Newest Literature Essays

Scent and hatred in the novel Perfume Everyone has characteristics that define or individualize them. Without these characteristics, it becomes difficult for one to be considered unique. The novel Perfume, by Patrick Suskind, presents a character,...

Bildungsroman novels are identified by the grueling quest a protagonist undergoes in his search for place in society. The experiences the protagonist undergoes within this search contribute to their moral and psychological growth, building to one...

In his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn illustrates the struggle for survival zeks faced within the GULAG. He elucidates this effectively through the portrayal of a day’s experiences in the life of Ivan...

Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, which follows Rasselas and his companions as they search for the choice of life that generates the most happiness, influenced Johnson’s generation so profoundly that the period from...

A theme that is immediately apparent in Pushkin’s The Shot is “the noble man with a romanticized view of life”. This theme was common during the Romantic Era, the period in which Pushkin wrote, but is important for more than historical reasons; in...

In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Lady Russell convinces Anne not to marry Frederick Wentworth as she finds him unworthy of Anne. Similarly, in Hedda Gabler, Hedda herself conceals her knowledge of and destroys Eilert’s manuscript in order to end his...

“V” is a poem in which Tony Harrison illustrates the working class hostility towards the political establishment and Margret Thatcher’s government during the 1984 miner’s strike. However, it also focuses on the unity between himself and his “woman...

Myths are essential to the human race. The Greeks and Romans used them to explain nature, life and death. Abrahamic and Eastern religions use them to modify behavior and mollify human anxiety about what happens postmortem. In order to keep a myth...

After WWII, many soldiers returned home to a new world. As more and more females joined the workforce, the American identity shifted from a primarily male dominated society to an integrated society between men and women. The burdens of everyday...

The popular children’s book The Giving Tree tells the story of a tree that loves a boy so completely and selflessly that it is willing to give up everything it has for the boy. Gilbert Grape is a realistic version of just that—a young man who...

The facade of Bentrock, Montana, is the idyllic, but dull, American frontier town. Ordinary people working long hours in the fields each day to provide for their families. To strive for, and eventually live the American Dream, is the essence of...

When reading a book as brilliant as The Brother’s Karamazov, one wonders where Dostoevsky’s inspiration came from. According to Sigmund Freud, the novel must not be studied as a fiction but as a science, that being psychology. It seems that the...

In his play Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov uses many writing techniques to convey a sense of breakdown in communication. While his play has elements of humor in it, making it seem almost farcical at times, Chekhov was truly concerned about the lack of...

Anthony Doerr’s remarkable novel, “All the Light We Cannot See,” is a literary piece that moves briskly, efficiently, and beautifully in precise and pristine sentences. Every sentence is a lyrical poetry that the author carefully structured. The...

In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Offred, the main character lives in Gilead, a dystopia where fertile women are solely used to reproduce children. Known as handmaids, these women are confined into prison-like centers and forced to...

Indubitably, Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' is largely reminiscent of the archetypal Grecian tragedy; evoking an overwhelming sense of pity/catharsis for the female protagonist. However, the constituents of said 'tragedy'; though in...

John Donne's 'A Valediction Forbidding Mourning' opens with an acknowledgement of 'virtuous men' passing away. The concept of death, as grounded in the first line, is an extremely striking way to begin a poem. This striking opening is a typical...

‘The Table’ is a poem in the ‘Birthday Letters’ collection, which contains eight-eight poems detailing the life Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had together before Plath’s untimely death. In particular, ‘The Table’ is a poem about the writing desk Ted...

Language is one of the most important things that human beings use to communicate. Even before there were written words, people communicated through gestures and images in order to explain important things in their lives. Language helps us track...

"This above all- to thine own self be true, /And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (Hamlet, 1.3.154-56). As Shakespeare so eloquently wrote, finding oneself is the key to truth. This idea is a...

The winds of war strike all, and just as spring blossoms are blown from the trees falling white to the ground, young men are killed in their prime by war before they are able to bear the fruit of knowledge. Herman Melville observed the pre-war...

Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go allows for glimpses into some hidden dimension of a dystopian reality through the eyes of the protagonists life; Kathy H. The anecdotal, narrative form of the novel permits Ishiguro to present the protagonists...

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is a novel dominated by the struggle of powerful personalities. The Bildungsroman style of novel explores the coming of age of Margaret Hale, the nineteen year old protagonist, and the ‘struggles’ she faces and...

North and South is a condition of England novel which, like Gaskell’s earlier work Mary Barton, sought to give a voice to the working class and expose the middle and upper classes to their suffering through the medium of literature. Published in...