Newest Literature Essays

During his greatest time of need, Philoctetes is cast away by the people he trusted the most. He becomes unbearable as his snake bite serves as a barrier between him and his people and is left to be forgotten on the island of Lemnos. Although...

How many times have you made connections between movies and books of current times and those of ancient Roman times? As time has passed, the Roman empire and ancient times have continued to influence our daily lives. One of the similarities...

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex serves as a foundation for the second wave of feminism, and later, the third wave. De Beauvoir believed that a social struggle was needed to solve society's problems, not a women's movement. Second-wave feminism...

The Trees are Down by Charlotte Mew is an empathic lament dedicated to the trees and the importance that the poetess attaches to them. Her ecocentric perspective on the felling of the trees allows her to create a poem that is dramatically powerful...

In the very first line of the script to In Bruges, the writer, and director Martin McDonagh describes this medieval town with its Gothic churches and narrow canals as otherworldly. This is our first hint to the kind of presence that Bruges will...

Place is of great significance within Wide Sargasso sea, present even within its title, which takes the name of a coastless sea within the Northern Atlantic ocean. Jean Rhys establishes a sense of place at the start of the novel through vivid...

In Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, the narrative of drawing room interactions is used as a vessel to portray Wilde’s discussion of private versus public moral integrity and human nature through wit and a comedy of manners regarding upper-class of...

The base technique used by the fantasy type of narrative in popular culture has always been escapist. In the days of the ancients it can perhaps best be seen in the ‘happy idea’, a fantastic conceit linked to the classical Greek ethic of ...

British and American literature both have distinguishing features; even though the same language is used, albeit with some difference, each national literature is distinguished. The genre of the mystery novel in particular is one in which there...

John the evangelist writes in such a way that certain words and phrases recur frequently and clearly stand for themes he wishes to develop over the course of his text. But in order to appreciate the significance of these themes – their meaning...

The 1995 film Braveheart has been a hit largely because of the ways in which it makes an older world come alive. Taking place in an ancient Scotland, the film’s psychological realities are very different from the historical truths, although...

The narrative "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self", from Alice Walker's autobiographical writings, traces the evolution of her personality from childhood to adulthood, describing the debilitating effects of an eye injury on her...

In the classic short story “Blackberry Winter” by Robert Penn Warren, Seth, the main character, observes the differences between a normal June and a so-called blackberry winter. Each observation of these differences helps Seth, and the reader,...

In “The Decay of Lying”, written in 1891, Oscar Wilde promotes his views of Romanticism over Realism through Socratic-dialogue between the speakers Vivian and Cyril. In part of the essay, Wilde opposes Plato’s views that are found in chapter ten...

In Quicksands, published in 1884, Adolph Streckfuss conveys contemporary German class standards, cultural assumptions, and depictions of appropriate and moral human behavior while relating the events of the novel. By doing so, he creates what is...

Satyajit Ray’s movie Pather Panchali follows the story of Apu during his childhood in a small village in rural India. Apu grows up under the influences of his sister, Durga, his mother, Sarbajaya, his father, Harihar, and his Auntie. Apu faces a...

The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, follows the story of the Corleone family. The movie focuses particularly on Michael as he is drawn inevitably into the mafia because his father, Don Vito, is shot and needs someone to step up to run...

The Diaries of Adam and Eve is a comical interpretation of the traditional creation story by Mark Twain. With a personal touch of his depiction to the characters of Adam and Eve, Twain managed to marry his previously written short stories, Adam's...

Borges’ short stories, Fictions, are marked by their intricate use of Magic Realism that incorporates mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction and by their explorations of classic “Borgesian” themes of identity, infinity, and fate. Two...

Classic literature often portrays struggles of identity, where the main character is caught between two sides of an ongoing ideological struggle, and begins to question who they are, because they’re not entirely sure to which group they should,...

Greek tragedy played a large role in ancient Athenian culture. Every year, Athenians would gather together for the Dionysia, a festival to the god Dionysus. During this festival, plays from prominent poets would be performed in competition with...

The Anthills of the Savannah is a novel by Chinua Achebe set in a fictional country in West Africa, Kangan, during the 1960s postcolonial period. Arguably, this novel represents Achebe’s ideology of the postcolonial African social and political...

The age of neoliberalism is one that has been subject to as much hagiography as it has been subject to scrutiny. The post-Reagan economic deregulation and intense globalization paradigms have utterly transformed life around the globe, and...