Newest Literature Essays

As Beatrice Battaglia rightly notes, Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night is not exclusively a “premonitory warning” about the threat of Nazi Germany on the eve of the Second World War (183). Rather, it confronts the discursive construction of a...

To bridge the gap between the inner and outer self, Heaney in "Badgers" evokes a sense of fear through the use of various techniques - namely, through the symbolism of the badgers themselves. What the badgers truly represent is open to...

Romantic poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and this essay’s focus, William Wordsworth, are all drawn to a particular theme in their respective work – the imagination. Imagination is a concept that defies easy analysis and one...

Both Pierre and The Blithedale Romance are structured around what Lucy would have called, if Hawthorne had written her, exhibiting secrets. Since he didn’t, she prefers the slightly less libidinally charged “disclose,” but this moment of...

Wim Wenders’ film and essay- poem can to be considered as ‘highly self conscious works’ simply due to the fact that they both raise issues about American culture and make a conscious effort to solve them. Did the fact that Philip suffered from a...

When soldiers are faced with war, they can have many feelings overtake them serving their time. One of those feelings is revenge, that “inflicting hurt or harm on someone for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands” so says Webster Dictionary....

Why do a lot of kids feel the need to do bad things to be cool? Kids feel the need to do bad things to be cool because someone is pressuring them to do that and the just want to fit in. In the short story, "On the Bridge" by Todd Strasser, the...

Lucy Sheehan rightly asserts that Mary Barton is one of a set of mid-century Victorian novels which “document the social problems arising from industrialization, urbanization, and extreme destitution” (35). She also notes Elizabeth Gaskell’s...

With the defeat of Jefferson Davis’ confederacy in 1865, the American South became a region marked by poverty. The Civil War not only destroyed large amounts of Southern infrastructure, but also devastated the demographic that would typically be...

In Filling Station, Elizabeth Bishop presents her readers with an image of urban life that at first seems filthy and repulsive; however, through subtle manipulation of techniques including tone change, connotation and structural shift, she...

The desolate winter setting of “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens symbolizes society’s emotional alienation. Published in 1923, the modernist poem proposes that one’s individual experience influences how they process audiovisual information. In...

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” the main character Robin bears a wooden weapon called a cudgel. Throughout the short story, the cudgel comes to define Robin’s relation to the conflict between his expectations and the reality...

In Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the title character becomes an obstinate fixture in the life of the unnamed narrator. Throughout the short story, readers are able to observe the depth of Bartleby’s intrusion through the personal...

Capote presents the murderer’s families as somewhat complicated as he researches them to try and find the motive. As a journalist writing a faction novel, his accounts of the families mostly come from them first-hand – however, he never mentions...

‘Phenomenal woman’, being semiotic of a woman’s stability and security in herself is particularly important in Angelou’s collection given that the one of the recurring themes projected consistently throughout her poems is the idea of confidence,...

Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved provides another perspective on the holocaust and uses real-life stories and experiences to explain the nature of the behavior of those involved, the oppressed and the oppressor. His essays are important in...

In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the character of Shylock begins the play with firm control over his daughter, his money, and his Jewish religion. Yet by the play’s conclusion, he is daughterless, has lost half of his wealth, and has been...

Given that William Shakespeare was writing in a period when ‘blackness [was] one of the many qualities, physical or otherwise, that isolate[d] and acutely degrade[d] those who possess[ed] it’, and ‘the male dominance over women and children in the...

For decades James Joyce has been canonized as a high modernist writer, and Ulysses as the archetypal modernist novel. However, as Emer Nolan observes, attempts to assimilate Joyce into the predominantly metropolitan modernist tradition habitually...

Leslie Marmon Silko can be considered a key figure within the Native American cultural renaissance that took place within the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century, within which increasing amounts of Native Americans – having...

'We and our families are pining and in misery, and want, and starvation! We demand a fair day's wages for a fair day's work! We are the slaves of capital - we demand protection to our labour. We are political serfs – and we demand to be free.’...

There are a variety of different methods in which to express oneself artistically. Some of the most eminent are through fiction writing and painting, however, one of the most historically sensitive and perceptive means of expression is through...

Because a shift to modernity can result in enormous, but detrimental, social change, T. S. Eliot’s dramatic monologue, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, criticizes the changing nature of society, characterized by the abandonment of...

The Novel Daisy Miller by Henry James portrays a study of an outgoing American tourist, Daisy herself, and the downfall of her reputation through the eyes of the narrator. Daisy Miller’s characterization throughout the novel is based solely on the...