Newest Literature Essays

After having been awakened from a gentle slumber in a brothel expecting to meet the bishop later that day, Santiago Nasar is met with his untimely demise; His death being the product of a pre-existing indifference ingrained within their Caribbean...

Othello is a tragedy by William Shakespeare set in Venice. Othello is a highly respected general and Iago is his ambitious comrade. Othello promotes Michael Cassio to the position of lieutenant and Iago becomes extremely jealous. Iago begins...

The Byronic Hero is a variant of the Romantic Hero who possesses an “expression which indicates a mixture of contempt and gloom”[1] and whose behaviour is unpredictable, “moodily taciturn and violently explosive.”[2] However, the Byronic Hero has...

Modernism was a movement that formed at the beginning of the twentieth century and lasted roughly 65 years. Cultural shocks, such as World War I, instigated the era of Modernism. While this war was meant to end all wars, people could not fathom...

In Life of Pi, Yann Martel juxtaposes issues of morality alongside the primitive necessity of survival. Pi’s life-threatening experiences while stranded on the Pacific Ocean threaten the integrity of his morals and beliefs. His pluralistic faith...

Twelve Angry Men is an allegorical play written by Reginald Rose in 1955. It depicts the way in which economic, social and cultural factors can have a significant impact on the process of justice. Rose encapsulates 1950s America through each of...

Marilyn French asserts that Shakespeare only constructs two types of women, the “virtuous subhuman or deceiving subhuman.”[1] In conjugation with the Elizabethan expectation of an “acceptable version of the feminine” woman, a woman who is passive,...

The Canterbury Tales is an estates satire, that not only points out the shortcomings and inequalities, but also the inauthenticity, that exist under feudalism’s code of social stratification. Examples of these characterizations of the estates are...

The war had been an enormous bomb blast. Everything thrown up, tumbling, turning and scattering high in the air. Now it was over; the whole lot was coming back down to land. But it was all settling in different places.

– Andrea Levy, Small Island...

Richard Foster states that The Importance of Being Earnest has a “multivalent nature”[1] and thus implies that a farce or comedy of manners are not particularly urbane genres and are therefore ‘unsuitable’ for The Importance of Being Earnest....

It is one of the greatest paradoxes in literature: a made-up story is more accurate than a factual story. Tim O’Brien sets out to prove this notion in The Things They Carried. This is a book of short stories, some of his personal war tales, some...

In the play Hippolytus, Euripides depicts characters in a realistic fashion by displaying their warring emotions in the wake of dramatic events, as well as their deceit in achieving their objectives. A prime example of such tactics is the...

W.H Auden’s poetry investigates a decent society as it is oppressed by political ideology and then by war. The prevailing political motivation of a fraught time period and the destructive impact of war are also illustrated in the Australian...

In Metamorphoses, Ovid attempts the great task of recounting the history of the world, from its creation to the death of Julius Caesar. However, Ovid's work is not solely an encyclopaedia of mythology; it is also the source of much standard...

After stabbing Captain Hook in an epic sword battle, Peter Pan cheerfully exclaims, “I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg!” This proclamation shows the relationship between adolescence, happiness, and nature. In...

In Skirrid Hill, Owen Sheers explores many themes, one of which is undoubtedly manhood. Throughout the collection, he often focuses in on adolescence and discovering his power as an individual. In this way, it seems clear that Sheers is a poet who...

In John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the audience’s opinion on the anti-hero Bosola and his moral integrity changes throughout the play due to his sudden catharsis and change in behavior after he realizes the consequences of his working for the...

In "Heart of Darkness", Conrad distances himself from the eurocentrism of the 19th century, offering a view of scepticism over dogmatic belief in the duplicities of colonial rhetoric. Through this, Conrad subtly undermines the claim of the...

"Heart of Darkness" is complex tale constructed through dichotomies of light versus darkness, a core of faith and belief versus hollowness, civilisation versus wilderness. Conrad, whilst purposefully introduces these contrasting binaries, he...

At the crux of Heart of Darkness lies a psychological and physical odyssey towards the confronting and profound realities of colonialism. Through constructing a complex tale based on opposites: civilised versus savagery, a core of faith and belief...

Justice in society is the ultimate destination for those who wish to uphold the truth; however, morality is contradicted by an individual’s choice to be uninvolved when personal serenity is at stake. The novel Jasper Jones upholds this idea...

The map is not the territory, the sculpture is not the subject, and the sequential arrangement of black marks on a white page or screen (or red ochre on a cave wall) is not the reality it attempts to depict. Every recorded human experience has...

In The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani, the narrator is a young Jewish man living in Fascist Italy prior to World War II. As more racial laws become implemented in Italy, he develops a deeper relationship with the Finzi-Continis,...

In his book Winter’s Bone, Daniel Woodrell follows sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly in her struggle to help her family survive in the bleak Ozarks. The protagonist must constantly maintain a crucial balance between caring for her mentally incapacitated...