Newest Literature Essays

In Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, supernatural plot elements entwine with Lisa’s development through adolescence. Under the neo-colonial Western view of the supernatural, these explanations would hardly seem satisfying to the hard line empirical...

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi uses several different points of view to narrate the story, including those of Miranda, her girlfriend Ore, Miranda’s twin brother Eliot, and with slightly less frequency, the house. The house is, in this...

Have you ever noticed that no matter what the context, you automatically associate the woods with creepiness and assume that the hero will rescue the damsel in distress? This is because the woods, damsel in distress, and hero are all examples of...

Novels are able to use both physical and psychological events to help shape a character or theme. They often act as building blocks for the meaning of the writing as a whole, and they are often thought invoking. In the novel, A Lesson Before Dying...

The movie Babel consists of 3 different stories, all interconnected by themes and ideas that are shared by the different stories. The three main themes that connect these stories are the loss of innocence as someone gets older, the idea of...

Johnathan Swift was an expert at satire, using irony and sarcasm as mediums to expose people’s stupidity and foolishness. The main targets of his irony were usually government and society. By writing Gulliver’s Travels in an adventurous style, he...

The ocean has provided a landscape for the unknown for centuries. Prior to the mapping of the world at the end of the 1700s, little was known of its vastness and conditions. Coleridge capitalizes on this notion of the ocean as a treacherous,...

The depiction of the Seven Deadly Sins serves a vital role in understanding the contexts through which works of literature explore religiosity and morality. Within both Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the portrayal of the...

The Asian American immigrant experience is often marked by both assimilation to American norms and, somewhat ironically, exclusion from the dominant American culture. In her novel Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe describes the concept of immigrant...

Irmgard Keun’s 1932 novel The Artificial Silk Girl opens a window into the life of a young woman in the early 1930s. Doris, the protagonist, is a young woman from a working-class family navigating life in Germany in 1931. Doris is uneducated and...

The purpose of this essay is to examine to what extent Dante presents pride as being the basis for all sin in La Commedia, and whether he portrays pride as being a qualifiable or justifiable evil. Pride is defined as feelings of your own worth and...

Jenseits von Gut and Böse not only calls into question the nature of the contemporary system of morality and the value that mankind places on actions, but indeed the necessity of morality when this serves to hinder human development and survival....

The purpose of this essay is to investigate to what extent Goethe’s Urfaust can be considered a complete work, or whether its fractured nature destines it to seen only as an unfinished draft that would later become Faust part I. Crucial to...

The aim of this essay is to investigate to what extent Kafka conveys a collapse in communication, how he achieves this enterprise, the significance of this goal, and the effect his literary decisions have upon the reader’s perception of the...

Innovation of existing genre norms and conventions is an important fixture in literature from the late-17th through mid-19th centuries. A time characterized by much societal change, as literature grew available to the masses, more women became...

Editorialising is what separates opinions; it breeds new thought regardless of fact or fiction, the truth can be questioned or credited. Editorialising is how mass media appeal to audiences, the opinions they share and the stories they choose to...

When you think of Alice in Wonderland, what do you think of? Maybe a small girl, with her imagination running free during a nap outside. Maybe a girl tripping on acid or another hallucinogenic drug. Or perhaps, when you imagine Alice in...

First influences and early lessons in life from one or both parents last a lifetime and heavily influence the growth and maturity of the child. In terms of the poem, a son’s growth is heavily influenced by the actions of his father, and small...

Sarah Daggar-Nickson’s A Vigilante is about Sadie, a survivor of domestic abuse who transforms into a figure capable of helping other women who have nowhere else to turn. Indeed, she becomes the eponymous, avenging warrior that punishes men who...

World War I, argues Susan Grayzel, acted as a ‘catalyst for enormous changes in all aspects of life, including ideas about gender and the behavior of women and men.’[1] More women than ever before challenged contemporary ‘spheres of interest’...

Buddhism began with a man named Siddhartha Gautama. Over two thousand years later, Herman Hesse wrote a story with a protagonist who also happens to be named Siddhartha. The shared name was no coincidence as Hesse’s novel tells the tale of a man...

The struggle of losing a parent or of losing a child, of not belonging, of feeling as though your efforts will never amount to anything, the struggle of being alone although you are not physically alone. These are all struggles that can be...

In the best-selling novel Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, Peter Wiggin is the brother of the protagonist, Ender Wiggin. Peter is proud and violent with an inability to be likable, one of the primary reasons he was not selected for battle...

Fiela’s Child by Dalene Matthee follows the life of Benjamin as he is separated from the Komoeties to live with his apparent birth family (the van Rooyens). As the story progresses, Benjamin’s transition reflects the tensions between his two...