Newest Literature Essays

John Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes explores the supernatural love of Madeline and Porphyro. Keats uses the holy trance of Madeline to explore her relationship with Porphyro, as well as love’s place in their world. The callous environments...

Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ embraces the conventions of the fairy-tale genre in order to destabilize its underlying power structures. The manipulation of the archetypes of the virgin and her ‘Prince Charming’ in the story...

In his article “Literature,” David M. Bethea explains how “the pagan concept of “mother Earth” and the Christian concept of “Holy Russia” … were telescoped again, made extension of each other. As a result, perhaps the greatest of all modern...

In The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chesnutt clearly depicts the white journalist at fault for causing the spark of anger which set the black community to react in violence. Chesnutt makes it clear the sympathy lies with the black community. The...

The United States of America has progressed so far in terms of equal rights for all of its citizens that when one looks back at the USA of the past, a country that widely exercised the use of slavery, modern day America is unrecognisable in...

A rare two-tailed form of the sonnet serves as the canvas for one of Milton’s political poems regarding the state and the church’s limitations on individual thoughts, actions, and subjectivity in “On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long...

Craig Thompson’s graphic novel/comic Blankets chronicles the life of protagonist Craig. The novel follows Craig from childhood through young adulthood. It is a bildungsroman in more than one way. Craig’s journey through the years, obviously, fits...

Try to imagine music that would accompany someone getting stabbed to death in a movie. Now try to imagine music that would accompany a love scene. Hopefully these are two very different pieces of music. Sound alerts the audience of the action and...

Shakespeare’s King Lear tells the tragic story of a man attempting to test his daughters love for him by promising them land in exchange for words of flattery. Shakespeare illustrates a modern portrayal of femininity in the central character and...

The oral tradition of Archaic Greece involved reciters who recreated the individual characters and incidences each time the poems were orated. The Iliad as among literature conceived during ancient Greece were preserved through oral culture in...

The distinction between gender expression and gender identity is an important one that must be made before we begin to discuss The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff. According to the Human Rights Campaign, gender expression and gender identity have...

The Modernist Era was a time of radical departure from a traditions-orientated society and a journey of discovery to a new form of expression. As a result, the poetry produced during the era was reflective of this change. Specifically, T.S Eliot's...

A study of the poetry of William Butler Yeats illuminates the dichotomies of human experiences, dichotomies that he explores through his skillful manipulation of language and form. Yeats’ literary genius and the organic unity of his work are most...

Gothic novels, irrational works of literature that attempt to hold the reader in constant suspense and fear through mystery, would utilize various components to captivate the audience. Common themes of isolation, villainous men, the supernatural,...

Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) is submerged in heightened emotion as it deals with Bigger Thomas’s life in segregated Southside Chicago in the 1930s. Depravity intertwines so deeply with Bigger’s narrative in the novel that there seems to be a...

During the 19th and 20th centuries, the success of large nations was driven by the process of colonization. Colonialism, the practice of gaining full or partial political control over another county by occupying it with settlers and exploiting...

In Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, the juxtaposition between the nature of his character’s surroundings and the nature of their internal thoughts heightens the angst his readers feel towards the characters. This is especially true in the chapter that...

Turn of the Screw by Henry James, on the surface, surrounds the demise of a child’s life and the demise of the governess that cares for him. However, when James’ diction is sifted through it dawns on the reader that there is an ambiguous nature...

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the title it is now most famously known by, The Wanderer is a poem that operates as a journey on numerous levels; there is – of course – the physical journey of the solitary man as he navigates his way through an...

Subjectivity and autonomy are some of the foundational blocks in the process of self-identity for people, and for those who identify as women, it is key to establishing a sense of independence and self-worth. The process in which people are...

In Henry Green’s Party Going and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, the authors portray crowds as singular bodies, in which people lose their identities to conform to the identity of the crowd. Their portrayals illustrate the theories about...

Masculinity and the idea of what it represents is merely a socially constructed concept and nothing more. The main character in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Patrick Bateman, however, sure has a certain view of what it should look like and...

Muslim: terrorist. Mexican: rapist. Black: criminal. These reductive and vicious associations appear far too often in today’s society. With an increasing rate of African American incarceration - up to over five times the rate whites are...

Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt both explore the romantic relationships of characters that lack parents. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Beli, the mother of the protagonist, is...