Newest Literature Essays

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...

The Duchess of Malfi is a Jacobean revenge tragedy play written by the English dramatist John Webster in 1612–1613. The play begins as a love story, when the Duchess marries beneath her class, and ends as a nightmarish tragedy as her two brothers...

In the past few decades, an expanding market economy and increased interaction with the global world has led to new generations of contemporary Chinese artists working on the global stage. While some have taken on a critical view of the cultural...

Everyone in life has experienced a moment where we feel out of place. The feeling of being unlike all others and going against the norms of society has had major impacts in the lives of everyone. For many years now, society has provided the ideal...

The 1987 film Dirty Dancing has often been dismissed as a trivial coming-of-age story, one which simply centres around a teenage girl’s fantasy – arguably the most denigrated yet necessary narrative in popular culture. The political implications...

John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is an ambiguous play regarding its position on gender, which makes it particularly fascinating. It certainly utilises the inherited categories and assumptions about female behaviour which were prevalent in the...

Billy Elliot is a British film, released in 2000, by director Stephen Daldry, which tells the story of a miner’s son who suddenly discovers that he enjoys ballet more than boxing. Set in Northern England, in 1984, with the political context of the...

Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation conceives of early twenty-first-century America as an anxious nation, raising a generation of young people simultaneously overstimulated and underwhelmed by the world in which they find...

Paul Thompson’s The Farm Show shares several similarities with Theatre Passe Muraille’s production of Jinch Malrex. The Drawer Boy is based on Theatre Passe Muraille’s production of The Farm Show and follows a young actor as he shadows the daily...

Exposure to certain aspects of modernization results in varied effects on the culture of a people. Ole Kulet examines the concept of alienation in Blossoms of the Savannah through characters who embody specific values and traits that are alien to...

Russian Formalism refers to form of literary criticism founded during the 20th century and it shapes the work and ideas of a number of eastern-European scholars such as Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky. A primary distinction between Russian...

Issues of wealth are addressed as central concerns of the texts The Duchess of Malfi (Webster, 2012) and Oroonoko; Or, The Royal Slave (Behn, 2012). The exploration of character portrayal within different social standings and how the...

The Quilt or ‘Lihaf ’ as popularly known is a short story by Ismat Chughtai which was published in the year 1941 in a leading urdu magazine of the time and was received amdist a lot of controversy and chaos. And rightly so, given how much the...

Life's greatest tragedies will scorch madness and vengeance into the hearts of those willing to toss aside their humanity. Hamlet, consumed by calamity, names himself an Archangel of Death in the Shakespearean tragedy. A striking historical play...

The 2014 science fiction independent film, Ex Machina, explored the world of artificial intelligence, while challenging the understanding of human consciousness. The story follows Caleb, a young programmer at an internet-search giant, who wins a...

Although shocking, violence in the plays and films of Martin McDonagh is not out of place. Instead, McDonagh creates violent relationships, delicate balances of trauma, and vicarious enjoyment of the violence to construct a primitive and...

The Love Suicides at Amijima is a play that was meant to serve as a social commentary rather than portray an epic romance. However, the 1969 film adaptation appears to take a different approach to the story. Based on the two opening scenes that...

Described by Fredric Jameson as a loss of historicity and by Brian McHale as a fascination with the ontological, the term postmodernism seems to have taken many different variations. At its very essence, this movement encompasses a questioning of...

Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) is perhaps his most famous work, and has justified claim to be categorised as a text of ‘transatlantic identity’. For the purpose of this essay, the definition of ‘transatlantic identity’ will be as follows:...