Newest Literature Essays

The images of stones, bones, and tar form a motif in Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus. From Alejo's sickness to the encounter with the nurse, these images are continually linked to each other to depict a wide range of the...

Susan Glaspell was only twenty-four-years-old when she covered the Hossack murder in Indianola, Iowa as a journalist. It would be many years before Glaspell would write her breakout play Trifles, a play that bears remarkable similarities to the...

Human nature undeniable has many facets is undeniable. Whether or not some character traits are superior to others, however, is debatable. One such deliberation is whether sense invariably triumphs over sensibility. Through her characters...

In modern literature, suspense and tension are almost essential in producing works that are both successful and interesting to the reader. These two aspects of literature are especially important in Truman Capote's novel, In Cold Blood, which...

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word,

paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon

in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded

to me like the name of some...

American society is rarely content with its present state. Rather, it constantly seeks ways to improve and enhance the current standard of living. Ideally, these changes should be paving the path to a better future, one in which hostility and...

Ernst Lubitsch's sparkling and elegant comedy, Trouble in Paradise, centers around three characters: a male thief, a female thief, and a wealthy widow. The bare bones of the characters suggest predation and immorality, but the storytelling...

The first U.S. Poet Laureate for three consecutive years (from 1997-2000), Pinsky has succeeded in much more than poetry. In 1984, for example, he was the author of an interactive fiction game called Mindwheel; today, he is the poetry editor for...

The vignettes and anecdotes interspersed throughout John Steinbeck's Cannery Row may, at first sight, seem tangential. Yet they are fundamental to the novel, not least because the plot line--throwing a party for Doc--would be insufficient to...

In the German films of the Expressionist Era of 1920-1927, class and wealth distinctions between people were presented visually in a variety of ways. All the films produced in this time period were silent, so distinctions of any kind between human...

A recurring theme that can be found in Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 is the conception that chaos has a tremendous effect on society. Pynchon engages in a dualistic method of literary technique to engender the realization of the...

Beowulf is an important text in the history of British literature as it is the first notable work to be written in the English language. Yet, it is significant beyond its chronological status. Containing both Christian and pagan elements, Beowulf...

The novels Things Fall Apart and The Joys of Motherhood both present Nigeria as a competitive, consumption-crazed country. Each novel, therefore, also creates a parallel between Nigeria and capitalist, Western societies--yet each one shows that...

Sylvia Plath composed her most famous - and infamous - poem "Daddy" at a time in her life when she must certainly have been contemplating suicide, or at the very least was in the grip of a devastating depression. At this point Plath, having been...

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey portrays women as overwhelmingly negative, either dominating or submissive. Nurse Ratched, Vera Harding, and Billy’s mother are controlling women who use fear to reign over men and mask their feminine...

In a novel about racism and slavery, one can not pay too much attention to the matter of colors. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, however, the issue of color is not confined to discussions on race. Blood, ribbon, even roosters, all vividly colored,...

Maturation and personal evolution of main characters typify the bildungsroman, a distinct novelistic form. The growth of characters Tom Buchanan, George Wilson, Jay Gatsby make F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and important example of the...

Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath" has been the subject of much critical attention. Many of the novel's detractors have concentrated their critiques not upon its literary failings, but rather its politics (Zirakzadeh). At the time of the...

E.M. Forster and Charles Dickens use their novels, Howard's End and Hard Times, respectively, to discuss the social inequalities of class. These inequalities are registered in their characters' different relationships to facts and knowledge. While...

Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is a melancholic poem that considers the possibility of immortality for the people buried in the churchyard the speaker visits. Although previous sections of the poem explore different ideas,...

Both James Joyce's Eveline and Thomas Hardy's The Son's Veto express the negative effects that service has upon an individual's life. While Joyce uses an intimate obligation, a promise to a dying mother, Hardy's story addresses a wider cultural...

In "Ode to a Nightingale," John Keats uses nature and a nightingale as figures for an optimistic view on mortality, and on the speaker's life specifically. Throughout the poem, the nightingale itself is an figure for the beautiful and cyclical...

Orson Welles' films Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai each pivot on a central pair of lovers. Despite the differences of the movies, each set of main characters share a set of characteristics. Both pairs of lovers (Susan Alexander and...

The opening act of The Winter's Tale is atypical among Shakespeare's late romances. Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles, King Lear, and Othello all open by unfolding the plays' major, and most dramatic, crises. The Winter's Tale, however, offers the...