Newest Literature Essays

When reading James Joyce’s, Dubliners, conformity and the role it plays in society are important themes. Throughout the text, the characters struggle to adhere to the “social norms” of their time. In numerous stories, the characters are tasked...

World War II is remembered as a struggle against an obviously evil entity; it was the Allied forces’ fight to put down the Axis powers and bring to an end the Nazi’s fascist regime. Allied troops are often exalted as heroes, and remembered for...

In Major Barbara, one’s religion is equated to their sense of morality, as well as their belief system. The play features a number of characters, each with strong and often conflicting convictions. These faiths shape the characters’ courses of...

Morality can be defined as a society’s set of values and beliefs. This, in turn, moulds the subject position of the members belonging to this society and defines what they perceive as right and wrong, thus giving birth to moral relativism. Moral...

In modern-day, power is an entity that everyone desires but the simplest things such as a person’s language or even the socioeconomic status can change the game. Language consists of many elements within but most are disregarded such as culture...

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go is developed slowly, following its characters as they unassumingly and quietly move through a dystopian landscape towards their deaths. The nature of this dystopian world unfolds piecemeal through Kathy’...

Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession both follow characters who are portrayed as existing on the limits of their respective societies. Santiago and Mrs. Warren both maintain their fringe positions...

Seconds after leaving the womb, babies start to take in the world around them. Although they may know little information about it or its inhabitants, they are taking the first steps on the road to becoming a human—being self-aware of existence. In...

Psychologically humans are wired to have certain feelings, needs, and thought patterns. However, when these are threatened lethal behavior is initiated in order to preserve themselves. By way of illustration, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood...

Through time, the beliefs of people have always been used to guide members of different societies on the accepted code of conduct. The way of life of these people is thus influenced by their beliefs, and whether or not they lead fulfilled lives is...

“It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships,” said Albert Memmi in his influential book entitled The Colonizer and the Colonized. This statement...

Edna O’Brien’s trilogy “The Country Girls,” republished in 1986, follows two young Irish women as they navigate a system which is not built to allow them success. O’Brien explores many ways in which the society of her time negatively affected...

Gothic fiction as it existed in the Victorian literary scene up to the 1900s was a part of and a reaction to the overwhelming speed at which modernity was taking hold of England leading up to the Industrial revolution. The gothic genre was a way...

An act of transgression is the start of a new consciousness and for Dante Alighieri the visionary experience is initiated with such an action. La Vita Nuova explores ideas of love, poetry, and expression of the self through the Beatrician moment...

The Caucasian Chalk Circle, at its essence, is a play in which Brecht brings out the idea of negligence and irresponsibility. In the war-ravaged Grusinia, the leaders are portrayed as not only being indifferent to the cry of their subjects but...

Sexual assault is an issue that many people are unfortunate to face as it can affect people of any age, race, or location. Nearly everyone has heard of sexual assault, but many people disregard it as a fake issue making it hard for anyone out to...

“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies!...I have given you my soul; leave me my name!” (Miller 143)

This quotation is found both in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible and in Aaron...

Rick Riordan’s book series for young adults follows the adventures of teenager Percy Jackson as he fights monsters, carries out quests, and generally acts the hero after discovering that the father he never knew is the Greek god Poseidon. His...

Consumerist culture of the latter half of the twentieth-century has had profound impacts on the mental and spiritual well being of the world population, and a lack of such moral grounding rears its head in the shape of excessive consumption. The...

Growing up on a dusty ranch in rural California, a young Sam Shepard was accustomed to a hardened and seemingly fabled nature of the American West, one that seemed to breathe the kind of utter wildness one might only think imaginable in a John...

The scattered leaves of the great tree shivered a sound of wind through rotted sail, and from some immense crevice near the tree’s considerable base, a serpentine shadow of midnight scale and flashing fang poured rapidly forth to surge across the...

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette references a menagerie of folklore and inhabits many stand-out qualities often seen in fairy-tales throughout the novel. This is aided by the fantastical narration provided by Lucy Snowe, the protagonist who seems to...

The Liberation of France offered a new freedom that French New Wave cinema aims to exemplify through the casual nature of polyamory and female characters that are unconstrained by traditional morality or bounds of marital pressure. Jean-Luc Godard...

Look, there we are. The first shot of Alfonso Cuáron’s Children of Men is a shot of an audience getting information about the state of things in the same way that we do, through the media. You may have missed it but Cuáron’s fundamental motif of...