man who had died of...

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest features many allusions and references to Christian religion. Most obvious is McMurphy's martyrdom at the novel's climax. But this incident is foreshadowed throughout the novel with a series of direct...

Malouf’s Ransom explores the brutality of war and how this can result in the loss of humanity for some, given that the grief of loss overpowers all other senses. The bloodlust and thirst for vengeance evident in Achilles and Hecuba’s thoughts and...

The Significance of Violence in No Country for Old Men As is true with most of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, No Country for Old Men is replete with scenes of violence. This novel, which is set in the chaotic and lawless borderland between Texas and...

Alexander Pope’s poems ‘An Essay on Criticism’ and ‘Windsor Forest – To the Right Honourable George Lord Landsdowe’ compared with the critical extract of William Wordsworth’s Preface ‘Poems Volumes 1’ creates a basis in which one can demonstrate...

Even as Paradise Lost is the story of “man’s first disobedience,” John Milton notably opens his epic poem with a complex portrait of Satan as the ruler of Hell. Satan is a sympathetic character as a rebel, but easily denounced as a hypocritical...

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene features an array of characters that appear briefly, usually to influence Redcrosse in a critical moment along his journey. Fradubio is one such character, given sixteen stanzas in a poem of over 600 stanzas. The...

The nature of God has been a controversial subject for writers throughout the centuries. In the poem “Caliban upon Setebos,” Robert Browning explores the relationship between deities and their subjects through the voice of Caliban, a brutish...

Both the poems ‘Attack’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (AFDY) portray Word War 1 from a negative perspective. Although they are written in slightly different ways, the two create a clear image about the indignity of death in battle. In ‘Attack’,...

“The beauty of the world lies in the diversity of its people.” (Unknown). Attempting to really connect with people who are a part of an entirely different culture than your own is a very difficult thing to do. Whether they belong to a different...

David is consumed by his inner conflict and confusion over personal sexual identity. This ambivalence causes him to neglect heteronormative family, relationship, and masculine norms, leaving him stuck in liminal spaces within society and...

In Persepolis, a graphic novel memoir, Marjane Satrapi depicts a chilling picture of what life was like growing up in Iran during times of upheaval. She describes many disturbing things, such as bombings in her neighborhood and rallies against the...

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, author Michelle Alexander delves into the troublesome topic of social control mechanisms through the lens of race. Alexander, a professor of law at Ohio State University and...

In 1971, John Gardner changed the way people think about the English epic Beowulf when he published his novel Grendel. In his retelling of the story from the monster Grendel’s perspective, he repeatedly makes references to the philosophy of...

As we encounter obstacles over the course of our lives, we often turn to external sources to justify internal conflict. This tendency to assign responsibility is evident in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793, in which refugees fleeing Santo...

Jhumpa Lahiri is a Pulitzer Prize-winning short story author, one who has been lauded as one of the first authors to establish a literature for Indian/Bengali-Americans. These diasporic writings address many issues that involve adapting to new...

In his play Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Brian Friel utilizes the entirety of the storyline to develop and present the dramatic relationship between Madge Mulheren and Gareth O’Donnell. Quite quickly, Friel makes it evident to the audience that...

In the novel The Sea-Wolf by Jack London, Wolf Larsen’s spirit lives in Humphrey. Even though Wolf’s philosophy about life differs from both Humphrey’s and Maud’s, Humphrey’s interaction with Wolf impacts him to the extent that he takes on some of...

To illustrate the universal themes of his medieval tale, the Gawain Poet uses elements outside of dialogue. In particular, the subtle use of colors expresses the values that impact Sir Gawain throughout the poem. In Sir Gawain and the Green...