Newest Literature Essays

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...

The Qur’anic presentation of Jesus is oddly similar to the New Testament presentation of Jesus; this may come unexpected to any individual not well-versed in both the Qur’an and the New Testament. At its core, the Qur’an narrative corroborates...

In the Roman imperial world — precisely around 177 CE — Christians were being scrutinized and punished because of their idea of true religion. At this time, the Romans defined the Christians’ religious deviance as atheism, cannibalism, and incest....

In Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan appears to be an antagonist to God, but is actually a hero in rebel form. Through his speeches and the birth of Sin, Satan establishes himself as a creator. Creation, especially through word, is the ultimate form...

Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and John Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci” explore the power of women. “Goblin Market” preaches that women have the power to renew the lives of other women. Keats explores the way a woman’s seduction can...

The story of The Metamorphosis is a troubling one in that the author, Franz Kafka, left the interpretation of its proceedings open to the reader. Because Kafka did not leave any sort of metaphorical explanation for the short-story, there are many...

In A.E. Housman’s “The Carpenter’s Son” and Christin Rossetti’s “Good Friday”, both authors write about the Passion of the Christ. The poem is written from Jesus’ point of view in “The Carpenter’s Son” and portrays Jesus’ regret and doubt. In “...