Newest Literature Essays

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 “...

In Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, the authors explore the consequences of the new technology of the telephone. Both books describe how telephones are a form of miscommunication, accidental and intended, due to the...

Writers and poets customarily portray the traits of the modern man in their contemporary setting akin to the altering literary and social values. In T.S Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men, the titular men are confined in a purgatory of two counterpart...

Masculinity is one of the most prevalent themes in the films of Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick’s films can be viewed as misogynistic, as there is often brutal violence towards women and a considerable lack of prominent or dynamic female characters at...

In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining(1980), there is a prominent theme of familicide throughout the film. Familicide is defined as a murder where at least one spouse and one child are killed, usually by the other spouse. Jack Torrance (Jack...

Having meaningful relationships is an essential part of one’s life as it provides the individual with an external support system, whether it be emotionally or physically. In fact, just the mere idea of knowing you have people you can count on when...

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics serves as a guidebook to living a relatively moral life. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle placed an emphasis on friendship—what it is, it's different types, and its requirements—within two books. Aristotle then...

The novel “Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett has finally come alive on the screen in a six part miniseries for Amazon and the BBC, after years of projects and ideas that never saw the light of day. Unlike many movie or television...

Originally examined by Immanuel Kant, he describes the sublime as an aesthetic experience in which one feels a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. The sublime is known to be found in “formless objects" or...