Newest Literature Essays

The characters of Ulysses are, to some extent, all shaped by the years of historical turmoil that preceded them. In early 20th century Dublin, they hold their various lineages and family histories to great importance, and others determine their...

It is often debated as to whether the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth represent instruments of fate or whether they are simply manipulating and toying with Macbeth and influencing him to act in certain ways. However, Orson Welles, in his...

The portrayal of gender and hierarchical power in Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, is reimagined in The Penelopiad to adhere to the values of Atwood’s post-Modernist context. Texts reflect their context but a comparative study reveals the eternal....

Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville explore marriage through a significant physical object in their respective stories, “The Black Cat,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and “I and My Chimney”. In each of the stories, the object serves as a dividing force in...

“[he] Began eloquence with us.” (JONSON)

Medieval critics often date the beginning of modern poetry back to the emergence of Tottel’s Miscellany in the late Sixteenth century, specifically with the appearance of Wyatt and Surrey’s...

Saida Herzi offers an in-depth account of the suffering that women from Somalia go through due to circumcision in "Against the Pleasure Principle." Even though the women are conditioned to view circumcision as a religious practice to foster...

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm: to...

The industrial revolution was greatly opposed by the poets of the Romantic movement, due to its corruption of morality and nature, including the exploitation of children. Rousseau stated that ‘everything degenerates in the hands of man’, fueling...

In 1759, Voltaire published his magnum opus, Candide—nearly a century after Milton first published his own masterpiece, Paradise Lost. Upon finally settling on a farm with his dearest friends, Candide concludes the text by saying “we must...

Con Academy, written by Joe Schreiber, is not a typical high school-romance book, but rather a book that based off the idea that cheating throughout life could potentially lead to a positive outcome. With the genre being mystery and thriller, the...

Throughout both novels, The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson and Life of Pi by Yann Martel, the protagonists are on a constant journey, throughout which they make many and continuing explorations. Their paths are lexically, semantically and...

Selvon's 'The Lonely Londoners' not only explores processes of cultural contact, but is in itself the product of and inspiration for future mixing of cultures: it is a novel which ‘forged a shift in perspective which would not only change the way...

The narrative style and nature of Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business as presented through the perspective of main character Dunstan Ramsay creates a divide between his “objective truth” of the events of his life that he claims to tell and the “...

In the Indian epic the Ramayana, there are several women who play integral roles in the story. For example, it is because of Rama’s stepmother that he is sent of into the forest to live in the first place, it is because of Surpanakha that Rama...

William Blake’s poems ‘The Tyger’ and ‘Holy Thursday’ - each from his more dysphemistic book ‘Songs of Experience’ - explore and lament the loss of spirituality in the unethical era of the Industrial Revolution. He approaches the topics of man's...

During her TED Talk in 2013, Elizabeth Loftus stated, “Your memory is like a Wikipedia page- you can edit it, and so can other people.” People tend to believe that memory is an exact, unflawed reflection of their experiences. However, memories are...

“K’op, the Tzotzil word for both problem and prayer, recalls rum’s dialectical role in both causing and healing imbalances” (Eber 135). In the Highland Chiapas of southern Mexico, Pedranos live in a vicious cycle of drinking rum to forget their...

Human beings are composed of several characteristics that make them unique, but these features are often considered “labels” in a social sense. Intersectionality explains the process of experiencing life based on several identities that one...

In Kechiche’s film titled the Vénus Noire is the cinematic representation of the historic figure, the Hottentot Venus also known as Saartjie or Sara(h) Baartman. She is in the centre of the film starting at the time Saartjie begins performing in...

Changes to moral character, altered mental stability, and acceptance of adversity are effects of long-term oppression, well documented through both fictional and autobiographical works. When a force of oppression overcomes its subject, the subject...

Donna Haraway’s seminal posthumanist essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” engages with the argument that humans and non-human animals are not such disparate categories and that these the categories that reduce and restrict definitions are far messier than...

Shirley Jackson’s classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House proves by example that feelings of horror don’t have to come directly from supernatural creatures or events, but can come from seemingly normal characters themselves, and more...

Sometimes a fire grows big, so big that it seems like it will burn through anything that comes before it. That fire, figuratively, can be set off by someone throwing a match. That fire is like Dantes’ anger and thirst for revenge after being...

“Queer[ness] functions to undermine normativity.” (TISON PUGH)

Before introducing the critical debate surrounding Chaucer’s use of queerness and establishing the main argument of this essay, it is important to initially define the meaning of the...