Newest Literature Essays

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The history of the United States from the eyes of the "American Negro," to use the now-dated literary term, is both bleak and cruel. A...

“And anyway, why should the creature be happy?Your affectionate uncle,Screwtape” (Lewis 41).

In the preface to The Screwtape Letters, author and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis essentially clarifies the target audience of the work: “There are two...

Anne Bradstreet is one of the most prominent literary figures of the colonial era of American history, and she is often cited as one of the primary sources of Puritan literature. Some of her work carried undertones of pre-First-Wave feminism...

“Little Red Riding Hood” can be viewed as one of the most popular and famous bedtime fairytales. Based on the original counterpart, Angela Carter remolds this story by adding sexual elements through her work “The Company of Wolves”, in which the...

In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, the main character Clym Yeobright seems to disappoint everyone he loves upon his arrival home to Egdon Heath from Paris. His refusal to continue to lead the life he had previously been living in Paris is...

“Pape Satán, pape Satán aleppe!”[1] These baffling, untranslatable words screeched by Plutus in the Fourth Circle of Dante’s Inferno have been the subject of extensive linguistic exegesis for many years but, unfortunately, the attention given by...

Dionysos exists in a realm of contradictions and fluidity between binaries. Though a god, he appears in the bestial forms of a snake, bull, and lion, in addition to that of a human. Dionysos is a male god, yet has long, blonde, perfumed hair and...

Angels are one of the most primordial archetypes of the supernatural realm, identical to humans in almost every except for having wings, thus setting up an unavoidable moment of recognition: when an angel appears in this world, ye shall know him...

In Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew, a number of individuals assume different identities through an array of varying illusions. Deception is a prominent thematic concern within the play, as a multitude of characters adopt disguises,...

The tragedy is perhaps one of the oldest and most captivating forms of literature. While each is unique, nearly all tragedies exhibit certain traditional similarities in content and structure. One of the most defining of these similarities is the...

“Like William Faulkner and Willa Cather, John Steinbeck wrote his best fiction about the region in which he grew up and the people he knew from boyhood…” Paul McCarthy

Steinbeck’s novels of the common people and the troubles that beset them have...

Existentialism emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. Contrarily, environmental determinism suggests that society shapes individuals, allowing...

Suzanne Collins captivates readers of every age, race, and sex with her dystopian, slightly Orwellian novel, The Hunger Games. Aspects of it are reminiscent of Lois Lowry’s The Giver in that the society depicted is one in which mankind has...

Percival Everett writes Erasure with an incredibly avant-garde structure for a fiction novel. The primary narrative is actually a frame story in which a plethora of writings stemming from a myriad of genres are skillfully embedded. The work...

Margaret Edson’s play Wit, devalues the question ‘how are you feeling today?’ by the lack of emotion and the harsh clinical empathy that ruins the effect of the query in order to highlight the professional, physical, mental, and spiritual...

Plato’s Republic utilizes a political approach to answer what is essentially a moral question. In attempting to identify justice in the individual, Socrates takes an unmistakable turn toward the direction of political philosophy, describing the...

In The Histories, Herodotus offers an account of the events leading to the Greco-Persian Wars between the Achaemenid Empire and Greek city-states of 5th century BC and attempts to determine “the reason why they fought one another” (1.1). In...

The play Trifles by Susan Glaspell depicts the repressed roles of women in 1916 and holds underlying tones of the feminist movement shown through the two female lead characters, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale. This play paved the way for female writers...

Colson Whitehead has written an inordinately compelling post-apocalyptic science fiction novel centering around the zombie archetype. In Zone One, he deftly uses the zombie model to create a mediocracy—a populace of dependent thinkers who accept,...

Throughout the course of history, mystical concepts and magical elements have been woven into virtually every civilization’s culture. From angels and demons to fantastical creatures like unicorns and leprechauns, supernatural beliefs have...

August Wilson’s Fences is a classic play about African-American life written in 1983 and set sometime in the 1950s. It serves as the sixth installment in Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” which spans ten installments in total. Fences is a period piece...

Mysterious Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy about how arbitrary love is. The play shows a cast of characters with conflicting love interests, and midway through the text, many of their...

Ray Lawrence’s film Lantana and Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement share several key ideas that can be conveyed to the audience in similar ways. The guilt of betrayal, differences in class and the idea of love are all explored in depth by both author...

“Does this dress make me look fat?” It’s a common conception; women tell each other to wear black because the contrast is slimming. Politicians run attack ads on components to make themselves look better in comparison. The literary technique of...