Newest Literature Essays

Washington Irving’s name has become almost synonymous with American Literature. Characters of his like Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle are cultural icons known by nearly anyone with passing knowledge of literature, and many of his works have been...

Cannibalism: it’s one of humanity’s biggest taboos. The word itself conjures images of horrific depravity to mind; scenes like the tribal rituals atop the pyramids of the Aztecs where human hearts were carved out and tossed to the crowd. But...

When learning how a film is put together, one of the first things to do is get a pen and paper and count the shots. It's not very technical and a bit tedious as well. Tallying every time there are cuts forces the viewer to see things differently....

Asking questions about meaning and of belief is a fundamental part of being human. Arguing as to any specific worldview is a fundamentally futile process because of the ways in which the search for this meaning is almost as important as the...

The plots in both The Lottery, and Rocking-Horse Winner focus on winning an eventual reward by the respective characters consequently causing the tragedy of their outcomes. In H. Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner, Paul obsesses over luck and...

With each generation comes a piece of literature that sparks a wildfire within its society. In the early 1960s, Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique fulfilled this role. Friedan challenged the era’s gender roles for American women. This piece...

In Alison Bechdel’s “tragicomic” graphic novel Fun Home, the author combines the traditional forms of the Bildungsromanwith the more contentious form of the graphic novel in order to apply a literary analysis to her own life. The result is a...

As the classic film Love Story is coming to an end, Oliver (Ryan O'Neal) is next to Jenny (Ali McGraw) who is on her deathbed. Her beautiful hair is perfectly laid on the pillow and her youthful skin glowing. Surprisingly, in her last moments of...

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra plays on the dichotomy of male and female rule, the struggle between gender and racial ideals, and the obsessive love (lust) that exists between the characters that ultimately lead to both of their deaths. Upon...

Each human being struggles with the fall from innocence into experience. But parents struggle with this a second time in a more complex way--they must choose, based on their experiences and wisdom, what is best for their children. Should they...

Portrayed through the lense of an anonymous narrator witnessing the rampant disease that inflicted the rural village of Walsham, John Hatcher’s The Black Death provides a personalized account of the bubonic plague as it spread across nations and...

Cracking India, also known as Ice-Candy-Man, is an incredibly dense novel filled to the brim with a myriad of things to dissect. The book catalogs a host of changes to the country of India, and to the individuals that live there, as British rule...

The OED defines power as the “ability to act or affect something strongly”. However, this essay is not interested in the meaning of this power but instead, will examine the manifestation of power, in ugliness. In The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame...

There is a striking difference between the film poster for Deepa Mehta’s Earth and the novel cover for Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man (see Appendix). The novel cover, dominated by blues, greens and a silhouette of Lenny, is more evocative of Lenny’s...

The institution of slavery entailed different structures that fostered this inhumane practice in history, from the Middle Passage to the forced servitude in plantations. However, the happenings within the slave ships in the Middle Passage have...

Adrienne Rich, Dylan Thomas, and Marianne Moore are each icons of their literary eras and they represent in their work the shifting and varied ideologies of their times. Although they celebrate the figure of the poet, they approach the figure...

Within both The Handmaid’s Tale and Feminine Gospels, the concept of loss is proven to be prevalent, as a determining role amongst the two pieces of literature. Duffy and Atwood present this idea particularly in regard to the loss of voice,...

Within the film Singin’ in the Rain, the marvel of how process becomes product is brought front and center. One of the most interesting sequences in this regard is the “Moses Supposes” scene, which makes the otherwise-dull process of vocal...

Feminist ideas were already at large when Maya Angelou published her poetry anthology “And Still I Rise” in 1984. The 1900s saw many significant changes in terms of women’s rights: women were given the right to vote in 1920, the 1960s saw the rise...

The novel Never Let Me Go focuses on the ethical implications of cloning and scientific progress. It was written at a time when these controversial subjects were very popular among contemporary readers due to the scientific breakthrough of Dolly...

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment explores the philosophies of nihilism and rationalism common in Russia during the period and their subsequent consequences through its characters. Dostoevsky presents Arkady Svidrigailov as a foil character...

The evolution of Leukemia as a dream/ritual is subtle; however, Lucille Clifton shows the importance of every single word through her tedious drafting. Lucille Clifton — in Leukemia as a dream/ritual — translates the pain of cancer into the...

The poems "I Measure Every Grief I Meet" by Emily Dickinson and "The Day Is Done" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow both focus on the theme of sorrow, but do so in markedly different manners. While Dickinson approaches the topic in a very nonchalant...

T.S. Eliot once declared Ezra Pound to be “more responsible for the twentieth-century revolution in poetry than any other individual” (“Ezra Pound”). Nevertheless, in the modern era Pound’s associations with antisemitism and fascism “determines...