Newest Literature Essays

American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once stated, “Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.” While many would agree with Emerson’s claim that materialistic gain is insignificant without core values and a strong moral compass, the community of...

The poem “Daphne with her thighs in bark,” written by Eavan Boland in Night Feed, takes its title from the first line of the poem “XII” from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, by Ezra Pound. In Pound’s poem, this first line is a translation from Le Château du...

“Imagination is the only weapon

In the war against reality.”

- Jules de Gaultier, French Philosopher

Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are literary works related by the common...

The poems “West London” by Matthew Arnold and “The Architect and the Vagrant” by K. Sello Duiker offer readers a criticism of a society that separates the social classes. Both poets emphasise the segregation of the wealthy (the group that society...

Set across post-union, pre-apartheid South Africa, Down 2nd Avenue follows Eseki – Es’kia Mphahlele – as he recalls the days of his youth. Throughout the narrative, focus is placed on gender, femininity, and masculinity. This focus, however, is...

Within Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples, the notions and ideologies of Afrikaner identity is perpetuated through hegemonic masculinity. This asserts that “between [Frikkie, Johan and Marnus] the secret [of Frikkie’s rape] will always be safe”....

Although the law is meant to be clearly defined, most of the time, it can be interpreted differently. In his essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Jonathan Lethem emphasizes the law’s unclear definitions and the way people use them for...

The film Spotlight is constructed on the 2002 inquiries of substantial child sexual abuse acts conducted by many priests in the Catholic Church. The inquiry was led by a remarkable exploratory journalism squad at the Boston Globe. The team was...

Moby Dick is not a story-driven book, but one that delves deeply into subjects such as fate, presence of God in daily life, and reading. Melville, a progressive and innovative writer, deploys the idea of reading and interoperation into every...

The ‘ubi sunt’ topos is a powerful Christian homiletic motif which poses the question “where are those who went before us?”. The motif functions in a similar way to the Horatian emphasis on ‘eheu fugaces’, stating that everything is destined to...

What is literary inheritance? This is a concept that claims that authors receive the works of earlier authors, which they can implement and add on to in their own pieces. This is important for writers and literature, as it helps inspire future...

A Wall of Fire Rising by Edwidge Danticat depicts the emotions of guilt and regret in a financially struggling family in Haiti. The focal character of the story, Guy, suffers from this guilt and regret as the father of his family, longing for a...

The poems Ballad of the Landlord by Langston Hughes and Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane by Etheridge Knight convey a powerful message about the treatment of African Americans in the early-mid 1900s. The...

Among all literary techniques, the irony is widely dominated the post-world war fiction. It is very significant to point out the mood of dissatisfaction and disillusionment of society which saw the disaster caused by the first World War. Through...

Many tragic villains throughout a scope of tragedies have left audiences debating whether they were truly in the wrong, writers often introduce an ambiguity to their plays, novels or poems to allow the audience to debate the morality of the play....

From the very start of Inferno, Dante is thrust into a world of endless pain and suffering, watching the souls forever trapped in the consequences of their sins. Specifically, Dante uses landscape and weather phenomena of each circle as his tools...

The central narrators in James' The Turn of the Screw and Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day are both outsiders, in more than one sense of the word. Their job titles literally make them outsiders to the stories they tell, but in more subtle ways,...

Flaubert uses the letter from Rodolphe to Emma as a symbol for their relationship by recounting and clarifying the tendencies and actions of both characters, to show how these have led to the downfall of their relationship. Flaubert concentrates...

The openings of Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw establish the style and atmosphere to come, without addressing any of the content. As the opening scenes are completely isolated, they bring in alternative perspectives on how to approach...

The openings of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Brontë's Jane Eyre are both centered around introducing the main characters, Stevens and Jane, respectively. Through the first-person narration, their personalities, settings and situations are...

A detailed description allows people to imagine even though not visible. Authors like Flannery O' Connor, in their works, have put in huge details in order to awaken the senses of the readers and help imagine the minutest of details. This aids...

Poetry can be a powerful medium in expressing an opinion which is then left to the reader’s interpretation. Maya Angelou’s poetry does not merely ‘remind’ us of our conscience but challenges our sense of right and wrong to protest against...

Chinua Achebe’s autoethnographic novel “Things Fall Apart “written in 1958 can be viewed as an attempt to destroy the misleading conceptions about Igbo culture that were given to the world by European writers. The way novel presents the arrival of...