Newest Literature Essays

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...

Set in entirely different parts of the world, the two novels The River and the Source and The Pearl both explore the theme of greed in conceptual terms. John Steinbeck and Margaret Ogola not only bring into perspective the implications of...

Like all of Hitchcock’s films, Strangers on a Train is a masterpiece of suspense. The striking visuals, unexpected stabs of dark humor, and masterful editing make it the nail-biting, hair-pulling sort of film they just don’t make anymore....

The San Gabriel foothills rise like tombstones over the city of Duarte, California, their black silhouettes limned against the setting desert sun. In the valley, it’s warm all year, home to avocado, orange, and walnut groves, grown by an older...

In most patriarchal societies that are primarily governed by traditions such as the social order in which Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider is set, most cultural practices and traditions are often used as a tool for suppressing women. The women in...

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

-John Stuart Mill

The extreme willingness to sacrifice...

Men and nature had shared a very close relationship since the beginning of civilization. Ancient Sanskrit scriptures, Vedas and Upanishads, are a testimony to this closeness with innumerable descriptions of shlokas and mantras specifically...

Stevenson makes effective use of setting in the novel, not only to establish mood but also to develop the novel’s characters and thematic concerns through the use of symbolism. The novel is set in London, and Stevenson creates a menacing...

Petrarch had his Augustinian conversion experience on Mont Ventoux on April 26, 1336 and described it in enormous detail in a letter written to Dionigi da Bo San Sepolcro, an Augustinian monk and Petrarch's confessor. The letter tells of a...

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty follows a romantically shy, socially awkward man who sets off on a quest to find a missing negative for the final cover of LIFE magazine, finding his confidence and self-actualizing through the grand adventure. The...

But why must choice always lie along a linear spectrum, with two poles, instead of, say, among a sphere of possibilities? (Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp: Statues, 7)

As human beings, we spent our whole lives seeking, looking for the ultimate truth...