Newest Literature Essays

Many authors have identified the self-absorbed behavior of Emma Bovary as the key character quality that leads to her downfall, and modern analyses point to lack of social and educational opportunities as the root cause of the decline and death of...

“O, brave new world!” John joyfully proclaims after being told he will have the chance to live in the World State with Bernard and Lenina (Huxley 93). Upon first reading dystopian literature, one might feel much like John, assuming a more...

Although most men and women recognize how traditional gender roles dictate their actions in hopes of being accepted into society, very few can claim that they have been completely exiled from their community because they appear too “masculine” or...

Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a simile as, “An explicit comparison between two different things, actions, or feelings, using the words ‘as’ or ‘like’…” (Baldick 334). In his critically-acclaimed epic poem, Omeros, Derek Walcott uses...

What is “normal”? We spend enough time, collectively, trying to figure out just that, but if women think it’s complicated now, what about women making their way before us? Expectations were rigid, gender roles carefully defined, and opportunities...

In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton paints an intimate view of New York culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wharton does this by masterfully presenting a slice of New York, focusing on a few intricately developed...

In his play, Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare presents duty and desire on a metaphorical spectrum through the individual narratives of several characters including Antony, Cleopatra and Pompey. When presenting duty and desire in Antony and...

Malouf’s Ransom explores man’s quest for meaning, underscoring the importance of hearing and telling stories as they influence basic human understanding and interactions. Priam’s anecdotes illustrate the ability to cement our identity and...

One of the most famous passages in Plato’s Symposium and one that seems to receive the most attention in contemporary philosophy is Diotima’s Ladder of Love. Diotima explains that love is an ascent through a number of stages or steps on the ladder...

The story of the flood in Genesis 6-9 in the Old Testament is familiar to the readers of the Bible, but the record of such a flood first appears much earlier in ca. 2,500 B.C. on the eleventh tablet of the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Although...

When Albert Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus [1], he demonstrated the absurdity of human existence in the indifferent universe with the ridiculous task of pushing a rock up a hill an infinite number of times. Every time Sisyphus pushed the rock to...

E.T.A. Hoffmann never reveals the true nature of his protagonist Nathanael’s childhood incident, and thus by design creates ambiguity within The Sandman. This ambiguity leads to two possible interpretations of the story, one of reality and one of...

Within his fiction, German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse investigates a surprising, Eastern view on people’s perception of themselves. While traditionally Westerners describe each person with such definite characteristics as their names, appearances,...

Through the discovery of new values and places, individuals may reject socially construed ideas as they come to new perceptions of their broader society. However, some individuals may remain indifferent. It is these individuals that pose the...

Hope in the face of death seems to be an impossible concept to adequately convey to a reader. After all, death itself seems to be the epitome of hopelessness and despair. However, Anne Bradstreet conveys in her poetry this very idea. Bradstreet...

In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer portrays multiple unique personalities including a conniving, rebellious Monk who selfishly dismisses the church’s rule and lives greedily in his own world. Throughout the Monk’s tale, proof of his...

Though regarded by many as a harmless children's tale, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was crafted by L. Frank Baum to convey an allegory of the Populist Party during the 1890s and to illustrate his concerns about the American government. Baum...

God, Glory, and Gold. These are the three G’s of European colonization, and the same three G’s that would lead to the destruction of entire civilizations of native people and their forced submission to European ethnic and socioeconomic forces for...

The 16th – 20th centuries represented an era marked by European colonialism. This included the forcible occupation of foreign lands and the control of these lands through various mechanisms of power. In Australia, this expansion involved the...

Brooklyn by Colm Toiblin tells the story of Irish immigrant Eilis Lacey’s journey to America during the 1950’s. The novel explores Eilis’s relationship with home as it shifts in correlation with her loyalties to those around her. The conventions...

In the novel Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers, the story of young Frankie Addams is told as she begins to navigate the world, documenting from her perspective, her exposure to harsh reality of the world as she begins to develop into a...

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now sustains a derogative perspective on the state of war and its corruptive influence. Set in Saigon during the Vietnam War, the action and narrative present the post-World War II era as a morally...

In Sir William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the symbolic use of color conveys the innocence and the evil on the island, as well as each of the boys' personalities. The contrasting light and dark colors in the book symbolize the goodness and evil,...

A Midnight Summer’s Dream is exceptional in that it features more than just one story unfolding at once. Although the quartet of lovers and the fairy world is often the focus of the play, the rude mechanicals and their attempts to produce a play...