Newest Literature Essays

Lines from the first laisse of the epic, The Song of Roland express the focus of the poem: the demise of paganism and the victory of the superior, Christianity through the will of God. “Saragossa . . .held by King Marsiliun who does not love God....

The Oresteia opens with a plea from a watchman: “I ask the gods for release from this misery” (3). This petition reveals the plight of many Aeschylus’ characters. The curse on the house of Atreus is one of corruption, and it is a curse that cannot...

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a collection of essays, all centered on anecdotes of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. The seemingly straightforward recollections slowly reveal dense layers of personal and metaphorical meanings...

Washington Irving

Washington Irving, considered the father and creator of the American short story, writes symbolically of American society through his characters and themes. Heis credited withbringing short stories into the Dark Romantic...

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being outlines a richly detailed world of philosophical and metaphysical exploration. The novel projects and addresses a variety of sociocultural, political and ideological issues of the period of...

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness presents an exciting exploration of the vast ethnic and geographical depths of Africa and the Congo River. The novella is a tale of immense conquest of new ground and culture, but under the primary level of the...

Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 explores the idea of a person living a tedious, restrictive life while trying to fool himself into believing in a sense of happiness. Similarly, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask,” proposes the idea...

In 1929, Ernest Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms. During this era, there were many books centered on the Great War. Percy Hutchinson, a contemporary writer for the New York Times, predicted that Hemingway’s book “[…] is to be given...

Ernest Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms, follows a distinct narrative structure. Each component of the plot – exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution – is contained within a book. This definite sectioning allows the...

While most people in society strive to have moral attributes, not everyone understands what traits are important in achieving this goal. Often, people attempt to model themselves after another’s example. In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, by...

In Much Ado About Nothing, love is fickle and volatile. Several pairs of characters fall in and out of love at nearly a moment’s notice and a few accept their emotions without question. Many complex events cause these sudden emotional changes to...

The poems “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Sir William Raleigh, and “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Christopher Marlowe have the same central theme, that love and nature are beautiful but don’t last forever. Both authors use...

In Raymond Carver’s short story “Beginners,” the use of alcohol is the most apparent and important image and helps show the characters’ true feelings about their love life. Through the characters’ consumption of alcohol, we are able to see their...

From a modern context, Conrad's representation of Africans in Heart of Darkness are often read as racist. This essay is an assessment of such representations in Heart of Darkness.

Joseph Conrad's frame narrative about Charles Marlow's journey down...

Love and hate require intimacy and heart-knowledge. Both emotions leave the individual subservient to the emotion and become compulsory for survival. If an emotion develops into a discernible obsession, it may eventually abandon the zealous lover...

When I realize how far the world has come in the decades of the past, I marvel at man’s ability to efficiently collaborate and make good things come out of teamwork, even through the barriers of the varying cultures in the world, including...

A family functions like a grapevine; its coarse green vines intertwine from the dusty dirt that conceals the intricate network of roots to the first cluster of sweet grapes that grow in the hot California sun. Similar to the growth pattern of a...

How is it that, almost 180 years after it was written, Americans today still read Tocqueville as if it were the most essential piece of American political thought? Maybe it’s because it is.

When reading chapters 7 through 10 of Volume 1, Part 2 in...

Two of the most influential pieces of epic literature ever written—John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy— have much more in common than it might first appear. Upon further examination of both the epics, it becomes...

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is an intriguing novel written in the perspective of young Lily Owens. Lily’s story begins while she is at her home with T Ray, her evil father who despises her. She runs away with her nanny, Rosaleen,...

In My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass, the setting plays a monumental role in the development of the story, elucidating how an individual’s environment can be nurturing or detrimental to his or her moral development. Douglass...

In The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, a moody and reflective tone with an ironic undertone is used effectively alongside formal, concrete diction, simple syntax and antithesis, expressive figurative language, and numerous allusions to the...

In Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet are doomed from the start, and the audience is aware of this from the prologue. “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes a pair of star-crossed lovers take their...

In both “Twelfth Night” by William Shakespeare and “Enduring Love” by Ian McEwan, the pursuit of love is presented within the main characters. Their attempts to pursue a relationship could be seen as romantic and passionate; however, it could also...