Newest Literature Essays

Many critics have agreed that the resolutions to the myriad of conflicts in Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream are all unified in a manner that reinforces the central theme of the play. However, when it comes to what exactly critics...

Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” has conflicting interpretations that include : unrequited love, doomed love, passion, opportunism, sacrifice, betrayal and murder. “Porphyria’s Lover” exemplifies the concept of undecidability due to the focus...

On the surface, William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 144” presents men and women in chiaroscuro, or strong contrasts. Since this sonnet is one of his later ones, and thus adopts a scornful and misogynistic tone after the mysterious Dark Lady steals away...

There is no one uniformly agreed-upon notion of love: it is one of the few concepts that people allow to be defined by its subjectivity. In fact, love thrives on the subjective. Exemplifying this point, in Plato’s Symposium some of the greatest...

When we think of rulers we think of extravagance and authority, wealth and might, grandeur and command. But what slips our mind is that perhaps even rulers follow rules to rule. ‘The Prince’ by Niccolo Machiavelli is one extended prescription of...

Hardy’s ‘Beyond the Last Lamp’ presents the theme of love and time in a subtler way than Marvell’s poem, as we only realize the retrospective nature of the poem at the fourth stanza, and see that his memory of the couple’s difficulty has stayed...

Sonnet 116 and the Great Gatsby both present love and commitment as inextricably linked, with commitment seen as an integral part of true love. Contrastingly, The Scrutiny gives a humorous take on the idea of committed relationships, and presents...

The relationship between Miranda and Ferdinand both challenges and reinforces gender roles in ‘the Tempest’. By proposing to Ferdinand herself, Miranda challenges the feminine expectation to be obedient or timid and asserts her own authority....

The New Testament canon is the collection of different books by different authors that were compiled together to create a larger, singular text. Today, the New Testament serves as a justification to the existence of Christianity and a reference on...

A mountain, dotted with fully bloomed flowers and orange-leaved trees in autumn, is left barren by the heavy snowfall endured during winter; however, when spring comes, the mountain is embellished with new flowers, its beauty greater than ever...

Many scholars have adopted a feminist approach when examining Ophelia’s madness in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. A popular interpretation is that Shakespeare uses Ophelia’s insanity to empower her in . After spending the majority of the play...

“Jasper Jones”, composed by Craig Silvey and published in 2009, is a gripping tale of Jasper’s horrible discovery which itself unveils series issues. Craig not only exposes the darkness in society but also condemns the widely held stereotypes,...

In Eliza Haywood’s novella Fantomina, the main character is a high-class woman who takes it upon herself to explore her feminine and sexual agency during a time of suffocating and expected purity. The narrative begins with Fantomina’s attraction...

In Tolkien’s view, voiced in his seminal lecture of 1936, the world of monsters is “essential” to the configuration of Beowulf; one half of a series of apparently antithetical binaries youth and age, good and evil, and not least, the human and...

Dickens explores the issues of an industrialised society and, a key theme, the capability of the latter to suppress and obstruct human emotion, individuality and imagination. Dickens conveys these themes, primarily, through the characterisation...

Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, Death of a Salesman, endures today because of its ability to effectively convey a complex family dynamic in the wake of its patriarch’s failed American dream. Themes of disappointment and denial, embellishment and skewed...

Atypical Existentialism Gregor Samsa was a person. A shockingly normal person. He dredged to work every day in spite of his general dissatisfaction, his home was nice enough, his family was there (if nothing else), and, like most things which have...

On the surface, Bong Joon-Ho's Snowpiercer is quite literally a linear story. After a mass extinction event leaving the world in uninhabitable cold, the last fraction of humanity survives on an ark-like train that will travel around the world in...

In ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ Kureishi utilizes Orientalist perspectives and textual attitudes in a multitude of manners in order to reflect how the meanings associated with the Orientalist's imagined ‘East’ shapes characters world-views and world...

Both Plato’s Symposium and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics introduce provocative ideas about love and friendship and how best to attain them. They make it clear that, without love and friendship, life would be a miserable existence. Each figure in...

When faced with extreme times of crisis, history has shown that humanity will show its fallible nature, particularly through the victimization and blaming of other individuals. Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, ...

Brooks and Miller examine how during times of extreme crisis, opportunities of good and bad nature are born and the consequences are unavoidably suffered. Arthur Millers, The Crucible, an allegory of the McCarthy era in the 1950’s American...

There are a number of mind blowing short films that play in the same meticulously designed and weird art-house thriller space as Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. You mostly see that kind of thing on the Internet more than you do in the theater...

“Goodness restrained has never been a match for badness unrestrained,” writes Umair Haque, contributor to Medium, claiming that being inactively involved in unjustifiable acts is still siding with the tormentor. This claim may be observed in “The...