Newest Literature Essays

“The Lady’s Dressing Room”by Johnathan Swift is a controversial, misogynistic poem written to mock women of this era. Swift wrote this expecting a reaction from women and men, trying to prove to men that women are not as elegant and dainty as they...

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Eliza Harris” was written in a time where the world was an unforgiving brutal place for African American slaves. Harper uses an intense amount of emotion to try and create a sense of empathy from her readers. She is...

After analyzing “A Summer’s Reading” from the 20th century American collection, The Magic Barrel (1950) by Bernard Malamud, exhibits a theme common in several short stories that teaches a challenging but, valuable lesson. “A Summer’s Reading”has a...

Bound Feet and Western Dress is a dual memoir, telling the story of Pang-mei Natasha Chang and Chang Yu-i, a great-niece and great-aunt who share their stories of growing up in the Chang family, each taking turns narrating the story in the first...

Society has confused my understanding of role models. In our society people toss the word “hero” around so often everyone seems to be a hero. Jordan Belfort, a criminal is called a hero for turning his humble beginnings into immense wealth....

The novel, 1984 by George Orwell describes a dystopia, a future state in which the government is totalitarian. The documentary film, Secret State of North Korea, directed and produced by James Jones, follows a reporter that interviews different...

What separates humans from the animals we keep in cages? What makes our specific collection of bones classify as human? Over 200,000 years ago, humans evolved into the modern man and since then, brilliant and seemingly impossible feats have been...

In his short story Bobok, Fyodor Dostoevsky provides a perfect example of one of his favorite devices, magical realism, which paints a realist view of the modern world with the addition of magical elements. The idea that a man might lie down in a...

Anne Sextons confessional lyric poem, “With Mercy for the Greedy” (1962) displays many ways of how she interprets life around her. Sexton tries to believe in religion to have a sense of believing in something, mostly because of her friend “Ruth”,...

Through ‘Le Père Goriot’ Honoré de Balzac explores the antithetical nature of several ideals: love and wealth, social status and happiness, rebellion and obedience, and – what a reader may find to be the most intriguing – morality and success....

The Significance of Institutions: Nadja, The Stranger, and Waiting for Godot Our human society is ruled by institutions. We cannot even fathom a life without them. We might think we have freedom, but there is only a certain amount of freedom we...

In the suffocating times of the Victorian era, authors adhered to strict and stifling methods of writing due to the restrictive and stigmatic conformity engulfed by Victorian society. Postmodernism conjured a form of radicalism in literature,...

In the story “Unaccustomed Earth” by Jhumpa Lahiri, the main character Ruma and her son Akash, are visited in Seattle by her father. Her husband, Adam, “would be away that week, on another business trip” (5). Ruma and her father’s relationship is...

The female characters in Isabel Allende’s novel, House of the Spirits, are generally depicted as the stronger of the sexes. It becomes apparent to the reader very early on that the author has a lot of respect for women; this is manifested in the...

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel García Márquez creates a set of characters who each represent a certain aspect of close-minded human nature as a whole. It is this style of character development that allows the reader to understand that,...

The greatest fear of all is the unknown. When a person is about to die, fear creeps in because he/she has no idea what will happen next. Doing anything that does not have a definitive outcome is very scary. This is mostly because people are afraid...

The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms. (Gramsci 276)

This is the epigraph of the novel July’s People based on which Nadine Gordimer prophesies the chaotic situation that...

Young Adult literature covers a wide variety of genres and subjects, covering topics that a vast majority of young adults are struggling with day to day. These novels are not limited to race or gender; however, minority characters are hard to come...

Auteur director Alfred Hitchcock first introduced audiences to Rear Window, a film that would go on to reach both critical and commercial success, in the mid-1950s. With this, he left them pondering a question still being debated by viewers today:...

Both Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi deal with the weighty themes of dehumanization, oppression, and the darkest sides of humanity. Similarities between the apparatus of oppression depicted...

True literature has two purposes, the first is to show a reflection of society, and the second is to encourage social change by showing an unflattering reflection. In 1959, Shirley Jackson published her acclaimed novel The Haunting of Hill House,...

How can we define humanity? The word “inhuman” is used to describe cruel and brutal actions. Thusly, a human’s perspective would dictate that humanity should be interpreted as the opposite, and entail dignity and goodness - but it is important to...

Nothing grows and changes throughout life like a person’s identity as people face new challenges and experiences every day. The protagonist of Black Swan film by director Darren Aronofsky, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is faced with a fatal...

Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander challenges 16th century Christian teaching. Christian teaching on desire stems from Thomas Aquinas’ Natural Law which is a set of moral laws intended to identify God’s purpose for human life. One of the five...