Newest Literature Essays

It is a universal desire to crave knowledge about where you come from. To not only want to know what preceded you, but how you, well, became you. It is no coincidence that people who are adopted seek to find their biological parents, or why...

D.T. Niane’s revised edition of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali follows the journey from birth to adulthood of Sundiata, a developing prince and founder of the Mali empire. From a childhood of ridicule filled with gossip, disappointment, and the...

A guilty conscious can be a crippling ordeal to the mind especially if the basis of the guilt cannot be undone or corrected. When the mind is in emotional distress it will grasp on any construct that makes it feel better. In Martin Scorsese’s...

The sex industry is a significant market within the globalized capitalist system. Critic Jean L Pyle argues that ‘structural adjustment policies mandated by the International Money Fund’ are required of less economically developed countries as ‘a...

One of the main ideas explored in both The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini, and Atonement, a film directed by Joe Wright, is the everlasting presence of the past in the lives of the protagonists, both of whom make a mistake in their...

‘Age has rusted what the poet writ/ Worn out his language and obscur’d his wit.’ (JOESEPH ADDISON)

Within the quote under consideration, Addison asserts that within the Restoration period the skill and rhetoric of the English poet had diminished...

Australian poet, Bruce Dawe, is renowned for the social commentary present in his poetic work, which so often addresses culturally sensitive societal themes. Dawe’s “Enter Without So Much as Knocking” (1962) follows the consumerist experiences of...

The first volume of the Diary of Anais Nin covers four years of her life from 1931 until 1934. During these years, she is swept up in an affair with both Henry Miller and his wife, June, she finally meets her father who abandoned her and her...

As a filmmaker, Christopher Nolan always wants to walk a fine line. If there's one fundamental theme that suffuses his entire filmography is that cinema as a shared narrative can be a hugely powerful cultural force. I'm far from the first to...

The Grimm fairy tale “The Jew in the Brambles,” which is found in the “adult” section of the collection, is much more than a simple fairy tale. It is even more than a folk tale intended for a mature audience. It is a story that evokes the deepest...

Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away is a dense film with many important aspects, ranging from character development to Japanese folk symbols to economic commentary. However, one of the most salient aspects of the film is its connection to and depiction...

Olaudah Equiano helped to popularize the horrors of slavery and facilitate the birth of the abolitionist movement through his book The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.[1]This book did more than establish the genre of slave...

Stephen King’s acclaimed short story “The Mist” tells the story of David Drayton and his efforts to protect his son Billy from a supernatural and blindingly thick mist that rapidly swallows the town of Bridgton, Maine, as well as the monstrous...

Leah Purcell’s play “The Drover’s Wife” is a post-colonial and feminist redefining of Henry Lawson’s short story of the same name. The play is centered around the hardships that Molly encounters at the time she is solely responsible for raising...

One of the main motifs of Thomas Middleton’s play, The Revenger’s Tragedy is the correlation between a woman’s virtue and her chastity. A prime example of this would be how Castiza, one of the only women in the play who is not painted in a...

“The parallel-text ‘good’/’bad’ investigations which characterise textual approaches to Shakespeare cause as many problems as they solve” (MAGUIRE 1996: 14).Investigating the authority of the first quartos of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and ...

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis offers the reader an intimate, sober view of the author’s early life around the time of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Her family is middle class, educated and fairly progressive. The young Marji wears Nike shoes,...

In Bad Indians, Miranda argues that, “Culture is ultimately lost when we stop telling the stories of who we are, where we have been, how we arrived here, what we once knew, what we wish we knew; when we stop our retelling of the past, our...

‘Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flow’r,/ Too soft for business and too weak for pow’r:/ A wife in bondage, or a neglected maid;/ Despised, if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed.’(MARY LEAPOR) Trinity 2017.

Mary Leapor draws upon the notion of...

Sarah Waters' Neo-Victorian novel ‘Fingersmith’ situates itself against a backdrop of contentious debates surrounding pornography. Second wave feminists were divided in their beliefs about whether pornography was detrimental or beneficial to...

‘Alas! Can tranquil nature give me rest,/ Or scenes of beauty, soothe me to repose?’ (Charlotte Smith)

Within this quote, Smith questions whether the force of nature and beautiful surrounds will have a profound and calming affect, allowing her to...

Wordsworth’s “Lucy Series” is a set of poems concentrating on a young woman, possibly a lover, and her death. “Song” focuses on the loneliness and underappreciation of Lucy after she has passed, although the content of the poem involves his...

Beyond all the facts that she told, what was most fascinating about what Kitty said during "One Day in Auschwitz," is that she considered Auschwitz, which many describe as hell on earth, as “home.” Obviously, most have never experienced anything...

The birds are silent and amidst this gasoline-fueled destruction, alongside “the charred stump of a sapling” (6) and the “tiny veins of burnt leaves” (6), a man has died for the simply crime of living. His townspeople have declared themselves...