Newest Literature Essays

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...

The nature of true happiness has been the subject of many a discussion by philosophers and scholars alike for countless generations. It seems that every man who could call himself a true philosopher, men such as Aquinas, Augustine, Plato,...

Throughout history, racism has been the cause of thousands of historical events that have ripped populations apart. To be more general, the discrimination of individuals always leads up to the split of the community itself. Within Harper Lee’s To...

David Malouf, born in South Brisbane to a Catholic paternal family from Lebanon and Sephardic Jewish maternal family from Spain who had travelled to England before settling in Australia, is an Australian poet and author, whose works reflect a...

In the novel, Maggie by Stephen Crane, Maggie suffers a horrific death. Throughout the novel the reader sees the terrible conditions that each character must live in, as well as the experiences that they go through. Their lives are filled with...

Sin Sui Far, an American author from the late nineteenth/ early twentieth centuries, placed a heavy emphasis in her work on the lives of Chinese-Americans and the oppression they felt. Through legislation passed by U.S. Congress such as the...

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...