Newest Literature Essays

“No Name Woman,” (1989) by Maxine Hong Kingston is a short story of the book The Woman Warrior about an American-Chinese narrator. She speaks for an immigrant culture with two traditions, two names, and which actions often carry double meanings....

Though every generation experiences a different variation of life that is specific to the time period within which they live, the overall human experience has been the same since ancient times. Human existence is a repetitive cycle, beginning with...

In Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine displays remarkable rhetoric in his attempt to elucidate his relationship with God. Augustine’s prowess in prose suggests that language is an esteemed value for him and a vital tool that complements the...

In discussions of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, one major controversial issue has been the representation of women. This issue has been debated by many critics in light of gender and feminist theories, in an attempt to decipher Nora’s subversion of...

In Anne Mellor's feminist critique of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Mellor conflates sex, gender, and desire. She maintains that all males in the novel are killers and rapists, whereas the females are victims and naïve. To be a male, according to...

Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith, refers to, alludes to, and shares many commonalities with T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Through analysis, it has become apparent that Brooks' poem embodies many of the...

An enemy of the people vs 12 angry men When an individual desires something so strongly, this individual will vigorously invest him/herself into achieving this desire that they begin to lose their moral compass. This desire will take over their...

Recurring physiological manifestations of sin and madness as illness are crucial in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. They frame the state of Denmark as a sick body, with Hamlet chasing a virus, attempting to eradicate it before the body keels over. As the...

Sam Shepard’s play, ‘Buried Child’ presents a subversive view of the American dream and the nuclear family. A Midwestern family from the 1970s hold a corrosive secret that eats away at their sanity, as well as their relationships. The fragmented...

The sonnet is unique among poetic forms. Its appeal has spanned five centuries and has managed to keep up with dramatic shifts in literary and philosophical movements during this time. There is a common perception that the sonnet has a requirement...

As humanity has evolved, individuals have become increasingly self-interested and insensitive toward others; morals and values within texts are subconsciously adapted to reflect these changes to suit the modern society in which we live. Exposure...

The idea that poetic forms are sensitive to and affected by the pressures of history is undisputed; yet whether a poet embraces this or challenges it varies. The adoption of a specific form inevitably implies historical concern. This is evident...

The struggle between women and authority has been a central concern for novelists throughout the ages, yet the rise of the novel in the 18th century brought with it the increase in number of female narrators and authors, giving women a platform...

Social critique has long been at the heart of drama, whether through satire, allegory or more direct devices, enabling dramatists to comment on the state of the world as they see it, to pose their own idealized version of society or to put forward...

In both the medieval morality play The Summoning of Everyman, first performed in 1510, and Christopher Marlowe’s Renaissance Drama Doctor Faustus, the search for progress arises through the themes of religion, morality and avarice. In Everyman, ...

The Renaissance period in European history oversaw a dramatic disintegration of beliefs that had largely helped to structure contemporary society, such as the belief that the Christian faith should be the epicenter of everyday life. It is...

“Player: We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.” (I: 19)

As a paragon of the Theatre of the Absurd, the play Rosencrantz and...

Arguably, Shakespeare presents the male characters within Othello as spontaneously emotional, and unable to control their reactions to negative events. Within this extract, Othello obsesses over the idea of Desdemona’s infidelity, goaded by Iago’s...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther depicts the life of the psychologically troubled Werther, the young protagonist and artist. The novel was one of the earliest examples of the prototypical Romantic figure in literature and...

By bringing such a wide spectrum of people together, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales reveals a tremendous amount about basic human behavior. Characters ranging from the noble knight to the corrupt pardoner reveal tidbits of how life was in...

New Criticism is a theory focused on the human experience. It guides the reader to examine conflict and tensions within a literary work, which emulate the complexity of the human condition. Ambiguity within texts allows for different...

What appears to be “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by S. T. Coleridge’s generic theme of romanticism of respecting and valuing the natural world and all it’s creatures is revealed by closer readings to be a front for a far deeper message on how...

In Dryden’s satirical poem Mac Flecknoe mock heroism is used to convey a scathing view of dullness specifically as it pertains to writers, authority figures such as monarchs, and the unintelligent masses. This technique allows Dryden to convey an...

Both ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood, and ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley portray a sense of threat and the impact this has on individuals with reduced power. In Atwood’s novel, this threat is caused by the theocratic regime, Gilead,...