Newest Literature Essays

Heart of Darkness is a novel that is chockfull of metaphors alluding to light and shade; a literary device meant to connect the reader’s preconceived notions associated with meanings of light and dark. The story, written by Joseph Conrad in 1899,...

Bernard Shaw’s 1914 drama ‘Pygmalion’ finds its roots in the classical myth of Ovid, who writes an erotic tale of romance between a sculptor an this status in ‘Metamorphoses’. It is unsurprising therefore that Shaw’s play has often been celebrated...

The relationship between the body and soul is one obsessed over by playwrights since the morality plays of the medieval period. Renaissance writer Christopher Marlowe and 20th century American playwright Bernard Shaw are no exceptions to this: in...

A Man of the People is a satirical story of mentorship, romance, revenge, and chance. The story is told in the perspective of Odili, the protagonist and a young educated man who is used symbolically to represent the younger generation that was...

Principles and sacrifices made to defend those principles is a key theme of “The Winslow Boy”. Many sacrifices were made by the major characters, some out of choice, while others had sacrifices forced upon them by more powerful characters....

Throughout Machiavelli’s The Prince and Christine’s Book of the City of Ladies, the narrators consistently integrate the theme of education through literature into their ideal social philosophy. From a political standpoint, Machiavelli’s guide...

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...