Newest Literature Essays

In the early 1900s, the time period in which the novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow takes place, expectations were that women should be submissive, obedient, and dependent upon their husbands. Women were considered weak, fragile, and in need of...

In Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, despite Blanche Dubois’ desire to start fresh in New Orleans, her condescending nature, inability to act appropriately on her desires, and denial of reality all lead to her downfall. Blanche...

In The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester Prynne Prynne redefines herself despite being shunned by the Puritan community. Although she has sinned, she does not dwell in the past. She grows stronger as a person from the cruelty of the...

In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, the sea symbolizes Edna’s freedom from oppression. Edna feels suffocated by conventional society and has no interest in being a devoted wife or mother. She feels trapped with Leonce and her children, but does not...

Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was more effective than Brutus’ because Antony used a multifaceted emotional argument, instead of relying on one assertion, as Brutus had. Because of this, Antony was able to sway...

As a story of appalling crime and retribution, Shakespeare's Macbeth is unique in ascribing greater attention to unscrupulous criminals than to their victims. As such, the overall mood of the play must be taken with respect to the context; the...

The extract from Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby depicts the events that occur after the Buchanans, Nick and Gatsby return from New York, after Daisy drives into and kills Myrtle, while letting Gatsby take the blame. Themes explored in this...

Though he is by no means a single-minded man, Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti focus largely on the beauty and physical form of the woman he addresses these poems to. In seven of these sonnets, he calls this woman’s beauty her “hew”, or in the modern...

Mark Twain’s novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, describes the journey of a boy named Huck and a runaway slave, Jim, heading down the Mississippi river in hope of freedom. While Jim is trying to free his family and escape slavery, Huck wants to...

The character of Daisy Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is not the women she first appears to be. In the beginning, we see her as an innocent, charming woman, the Daisy that Gatsby had fallen in love with. As we go further into...

When the Paris curtain opened in 1953 the audience was faced with a minimalist set with a tree and nothing else. The first sight of ‘En Attendant Godot’ suggests its bleakest tones are presented by Beckett through visual sadness and the overall...

It appears that all comedies throughout all ages relies on the accuracy of its meta-commentary, all successful comedies inhabit a illusionary world filled with flickering shadows of truth and mirrors filled with elements of human behaviour. In...

In today’s day and age, it is said that a persons’ economic background, perseverance and innate talents determine how successful they will be in life. It is believed that the “American Dream” can only be achieved by those privileged few who were...

In Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock were convicted of murdering the entire Clutter Family. When proven guilty, both Perry and Dick were sentenced to death. Though Perry had been the one to murder the...

The battle between the need for structure and the creative freedom of chaos is one that sits at the heart much of great literature. They are never discussed as harmonious or complimenting; they must be in conflict and locked in eternal struggle....

It’s impossible to analyse Beckett without struggling with his work’s abstract, surreal nature; the typical minimalist language mixed with abnormal premises make it difficult to find comprehensible meaning. Due to this universal difficulty Beckett...

When reading through Goethe’s version of "The Erl-King," then Carter’s, it is striking how different many of the core elements are between the two stories. Major changes Carter has made include the introduction of a female character and the...

Two concepts often appear to be in conflict or contrast at the heart of Gothic fiction; the dualities of good and bad are often critical to the formation of the literature. Within ‘Dr. Faustus’ the battle between good and bad is particularly...

In the novel Tusk and Stone, by Malcolm Bosse, Arjun is the dynamic character. A dynamic character is one who learns a lesson or changes behavior as a result of story events. When he is first introduced, Arjun is living with his family members...

In the 1861 novel Great Expectations, Charles Dickens tells the story of a poor English boy named Pip who faces a number of complicated situations and characters on his way to becoming a gentleman. Dickens’ writing style, while indicative of the...

The English language is slightly limited when it comes to “love”. Love is the only word that the language offers to describe, well, love. Despite people loving certain people (or things) in different ways--the love a best friend receives is...

William Yeats said, “I am of a healthy and long lived race, and our minds improve with age.” It’s true that as individuals face the world, they can only gain wisdom from exposure. For a young Jeannette Walls, it’s none other than her troubling...

The equation of “civilization is sterilization” is central to the theme of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. To the “sterilized” mind, this idea would simply mean that cleanliness is the hallmark of a civilized population; it is exactly what...