Newest Literature Essays

From Jason to Perseus, Greek plays popularly depict righteous mortals with honorable qualities. The abundance of heroes in Greek mythology shows the preference of many playwrights to portray humans in a positive light. However, these paragons of...

Shakespeare’s sonnets justify the rigorous fixation of beauty standards that dictate the human race by cultural, social and political means. This essay analyzes the first four sonnets of Shakespeare’s collection, which both bluntly satirize human...

What does it mean to destroy oneself? In the short amount of time that is one's life, a lot of people have made an art out of self-destructing. People place themselves in terrifying positions just to feel anything else but the crushing pain of...

Tennessee Williams creates tension and conflict through oppositions in the play – he shows striking differences between the characters Stanley and Blanche, animalistic qualities, the contrast between the old world versus the new world and the...

Much of what happened to black slaves during the middle and late 19th century has been swept under the carpet, and Toni Morrison was fully aware of this. Her book, Beloved, seeks to bring many of those horrors to light so that a modern day reader...

The non-fiction novel ‘In Cold Blood’ depicts the true story of multiple murders that took place in the small farming town of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959. Capote – the author and narrator of this text provides a wealth of knowledge surrounding the...

Alike the division of a novel into chapters, entrances and exits allow playwrights to structure the different sections of the plot in a comprehensive and effective manner for the audience. Whilst Wilde uses “An Ideal Husband” to examine a...

Much of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America centers around the immediate despair and hardships which afflict victims of the AIDs crisis in the 1980s. Beyond that, however, there are certain characters who illustrate conflicts related to issues...

Inherit The Wind is a play based on the true story of Scope’s “Monkey Trial”, in which a teacher is put on trial for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution to his sophomore science class. Similar to real life events, the play portrays a high school...

C.S. Lewis begins The Abolition of Man by considering the implications of a particular children’s textbook. The issue with the textbook, according to Lewis, is its philosophy of a subjectivism of value. The specifically noted passage that warrants...

While constructing his “just city” in Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues against the incorporation of poetry into guardians’ education on several different grounds, including those of epistemology, psychology, and morality (Rep. Books II-IV, X). In...

Historically, readers of Plato’s Republic have understood the book to be offering a blueprint of sorts for an ideal political regime, one that might actually be brought into being. Certainly, this view has some evidence to support it. But others...

Seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government, puts forward his view of political philosophy grounded in the idea that freedom, equality, and independence are central goals of human life, especially as...

Like many other works of ancient Greek literature, Plato’s Republic focuses primarily on the question of the nature of justice. Through the progression of the book, the characters (led by Socrates) engage in dialogue in pursuit of an understanding...

In Never Let Me Go the themes of death and memory are foregrounded. In acquiescence to her own mortality Kathy returns to the past to construct a narrative that reconnects her to her dead friends. Her narrative becomes the material of memory “...

Joycean critics frequently encourage the uninitiated to read Joyce with an emotional detachment. Scholars are taught to marvel at the aesthetic complexity of his prose with an “almost religious attitude”, under the dictatorial guidance of...

In The Wretched of The Earth, French author Frantz Fanon focuses on colonization as well as decolonization and its consequences. Fanon examines and analyzes the psychological impacts that colonization has on colonizers but particularly, he focuses...

The act of betrayal is often explored in literature. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet explores the act of betrayal between not only Queen Gertrude and the late King Hamlet, but also their son Prince Hamlet. Gertrude’s hasty remarriage to Claudius...

Emily Dickinson’s poems about death offer a stark contrast to the sentimental themes and imagery one would usually expect. Rather than the religious symbols and flowery language that we as readers have grown accustomed to, Dickinson approaches the...

Metamorphoses, a collection of poems composed by the Ancient Roman poet Ovid documents hundreds of myths in an encyclopedic manner. It is a collection that is hugely influential in the Western canon and many of the myths surround the brutish...

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-of-age novel that describes the life of a girl named Janette who is adopted into an evangelical household. Raised by a mother who is blindly devoted to her church, Janette as well feels great connection...

Throughout A Small Place, written by Jamaica Kincaid and Siddhartha, written by Hermann Hesse, the concept of the home plays a central role to them both. This concept is explored by each text quite extensively, and it is very significant in them....

Being imprisoned simply for being part of a different race is something most would agree is abhorrent. Many people would never forgive the people who would do such a thing. Yet Monica Sone (neé Kazuko),[1]in her memoir Nisei Daughter , remains...

The world of H.G. Wells’ Ann Veronica includes distinct colors in every scene. A particular color that comes up often is the color white. The many associations made with white seem to be on two opposite poles. At first, it is used to describe fear...