Newest Literature Essays

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...

In Okorafor’s Who Fears Death and McCarthy’s The Road, both protagonists encounter a spiritual journey in their apocalyptic scenario, emphasizing the importance of religion in the post-apocalyptic world. In the novels, the characters experience...

In George Orwell’s critical essay on W.B Yeats, he analyzes the tendencies of fascism present in Yeats’ works and his predispositions towards occultism. Orwell states that imagery in literature can be used to infer into the writer’s...

The character of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues can be viewed as a distinct form of excellence. However, as seen through comparisons with such works as Aristotle’s Ethics, not all models of excellent people are the same, nor would many people who...

A didactic novel of self-discovery comes in the form of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. The piece explores how spirituality extends beyond religion, that it is what we base our thoughts and actions upon - whether that involves a God or the ground...

For an adaptation that omits the death scene of its protagonist, Il Gattopardo is a film permeated by the theme of death. Although Pallotta suggests that even in the novel, "the confrontation of a nobleman" with the "human dilemma [of] death" is...

In Marina MacKay’s The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel, she discusses the types of characters used in a novel in light of the humanists and structuralists debate. She explains that humanist critics tend to give characters a human dimension...

Cultural identity used to be relatively simple, since in the pre-globalization era, cultures were somewhat homogenous and many people stayed within one culture for the majority of their lives. However, the contemporary world offers challenges to...

The first Cinderella story appeared in China close to 1200 years ago. Since then, the tale has been adapted countless times for a variety of markets, including today’s. The fact that the anecdote is still relevant in the modern day shows the...

Claude McKay’s sonnet explores the differences between innocence and guilt; the contrast between our own hateful world and the purity of God. As a result, McKay builds the themes of racism and brutality, most effectively by using biblical allusion...

In the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, written by Khaled Hosseini, it is evident that Laila and Mariam face an overwhelming amount of abuse from their husband, Rasheed. Although Rasheed was brought up in a patriarchal society, this does not serve...

Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is a critique of the issues of 19th-century European industrial capitalism. Dickens uses Coketown and its inhabitants to draw parallels to the real-life experiences of the British during this time period....

Art Spiegelman is an author, an artist, a son, a historian, and a survivor of trauma. In his book Maus, he constructs a dual narrative graphic novel where he attempts to understand these roles in the context of the holocaust and in the context of...

In Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, there is one reason in which the reader never suspects Amy as the criminal, and that is her use of the double unreliable narrator. In most books, the reader immediately can tell when the narrator is inaccurate; they...