Newest Literature Essays

Shakespeare’s light-hearted ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ explores both the triumph and tragedy which presents itself in the love of Hero and Claudio, using the latter as an easily deceived character whose errors almost culminate in a tragic ending to...

Enlightenment and Equality in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer The Enlightenment emerged in the late 17th- and early 18th-century as an intellectual movement emphasizing reason, individualism, and equality. The Enlightenment presented a challenge...

In the novel Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo, it becomes highly noticeable that Tommo shows admiration for his brother and finds out his actions influence his own life. Tommo’s adoration for Charlie impacts his characteristics throughout...

Richard Price is an accomplished novelist and screenwriter, writing his first novel The Wanderers while he was attending Columbia University. After this impressive debut he wrote several more novels in quick succession including Bloodbrothers,...

‘What’s interesting to me is how the story keeps changing, and the reality of what’s happening keeps changing, and how, up until the very final scene, it's all about how the truth is perceived.’ – Martin Scorsese, director of Shutter Island.

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Seamus Heaney wrote poems on a wide variety of subjects; from reflecting on his experiences with nature as a child to a period of political turmoil that plagued Ireland in the early 20th century called the “Troubles.” Some of his poems address...

As psychologist Rollo May once said: “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.” Throughout Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, the reader is exposed to the dueling themes of conformity versus nonconformity,...

Throughout Mark's Gospel, we see Jesus referred to as the 'Son of God' and the 'Son of Man' on numerous occasions, the former occurring a total of eight times within the text, and the latter, being 'the most frequent of the Christological images...

In a theological age conscious of the damage inflicted by sin upon human reason, Anselm of Canterbury emerges as one of its greatest champions. Though his maintenance of the primacy of faith never wavered, his project was one of using the tool of...

William Blake, as a libertarian and political writer concerned with Romantic values concerning the freedom of the human spirit and liberty, wrote his ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ in an attempt to attack the corrupt political systems and...

. William Blake, in line with his standing as a Romantic and being both politically and ideologically a libertarian, can be seen in his ‘Songs of Innocence’ to express his views as to the superlative value of the freedom of the human spirit, by...

August Wilson uses his play The Piano Lesson to explore the turmoil inside the homes and hearts of many African Americans in the 1930s. Many African Americans are torn between being proud of their heritage, which is blackened with the enslavement...

Fate is shown to be a common concept throughout ancient and modern works. From Oedipus Rex to Walt Disney’s Brave, the power of fate is highly recognized within our culture; whether it is accepted or not is another story though. Through the use...

Both Virginia Woolf’s critical essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) and her polemic Three Guineas (1938) explore feminist issues of freedom and influence. Despite being written almost a decade later, Three Guineas further explores the ideas and values...

Within his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke picks up where his predecessors in epistemological theorizing left off and proceeds to shift the study towards a more empiricist approach. Amongst the complexities of his theory, the notions...

The work of Thomas Aquinas, though somewhat insignificant in his own day, is arguably some of the most studied, discussed, and revered to emerge from the medieval period. As Plantinga, Thompson and Lundberg maintain, 'of all the theologians, it is...

Introduction

"The Poisonwood Bible," by Barbara Kingsolver, uses the character of Nathan Price to address the effects of western supremacy and one's personal superiority, specifically fueled by religion. The Price family travels to the Congo on a...

Aemelia Lanyer was the "first" established Englishwoman to have asserted her identity as a poet through her single collection of poems. Eve's Apologie by Lanyer is essentially a subversive text that questions dominant assumptions about the role of...

The novel Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Houng is a work that represents postwar Vietnam quite well, with the author holding nothing back in terms of her home nations virtues and ailments. So much is her unbridled frankness that the work has...

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the 1996 cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, is imbued with religious imagery. The feuding families display such images on everything from their cars, to their clothes, to their guns. In addition, a statue of...

In E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, Tateh and Father avidly pursue the American Dream while possessing contrasting beliefs about their individual visions for freedom, wealth/opportunity, and social mobility. While Father’s nostalgia, archaic ideas...

A deconstructionist has many duties, and among them are deriving multiple meanings from a source as well as a destruction of previous criticisms of said source. This essay on deconstruction will take another look at James Joyce’s short story “...

Within “The Triumph of the Reformed Religion in America,” Cotton Mather represents his roots of Puritanism as well as transitioning towards more enlightenment thought. His essay centers on a minister named Eliot who seeks to save the natives by...

In an attempt to amend the traditional Benthamite hedonic calculus in which simply the quantity of pain or pleasure is considered, Mill, within his Utilitarianism, postulates an additional qualitative distinction resulting in the notion of a...