Newest Literature Essays

The Masquerade of the Red Death and the Moustache, by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Cormier, are two short-stories that describe a common theme through similar rhetoric. In the Masquerade of Red Death, a wealthy young prince by the name of Prospero...

In George Orwell’s renowned novel, 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith continues to preserve his normal, day to day tendencies while secretly questioning the rigid policies of Oceania’s ominously dark society privately within his mind. Although...

In Stephen King’s The Green Mile, King’s characterization of death row inmate John Coffey as someone living with an intellectual disability, which oftentimes throughout the novel has the effect of infantilizing Coffey, works to challenge readers’...

Stephen King’s The Green Mile is an overtly Magical Realist text by means of one of the novel’s focal protagonists – John Coffey. Coffey is summarily described by Nada Hussein as ‘the huge Black prisoner [who] has magical healing abilities […]...

Beginning from the title, “A Simple Heart”, the reader can already sense a tone of fondness emoting from the author. Despite his intellect and pride in his education which is a stark contrast from his main character, Gustave Flaubert depicts...

“Show, don’t tell” is a timeless technique persisting in various media industries, inclusive for both literature and film. Tying together the two lies Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, chronicling the struggles of the eponymous George Washington...

As one of the many literary voices illustrating Lo Real Maravilloso, commonly known as magical realism, Carlos Fuentes’s novel The Old Gringo captures imagery of the Mexican landscape through vivid language that enhances associations between...

Sarah Miles may have had the façade of a loyal, loving wife, but at night her promiscuous nature was revealed. She became addicted to the covertness of affairs and longed to be embraced as her husband never did. Her desire to have a physical...

Vile Bodies is an amusing text which considers the trivial concerns of the youth of upper class London society in the early 20th century. The novel is often absurd and the plethora of characters who weave in and out of the narrative can leave the...

William Faulkner’s Dry September narrates the forming of a lynch mob in response to an improbable accusation of sexual violence, made by an aging spinster, against a black watchman, Will Mayes, in the small fictional town of Jefferson,...

In “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Mary Louise Pratt proposes the idea of “contact zones” as areas of interaction between cultures in the New World. Pratt defines “contact zones” as areas where cultures “meet, clash and grapple […] often in contexts...

Situated in the liminal space between literal and figurative expression, a symbol possesses constructed meaning that both transcends, and is indebted to, its empirical counterpart. Thus, there exists both a symbolic nightingale, borne of literary...

Many of the characters in Infinite Jest struggle throughout the novel with justifying and defending the existence of God despite the existence of evil in the world. The Higher Power, AA, CA, and NA’s non-denominational redeemer of addiction...

At the end of his lecture entitled “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,” Freud addresses the artist as a psychoanalytic subject in a brief but intriguing tangent. Though artists are never again discussed after this brief passage, Freud’s...

In his 2017 film Get Out, Jordan Peele explores some of the mechanisms of racism that have oppressed people of colour and their impact on modern society to a great extent. He exposes his audience to the concept of white feminism and...

Boyz n the Hood is mainly centred around 3 teenagers; Ricky, Doughboy and Tre; All 3 of which wish to embark on different paths. They live in the Crenshaw ghettos, Singleton uses Ricky in particular to break prejudices surrounding young black...

Over the years, literature has played a vital part in explaining and relating various aspects of a multitude of societies and cultures, and feminine status is one of the most common subjects of analysis to date. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is no...

In William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Shakespeare closely transcends the idea of an appetite for love from Of Apolonius and Silla by Barnabb Rich. The appetite for love is demonstrated through many characters throughout Twelfth Night and is one...

Many have tried, but few directors have been able to adapt famed author Cormac McCarthy’s works for the screen. At best, a film like 2007’s No Country for Old Men is made; at worst, 2013’s The Counselor, which is widely regarded as one of the ten...

In “Today I Am Paul” by Martin L. Shoemaker, the narrator is an android whose purpose is to care for Mildred, an elderly woman suffering from Alzheimer’s, both medically, and mentally, by emulating family that could not be with Mildred at the...

Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn is narrated by an unnamed white woman whose life overlaps with Oroonoko’s during his time as a slave in Surinam. When Oroonoko takes the narrator and several other European people to an island she...

In A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, there are several key moments that force the protagonist, Ged, to better himself as a wizard in order to continue on with his life. One of the most critical events to his development is his encounter...

“Much Ado About Nothing” by William Shakespeare brings to life the story of how Count Claudio and fair Hero prepare for their wedding and how Hero’s father, Leonato, and Claudio’s mentor, Don Pedro, choose to pass the time by deceiving Beatrice...

Through Antony’s negligence of his Roman duties and soldierly responsibilities, Shakespeare depicts a particularly fractured and complicated world in the first act of ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ that is characterised by the very public conflicts...