Newest Literature Essays

Symbolism is a powerful tool used to represent key points and messages across in stories. The symbols present in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini reveal important details in the development of the story. The table, where Mariam sits...

When comparing Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre to fellow Victorian novelist, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, one might feel inclined to draw similarities between the title character of the former, to Dorothea Brooke. However, the Middlemarch character...

Commonly used to help, medication has been associated in a positive light. Vaccines help protect against diseases, asthma inhalers help relieve asthma attacks, and anti-nausea medications help alleviate queasiness. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex is...

Human experiences are inevitably complex as they are compacted with inconsistencies and paradoxes in human behavior and motivations. Storytelling serves as a vehicle where we may share these experiences. This idea is evident in William Shakespeare...

Seamus Heaney, a 20th century poet from Northern Ireland, is well known for composing pieces that were strongly influenced by his local background. Heaney’s preoccupation with this largely rural setting, as it appears through the lens of his own...

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, published posthumously in 1920, is a ferocious denunciation of the war propagandists who with blind patriotism, glorify warfare. Owen intended to explicitly respond to Jesse Pope’s enthusiastic war poems....

Much like her main characters, anthropologist and world-renowned author Zora Neale Hurston endeavored the pressures of being molded into a perception of a Black person she was not per se, but she chose not to consciously acknowledge. Hurston knew...

The confidante typically is known for being present when the hero or heroine needs a sympathetic listener to confide in, but that is not the case in Sula. Instead, Nel is there to show how the main character differs from the rest of the women in...

In Annie Dillard’s essay, “Living Like Weasels”, she reminisces on her encounter with a weasel, and even though the weasel was a mere animal, it invoked life altering thoughts from within the author. Dillard compares the life of a wild weasel to...

Writing on the relationship between memories and narratives, theorist Derek Neal argues that ‘consciousness, memory and storytelling are intricately linked’ (954). This statement becomes especially relevant when, as will be explored within this...

The relationship between psychology and narratives is so inherent and well-established that there is a theoretical perspective within psychological thought, ‘Narrative Psychology’, that studies the ways in which humans create, observe, and listen...

Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters is an intricately written novel that weaves multiple threads of narrative through the Philippines of the 1950s. Within its depiction of the disarrayed postcolonial country, various literary devices are used to enhance...

While promoting his new film, Django Unchained, in 2012, director Quentin Tarantino promised audiences ‘ a new, virgin-snow kind of genre’, which he referred to as ‘the Southern’.[1] Tarantino claimed that the originality of the film – which...

Taika Waititi, perhaps best known for directing films like Thor: Ragnarok, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and What We Do in the Shadows, remarked that simply, Jojo Rabbit is an “anti-hate” film. Much more broadly, though, Jojo Rabbit exposes the...

Flower arranging, a lost razor, bestiality–all topics which are discussed in Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who is Sylvia. Despite its seeming inconsequentiality, the discussion of flower arranging in Act I when paired with the destruction of items in...

The wall is a humanly constructed element that reflects man’s beliefs and struggles. The purpose of the existence of the walls is controversial in which walls can be divided into a wall of enmity or a wall of amity (Bradatan 3). Walls of amity...

Brideshead Revisited acts as an ode to the dying English aristocracy which Charles Ryder appears to admire so much. Martin Amis asserts that the novel ‘squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe and proceeds to rubbish it accordingly’, with...

How there are tyrants while there are no slaves? (Jose Rizal). Colonization is an action done for the aim of establishing control over others or a specific domain because of the colonizer’s assumption of their own superiority and others...

Rife with mechanistic imagery and characterization, the appearance of the water lily in Episode Six mimics the momentary respite which Helen Jones experiences in the presence of Mr. Roe. Nevertheless, the bowl with the water lily and its...

Throughout its long and storied history, the war film has both entertained and informed audiences across the world. Invariably, bad, good, and great war films are released every year. Great war films, though, typically tell an exceptionally simple...

Critics who have worked on Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests invariably make the point that the play was written for the occasion of the celebration of the independence of Nigeria in 1960 and is thus a metaphorical commentary on the political...

Despite the numerous attempts to blur boundaries between the genders, it is inevitable that literature reflecting the city will categorise characters to fit into the expectations of the sexes. In fact, ‘the gender of a character … implies...

In his novel Oliver Twist, Charles Dicken presents the city – more specifically, London – as a place which entraps the people who exist within it, both physically and socially. This is particularly noticeable when compared to the text’s depiction...

British Children’s Literature traditionally tells a story whilst instilling a moral message for the intended children readership – commonplace in genres such as the conduct book and the cautionary tale. In fact, critic Peter Hunt believes that ‘it...