Newest Literature Essays

Christina Rossetti's 1862 narrative poem “Goblin Market” uses allegories of whimsical and fairy tale-like writing style to represent female sexuality and how fulfilling sexual desire is natural. The poem uses references to nature to encourage the...

The “Nausikaa” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses illuminates the complex dynamics of Dublin’s socioeconomic sex/gender system, in which women and men perform gender differently as the result of invisible yet pervasive social forces surrounding sex....

Upon mere glance, it becomes immediately apparent that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” share many common themes, including good versus evil, heart versus mind, and the nature of...

This essay would consider the modes of sentimental realism as presented in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens Oliver Twist. In Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the narrator’s use of sentimentalism enables the readers to sympathise with the...

In Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Crake takes on the ultimate scientific challenge of recreating humanity. This includes both altering existing behaviors, such as the mating process, and adding new features, such as self healing. Additionally, Crake...

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume successfully proposes three plausible responses any human may generate when considering the nature and existence of God, and personifies these responses through three characters. Subsequently,...

“One of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific” (Hansberry, To Be Young 128).

Ben Keppel notes that during the 1960s and 1970s, A Raisin in the Sun ...

Representations of social groups are often present in short stories, particularly aiming to convey an idea towards the reader. 'Going Home' (1986), by Archie Weller, a short story that follows a young successful Aboriginal man named Billy and his...

The Holocaust denial movement is perhaps one of the strangest and most nonsensical movements in the world. Unfortunately, the movement is becoming more and more prevalent throughout the world as fewer know - and even fewer learn - about the...

Poets of the Romantic era placed great importance on emotions and feelings of the individual, turning inwards to consider the power of the imagination and the freedom it provides. In fundamentally changing the focus of their poetry, Romantics...

There are multiple works of art discussed in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, including poems that the central character, David Lurie, teaches his class, dances, and Lurie’s opera. This brings up the question of why these works of art are included....

The poems “I Go Back to May 1937” and “Last Look”, both written by Sharon Olds, show how our relationships with loved ones can be complex. In “I Go Back to May 1937”, the speaker looks back at her parents in their college days. She thinks about...

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an illusion refers to “the fact or condition of being deceived or deluded by appearances, or an instance of this; a mental state involving the attribution of reality to what is unreal” (“Illusion, n.”)....

Trials of Brother Jero is a one-act satirical play that is divided into five scenes written by playwright, poet and essayist, Wole Soyinka. Soyinka is a multi-award winning playwright and the first African to be awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in...

In Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American, one of the main points of discussion is the West’s involvement in Vietnam. A telling scene that explores this theme is the dive-bombing one in which Fowler accompanies a French pilot, Captain Trouin,...

“Many of Duffy’s poems echo themes of Larkin’s… loneliness haunts her verse.” This belief clearly expressed by Jody Allen Randolph demonstrates that both poets address negative and lonely themes within their respective poems. The concept of...

Madeleine Thien’s short story, “Simple Recipes”, is told as a memory by an unnamed daughter of Malaysian immigrants in Canada. Thien’s work communicates the difficulties of immigrants, and their second-generation children in adjusting as well as...

‘O what is that sound’ is a poem written in the form of a ballad, containing two narrators; one questioning, the other answering. The reader assumes, perhaps falsely, that the first voice is the wife, and the second, the husband. A writer...

Abraham Moses Klein was a Canadian Jewish poet, journalist, lawyer, short story writer and novelist. He was originally an immigrant in Canada. The topics he mostly considered in his poems were Canadian cultural heritage and traditions. These...

Sigmund Freud’s interpretation on the notion of the unheimlich, or as it was translated into English, the uncanny, in his 1919 essay with the same title was famously supported by his unique literary analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story...

On the surface Simon Armitage’s “Poem” has the structure of an English sonnet in that it consists of fourteen lines, each with ten syllables, divided into three quatrains, a couplet, and is written in iambic pentameter. Through its use of...

The island that Prendick finds himself trapped on in The Island of Doctor Moreau can be seen as a version of Hell. It seems that life goes there to die and things fall apart for no reason. Wells’ emphasis on the physical aspects of the island...

Most characters in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens have a pretense that they keep up in the novel, both to themselves and to others. Sometimes it is clear that others can see through the person’s actions, and sometimes, people fall for the...

The opera-box is an essential part of social life in William Thackeray's Vanity Fair. There are scenes in operas of every city the characters go to, including in London, Brussels, and Paris. For an author that is obsessed with performance, it is...