Newest Literature Essays

Douloti the Bountiful is one of the three short stories in Mahashweta Devi’s book, Imaginary Map which delves into the unglamorous lives and unattended issues of tribal life in India. The novella conjoins the evil practice of bonded labor and...

‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ is set in New Orleans in the late 1940’s, just two years after World War Two ended; resulting in the setting and context of the play being rich in history and culture, as New Orleans often is. It was seen as a melting...

What really matters in a poem, the form or the content? While many may assume that the content reigns supreme, it actually takes both form and content to create a poem that performs properly. This is because the form is not simply a device that...

Loving someone involves unearthing them: getting to know someone intimately, from their strengths to their weaknesses. Margaret Atwood explores this perspective on romance in her poem, “I Was Reading a Scientific Article” which portrays a speaker...

In his novel, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe masterfully uses his characters to convey larger human truths as well as to drive his plot. Things Fall Apart is about the colonialization of a Nigerian tribe called the Igbo, following the characters...

The film, The Queen, directed by Stephen Frears in 2006, talks about the whirlwind events that happened after the Princess Diana’s death. The Queen’s adherence to protocols and the royal family’s insistence on not appearing to make a statement...

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,...