Newest Literature Essays

Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker describes the difficult and oftentimes discouraging assimilation of a young Korean American, Henry Park. Throughout the novel, Henry struggles to find his true self in either Korean or American culture. His effort to...

Tumbling out of the cart, clashing into the dark grey stone, the cask explodes over the pavement, its contents seeping into the jagged cracks of the street. Perplexed by the event, the people watch intently before hastily running towards the...

Friendship is arguably the most relevant philosophical matter expounded upon in The Nicomachean Ethics. While other virtues may not be practiced on a daily basis, friendship and the implications of such a relationship are somewhat more consistent....

In Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, humans are described as exhibiting three types of coping mechanisms in order to relieve themselves of the suffering that they experience. One of these mechanisms is intoxication: to intoxicate one's...

In the novels Their Eyes Were Watching God and Love Medicine, Hurston and Erdrich (respectively) use the characterization of the women to promote women’s empowerment and self-fulfillment. Lulu can be seen within Erdrich’s work as the...

A character’s views on morality and material gain seem to form the distinction between being a “good” or “bad” character in Austen’s novel Mansfield Park. By conducting a character analysis of Lady Bertram, Mary Crawford, and Sir Thomas, one can...

In The Odyssey, Homer conveys themes of loyalty, authority, and reverence to the gods as he tells the story of Odysseus’ journey back to his home in Ithaca. All of these themes are exemplified in the disguised Odysseus’ encounter with Eumaeus, the...

For hundreds of years, the dominant culture in America has categorically underestimated black southern culture and vernacular, mistaking these segments of American life as largely simple, vulgar, and uneducated; Zora Neale Hurston sought to change...

The Children of Men by PD James depicts the life of Theodore “Theo” Faron alongside his five acquaintances Julian, Miriam, Rolf, Gascoigne, and Luke as they embark on a harrowing mission to privately birth the child that will likely become the...

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson portrays the life of its narrator, Ruthie, alongside her sister Lucille as the two grow from mere children to young women while being surrounded by the confusion of shifting guardians, as well as the influence of...

Often referred to as the leading writer of transcendentalism, Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson directed thousands in the 19th century to rediscovery of self through his literature. Among them, young New Englander Henry David Thoreau mirrored Emerson’...

During the 1800’s, when Mary Shelley first began to write, she struggled to show her husband Percy that she was in charge of herself and her artistry. Shelley describes Percy as constantly being anxious about her having to prove herself and find...

"Bien Pretty," as the title implies, is a story that invests in appearance. Throughout the story, prettiness is used as a proxy for authenticity and confidence in one’s identity, while ugliness is a stand-in for performed identity. Flavio’s...

Pride and Prejudice is a novel that applies to many literary audiences of many centuries. This novel, in many ways, is a social commentary about manners. The emotion “pride” is one of the largest themes in this nineteenth-century novel. Austen...

The acclaimed novel The Great Gatsby was written by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald in the year 1925. Throughout time, the book has been recognized for accurately representing the Roaring Twenties’ society in the United States, a point in...

The relationship between sex and power within literature is incredibly complex. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway features the main character Jake, who faces the relationship between sex and power via his impotence, as well as his love for a...

Pilgrim’s Progress is a work by John Bunyan that is considered to be one of the most well-known allegories of a spiritual journey. For one to even begin to understand this work, it is necessary to embark on one’s own personal spiritual journey....

One possible analysis of Shakespeare’s Measure of Measure follows a natural progression of criminal justice over the course of the play. Angelo’s hardline punishments in Act One reflect the eye for an eye, measure for measure justice of the Old...

Money is arguably one of the oldest social conventions still utilized in the world, constantly expanding its influence on mankind. Money once bought forgiveness and respect; today, one can purchase influence in government and even extend life with...

In the book of Genesis, God creates humans to serve as caretakers for the world that he created. He creates a garden to nourish them and to provide a location in which he can speak with the pair. Even after Adam and Eve are expelled from the...

Prep, written by Curtis Sittenfeld in 2005, was a New York Times bestseller. This narrative gives a glimpse of the prestigious boarding school experiences of a poor girl named Lee Fiora who comes from Indiana. The author directly reveals...

Chinua Achebe, author of “Dead Men’s Path,” was born in a village in eastern Nigeria; because he was a the son of a missionary, he had a Christian upbringing. He was educated in England at the London University but finished his schooling at...

In Arcadia, Tom Stoppard presents a dynamic interplay of order and disorder that exists ‘eternally and creatively’ (Demastes 91). Order is generally associated with laws, structure, control, and in the play, it is exemplified by the Classical...

William Shakespeare’s The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice depicts an odd juxtaposition of love in the romantic sense with wealth in the monetary sense. The characters in the text acknowledge both senses as valuable virtues, yet...