Newest Literature Essays

In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes investigates the thin separation between love and obsession and their tendency to become one. With a narrative primarily carried through the ramblings of Doctor Matthew O’Connor, the novel explores relationships (between...

The title of Beckett’s play, ‘Act Without Words I’, betrays an immediate awareness of its dual status as a text on a page and as a thing intended to be used for performance. The title, lacking an indefinite article preceding it, could be read...

In Right You Are (If You Think So), Luigi Pirandello questions absolute truth by presenting various and contrasting perspectives of the same objects. The practice of highlighting multiple perspectives by showing several angles of the same object...

Although raised near the ocean and fascinated by the power of nature, Sylvia Plath spent most of her life in the suburbs and the city. In July 1960, however, she and Ted Hughes went camping for a week in Rock Lake, Canada. Not only was she with...

Both within ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ by Chaucer and ‘An Ideal Husband’ by Oscar Wilde, the theme of power is explored, with various characters attempting to increase their power often by corrupt or deceitful means. Although corruption is explored...

“Salome” is a poem taken from Carol Ann Duffy's collection of poems The World's Wife; most of the poems share a common feature: a historically marginalized narrator retelling the story from personal perspective. Salome’s character originally...

Humans sometimes become infatuated with certain emotions, to the point of letting these emotions control them: a single force such as anger drives their motives and controls who they become. Anger, in particular, is a belligerent and dangerous...

In many of Shakespeare’s comedies, we see people from all social ranks being portrayed – from the highest of nobles, to the lowest of servants. In cases of male friendship, there is a common pattern to see friendship develop through master-servant...

While windows are technically supposed to show a viewer the outer world, in Broken April they are used to give the reader a peek into the inner feelings of the main characters. When ‘Bessian put(s) his head close to the glass’ and ‘stay(s) a long...

In the book The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, we are introduced to one of the most fascinating and puzzling characters in modern literature; Tom Ripley. Tom Ripley is a character who is both contradictory and simple in his desires. He...

In The Destruction of Semnacherib, Byron uses different types of imagery to illustrate contradictory feelings about victory in war. In this poem, the complete demolition of the Assyrian people is described in both a horrific and peaceful way,...

In David Ives’s Sure Thing, disagreements are avoided with a ringing bell, which serves as a device to shape consensus and allows the couple to fall in love at the end. Both characters are quick to judge and come close to giving up on each other...

A person’s development of identity is often influenced by the perceptions of the people around them. The novel Does My Head Look Big in This (2005) by Randa Abdel-Fattah explores how the beginning of discovering one’s identity leads to a personal...

In Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson plays a former silent film star named Norma Desmond who lives as a wealthy recluse in order to protect herself from the truth of her irrelevance in the public eye. In the film’s first...

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s The Tempest present similar definitions of “power” through the differing circumstances of their protagonists. Power, in these plays, can be thought of as “control of the unknown.” If one character has...

Niccolò Machiavelli, an influential Italian politician, writer, and historian, wrote his political treatise The Prince during a politically unstable time in Italy. When the previously exiled Medici family returned to power in 1512, Machiavelli...

As the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” thinks to himself when he is unnerved by the sight of the story’s titular house, “while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power...

In William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the titular protagonist Caleb is purportedly writing to prove his innocence after his former master, Mr. Falkland, destroys his reputation. However, in the postscript, once Falkland has died after being...

A play can have power over its audience, whether it simply captivates them with its plot or makes them question their beliefs with its commentary. Though while the actors are the ones directly exercising this power over the audience, it is the...

Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong is quoted as having said that a Chinese man has three mountains on his back. The first is colonial oppression, the second is the oppression of tradition, and the third is his own backwardness. A woman, however, has...

Although Fielding’s Tom Jones isn’t written in an entirely linear style, by far the lengthiest of his digressions, and seemingly the least relevant to the plot, is the episode in which Tom meets the Man of the Hill. A misanthropic hermit whose...

The Book of Margery Kempe is widely considered to be the first autobiography in the English language. Unlike previous texts, in which a presumably truthful narrator voiced the story of the characters, Kempe is the author of her own story. As...

Regardless of what role Sylvia Plath was playing at any given time--student, poet, teacher, wife--her feverish perfectionism was a constant factor. During her tumultuous years at Smith College, her concern over the defects she perceived in her...

I am, I am, I am. Sylvia Plath's heart beat, and she translated it the best way she knew how. To a woman who was self-aware to an uncommon degree, what else could the sound be but a relentless reminder of her own existence? Many have pointed to...