Newest Literature Essays

The piece “My First Son”, was written by Ben Johnson and the poem “Mid-Term Break” was written by Seamus Heaney. Both poems revolve around the death of a loved one. The directed audience of both these poems, are people who have lost someone close...

In Jessica Hua’s “Accepted,” she examines the idea of belonging through the story of Elaine Park, a Stanford reject attempting to break into the school community. Elaine is fooled into believing she belongs where she does not, and as she discovers...

Sethe, Paul D, and other former slave characters of Toni Morrison’s Beloved display clear signs of post traumatic stress coming from their experience in slavery and the events that resulted. For the audiences of her novel, slavery is an...

The preface of a piece of literature generally provides an introduction by the author to what will be discussed, and often, the purpose of this discussion. Similarly, in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, the reader is introduced to the premise of the...

The plot of most novels is said to have layers which generally fall in the structure of rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. These layers are all parts that centralize around a type of conflict, such as individual versus self or...

In his paper “Secularization, R.I.P.,” Rodney Stark argues that the secularization thesis has been wholly disproven. This thesis, the notion that religious beliefs would gradually disappear as modernization progressed, is based on several...

In “The Politics of UFOs,” a chapter from her book Republic of Lies, author Anna Merlan recounts her attendance at a conference for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the largest and oldest UFO research group in America. Being established in 1969,...

Shinkai Makoto is well known for his captivating animation and themes of young love, both are present in the 2016 film Kimi no Na wa or Your Name. The film was released three years after Makoto’s last movie so it was one of the most anticipated...

The Dream is different every time—a sparkling skyline framed in the glass panes of a downtown penthouse, a rambling, ivy-adorned mansion in the countryside, a cheery bungalow by the sea. There is only one thing that never changes: it’s yours. Or,...

Throughout all of Shakespeare's Macbeth, the protagonist, Macbeth, infected by prophecy, cruises a downward spiral into more and more vile and unjustifiable acts until he is slain by the loyal hero Macduff. Because of the frequent acts of malice...

There is often an indistinctive discrepancy between actuality and what tends to be an illusion of actuality. This concept of deception is often captured by many authors, who establish characters and implement facades that hide their true...

Throughout book 9 of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, Satan is generally presented as the personification of evil, largely fuelled by Milton’s own religious grounding. This pure evil is conveyed by Milton though Satan’s innate drive to destroy mankind...

The Sun reveals itself as a symbol and a motif in the book as early as Maman’s funeral, it continues to be a sort of mood setter for Meursault, it sometimes makes him feel calm and peaceful, while sometimes it annoys and torments him, it presents...

Michael Foucault, a French social theorist, believed that power and knowledge are used as a form of control in social institutions. In his book entitled "Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison," he describes how every level of the prison,...

In 1836 Angelina Grimke writes an “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” in hopes of inspiring southern Christian women to join in her advocacy to end slavery. During this time, people heavily invested themselves in their religion,...

This novel is the first of six books in Rachel Vincent’s series titled The Shifters. The series is based on a world where werecats exist and it depicts their everyday life in the werecat community, while also letting the reader peak into their...

Centered on subjectivity, literature in the Romantic period thrived with its unique feature of surfacing the writers’ inner emotions between the lines. Poetry being one of the most iconic literary forms during this period often deals with themes,...

In present-day society, cultural assumptions often dictate that sexuality and gender are mutually dependent categories and that one posits the other. Societal norms imply that gender is divided into men and women, and that appropriate sexual...

Though unity is devotedly sought after by societies, perfect harmony is rarely achieved. In the story “A Handful of Dates”, the love of money serves as a serious threat to the unity of the small Arabian community. Yet, the story’s focus does not...

Melodrama, as a genre, only started to be considered critically in the 1970s and is still a difficult genre to recognise as many films prescribed to other genres often contain overt melodramatic elements. However, a few directors heavily...

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is a neo-noir graphic novel that deals with complex issues of moral ambiguity and authority. Published as a twelve-part comic through 1986 and 1987, it has since come to redefine the genre of comics through...

Buckingham largely acts as a foil to Richard of Gloucester throughout much of Richard III. Both hubristic in their own ways, the pair are clearly two of a kind when it comes to their mastery of rhetoric and persuasion, having little difficulty in...

In the book What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, Malcolm Gladwell talks about Ron Popeil, the “Set it, and forget it” man in the segment “The Pitchman: Ron Popeil and the Conquest of the American Kitchen”. In this segment, Gladwell writes mainly...

By the 1950s, classical stylings in literature had been all but abandoned by American writers. Poets and novelists were bent on revolutionizing literature by rejecting traditional stylings and standards. After seemingly every arbitrary limit to...