Newest Literature Essays

Throughout the course of history, women have had a variety of social roles, some of which can be seen through the lens of literature written during various different eras. Using several cantos from Inferno, part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy,...

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the color yellow is a prevalent hue within the narrative's depiction of high society. Although interchangeable with the color gold, there are two distinct connotations in the mention of each color. While...

“During the early 1900s, the burgeoning African-American middle class began pushing a new political agenda that advocated racial equality. The epicenter of this movement was in New York, where three of the largest civil rights groups established...

The past plays a large role in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, as well as in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Both short stories involve women who bring up – and sometimes focus on – the past and how the world used to be....

In The Plague, Albert Camus writes about a plague that strikes the Algerian town of Oran around 1940 and devastates the residents who did not expect a plague. This work of fiction takes on meaning beyond the plague itself by looking at how the...

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage abandons the idea of war as glorious and ideal, and instead shows war as rough and arduous, able to break an idealistic but untested person. The novel also departs from tradition by depicting its...

56% of audiences for the premier The Legend of Tarzan were women. 34% were men. The same is true for George of the Jungle and 300. Film School Rejects author Kristen Lopez hypothesizes that perhaps the turnout was for Alexander Skarsgard's...

In the play My Children! My Africa! by Athol Fugard, the characters' desires may be similar, but their many limitations due to social and political differences all contribute to conflicted viewpoints. Thami, Mr. M, and Isabel have difficulty...

After the end of World War II, Americans lived under the fear of nuclear war. The government built up huge arsenals of nuclear bombs, and used propaganda to assuage the American people’s fear. The best known example of that is the Duck and Cover...

Being the son of a pyromaniac involves a vast amount of trust and requires protecting the family at all costs. In William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” Colonel Sartoris “Sarty” Snopes, son of the pyromaniac Abner Snopes, is a young boy who must make...

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is part of a select club of books that yield both fantastic reads and excellent film adaptions. The movie is enjoyable even though it altered the book, both for the sake of brevity and for artistic...

Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is set in a mental institution, where the characters’ mental illnesses reveal much to the reader. Kesey enlightens the reader by characterizing the reticent Chief Bromden, who narrates the main...

The mind tends to remain at a stasis, neither consumed by pure ecstasy nor ridden with fearful anxiety. However, there may come a point in time when thoughts fluctuate between the two extremes until we are jolted back to reality’s state of...

In a world run by major corporations, it is not uncommon to find one’s self in a position of very little control, even over one’s own life. This feeling caused by lack of power and the other grieves of life sometimes brings about a feeling of...

Fear is one of the strongest emotions experienced by humans, so much so that it plays a drastic role in influencing the actions of men and women. This concept is one that appears frequently throughout Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, a riveting tale...

Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit explores the themes of homosexuality and relationships affected by difference. Throughout this novel, it is clear that there are symbols present that carry the overall meaning in this piece....

The philosophical concept of The Sublime, though typically hard to define due to its complex nature, is most often described as an object or a surrounding which evokes a feeling of profound awe when viewed. The key difference between the concept...

Societies attempt to create a world which is beneficial for all, in which all individuals are happy and content. A world like this, however, is hard to attain: People have various conceptions of how a perfect world operates, and how to achieve a...

Jane Austen, through the development of socially conscious female characters, is able to render a remarkably accurate depiction of the social structure present during the late 18th century. Her social commentary, however, highlights certain...

Perhaps one of the most potent methods to elucidate the strengths and weaknesses of a protagonist, a foil illuminates the meaning of a work with character balance and meaningful juxtaposition. In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand indeed makes use of such...

Simply by existing as a product of the human genome and becoming integrated into society, one unavoidably becomes aware of the fact that there is a wide range of good and bad that men and women are capable of. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old...

On the surface, William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (1604) and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) are very similar. The title character of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a man of color whose marriage with a white...

We are all chasing our own fish. We're all trying desperately to grasp something that is just out of our reach. For Santiago, the main character in Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea, he is chasing a literal fish. He exhibits exceptional amounts...

Although Waiting for Godot and Mother Courage and Her Children are quite different in terms of plot structure and setting, there are similarities present in the use of bleak imagery as symbols of religious, social, and political criticism. The...