Newest Literature Essays

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...

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...