Newest Literature Essays

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...

James Cameron's Avatar, with all its visual splendor, innovation, and ambition, it wasn't enough to make up for the 178 minutes of derivative, heavy-handed storytelling. Avatar isn't the first larger than life blockbuster with a mediocre...

Throughout Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, Bruce Wayne has faced many threats; The Joker, Bane, Scarecrow and metaphorically himself. However there is one man, despite not being categorised as the villain but more "Gotham's White Knight"...

As a character that is “consigned to eternal narrative silence” (Salih, p336) Sanditon’s Miss Lambe is an object of interest. This interest is furthered by the fact that is “Austen’s only ‘brown’ character” (Salih, p330). Alone, this silence and...

In Confessions of Saint Augustine, the reader is presented with many puzzles and seeming contradictions in terms of the structure of the work and how it mirrors, or does not mirror, Augustine’s spiritual journey. Some have argued that the book is...

Fairy tales serve to several purposes; however, they are most commonly meant to be read to children. Sometimes to teach them a moral lesson, others to simply entertain them. Some fairy tales, like Wilde’s, are more complex; they can be interpreted...

“Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

The opening stanza to Dylan Thomas’ poem echoes its theme of aging, asserting the necessity of the elderly to live...