Newest Literature Essays

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...

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....

‘What seemed to set the Beats […] apart from their peers was a deep, disturbing alienation that transcended their identities as artists and extended to personal idiosyncrasy and a self-destructive bent. […] To be sure, their project was in large...

Terry Gilliam’s 1985, Brazil, a bizarre, dystopian film demonstrates that the gap between an individual’s reality and their subconsciously desired world causes the psyche disillusionment and torture. The protagonist, Sam Lowry , is stuck in a...

Undoubtedly among the most controversial authors of recent times, Salman Rushdie’s writings delight, shock, irritate and even anger the readers. He is famous for his complex writing style which is presented in all his writings. His novel Shame is...

The following essay will explore the differences and similarities in tonality between the poems “Blessing” by Imtiaz Dharker and “War Photographer” by Carol Ann Duffy through discussing the language that is uses to create certain images and...

“H is for Hawk” is a short story through which Helen Macdonald purchases a hawk in order to help her deal with the death of her father. She creates a sense of suspense and tension when she realises that she has purchased the wrong hawk, but she...

William Blake and Thomas De Quincey embark on the quest of knowledge to enlighten humanity on that which lies beyond the peripheries of everyday life. Their visionary quest is a personal mission, in which their agenda is to broaden society’s...

“What a terrible feeling to love someone and not be able to help them.”

- Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

The presence, portrayals and betrayals of love in Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa and A Grain of Mustard-Seed by Edith Pargeter shine a...