Newest Literature Essays

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...

Two salient features of wonder create an immediate source of dissonance within “The Story of Sindbad the Sailor” in Hussain Haddaway’s translation of Sindbad and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights. First, the Qur’an explains, “There were...

The frequent use of antinomy in Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, has often been interpreted as a literary device that serves as a “jubilant celebration of male homosexual desire,” as analyzed by Christopher Craft.[1] Other...

Published in 1847 under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell, Emily Bronte’s only finished novel is a unique work when it comes to the way, in which, it deals with the complexity of the human soul and treats the mysteries of its psychology. This book...

In the course of making a name for himself and securing the fame of a scientific and social prophet, Herbert George Wells had aimed through his writing to attain goals that transcended comic realism and science fiction. Being himself a disciple of...

Silas Marner (1861) is George Eliot’s third and arguably most perfectly constructed novel. The book skillfully combines the conflicting aspects of Realism on the one hand, and fairy tale writing on the other by dwelling on the life of the...

Mathilda is Mary Shelley’s second long work of fiction after Frankenstein. It was written in the summer and fall of 1819 during a stormy period of her matrimonial life. For such reason, this book is often read as a biographical work; an approach...

Upon its publication in 1897, The Invisible Man came to supply the English market with another Faustian figure, by no means the first created by H.G. Wells, nor the earliest in the history of Victorian literature. Portrayed as a dangerous...

The Four Feathers is a novel commonly read as a pro-imperialistic work of the early 1900s. This conjecture is often strengthened not only by the fact that its author, A.E.W. Mason, was also a politician -a Liberal member of parliament who could...

The character’s aspects presented by an individual in order to be perceived by others are known to form his persona. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung identified this as a psychological component of the individual himself, “a kind of mask, designated...

The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem telling the story of the last 50 days of the ten year long war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Although the poem is attributed to Homer, it is a compilation of the long-standing tradition of oral...

Synecdoche, New York (2008) is Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut film. The film explores themes such as death, neurosis, existentialism, postmodernism, etc. from the perspective of the aging theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Hoffman)....

War, perhaps one of the most destructive concepts established by society, is something that will continue despite the atrocities war brings to society. Once and Future King, a novelwritten by T.H.White, follows the journey of a young boy (Wart)...

Life for Americans during the early twentieth century was difficult. During this time, President Theodore Roosevelt was shot, the Titanic sank, and the United States entered World War I. To distract their minds from the great horror of their daily...

Anne Bradstreet, the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished writer from the New England colonies, is still broadly considered to be an important early American poet. Her work was first published in London in 1650 and achieved popular...

Harriet Jacobs was the first African American woman to author a slave narrative in the United States. Her autobiographical novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was originally published under the pseudonym Linda Brent. The story follows ‘...

Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” is popularly heralded as early feminist literature because the short story features two female characters who are able to solve a murder the male investigators cannot. Mrs. Hale, the narrator of the story,...

How does one define captivity? Is it the physical restraint of a person through threats and violence? Could one be captive of their society due to the roles and expectations assigned to them? Both of these questions pose possibilities when it...

How often should one focus on societal norms? According to the works of Frank Bidart, people should try to avoid these norms and the standards that the public creates at all costs. Through pieces, like “Ellen West”, Bidart shows his distain for...