Newest Literature Essays

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, is a novel of dizzying richness, complexity and depth. It discusses topics as varied as European social and cultural decay, philosophical treatments on the mystery and vagaries of Time and the clash of East...

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta” explores the protagonist's, Victor's, forbidden and impossible love affair with a carefree woman, Nina. Throughout the text, Victor’s narrative flashes to different, unchronological points in the past and the...

Mala Ramchandin is the main protagonist of the novel “Cereus Blooms at Night” written by Shani Mootoo in 1996. Themes of ecocriticism, transnational feminism, and the genre of minor literature, a theory popularized by philosophers and activists...

The boundary between the human and the non-human animal is tested now more than ever with the prevailing field of Animal studies. Traditional theories in philosophical thinking from Aristotle to Descartes that regard the human and the non-human...

Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message” (McLuhan)and this is true of films as well as any other forms of media. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, is a film that uses the medium of...

The three main female characters of All the King’s Men, while standing as their own personal individuals, also serve to show the best and worst aspects of all the main male characters that present throughout the novel. While Anne Stanton and Lucy...

Love - both familial and forbidden - are integral themes complexly explored throughout The Night Circus (2011), and selected poetry by W.B Yeats (1908). Where forbidden love is a deeply rooted theme in The Night Circus between Celia and Marco who...

The White Man’s Burden Name Institution The White Man’s Burden Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) conveys several themes depending on different readers’ interpretations of the poem, and one’s point of view. One of the main themes...

The novel ‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote is a work of Fictional Journalism, otherwise known as ‘faction’ or ‘the non-fiction novel’. Initially, this might make it difficult to judge whether Capote tried to influence the reader’s opinion on the...

John Glenday’s For Lucie reads as an ode to a newborn baby girl who is fated to mature into a world governed by moral and spiritual darkness: the narrator urges the child to quell such gloom with the lightness and optimism that infancy brings....

Individually both racism and sexism pose challenges for minority groups and women in general. Racism: the idea that one’s race is superior to another’s based on mass stereotypes and assumptions of other races. Feminism, the advocacy of women’s...

Thomas Hardy describes the unfortunate fate of ‘drummer hodge’, who was left to ‘rest’, ‘uncoffined - just as found’ on the battle field. Drummer hodge, who died fighting the Boer’s in South Africa, is used to reflect the alienation of lost...

In his seminal paper, Richard Dyer states that, ‘white people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to...

“I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed for lack of a better word is good. Greed is right. Greed works, clarifies and cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary...

Conformism is a concept that is lusted upon or embraced for the sense of security or safety that it offers. However it is beyond just a choice to be made, it is a force of nature that is quite inevitable considering the demands and expectations...

Whether it be the Joker in the infamous Batman series, or Norman Bates in the cinematic classic, Psycho, some of the most prolific pieces of literature and film contain an antihero. As stated by Alfred Hitchcock, “The more successful the villain,...

There no doubt that Paul Haggis’ 2004 film Crash is the most disparaged best picture winner at the Oscars leading to the coining of the term ‘Worst Best Picture’. It is definitely not out of no good reason that it faces so much scrutiny for its...

In this essay, I will be following the idea of spectacle as considered by Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), which has clearly influenced Jonathon Crary’s notion of the spectacle. That is, the postmodern idea that in the age of late...

Dependency on agricultural livestock, the number of cattle declining by 10%, low wages and increasing levels of emigration: this is rural Ireland in 1936. Set in the small fictional town Ballybeg, the rural-pastoral trope constantly underlies the...

Many horror novels, vampire-infested stories or zombie apocalypse books are successful because their detailed description of blood, gore and destruction instill fear and shock and the pleasures of the Gothic sublime. Warm Bodies, by Isaac Marion...

Cinema changed everything: This is an accepted statement, but it is also a cliché. At the same time, it cannot be overstated enough. When it comes to an experimental innovator such as Bertolt Brecht, however, the form of cinema transformed the...

Homogenous identity bears its attraction in its promise of unity. By defining identity in terms of ethnicity and nationality, one feels that they are part of a community. A shared race, culture and geographical space often creates the sense of...

There is a thematic overlap between Richard Eberhart’s poetry about the Second World War, and George Orwell’s testimony from the Spanish Civil War, and this intersection of ideas is relevant to timeless issues of religion, specifically the...