Newest Literature Essays

Light and music are two elements of drama that can become significant in developing the plot and characters. Certain playwrights may further incorporate stage lighting including directional lighting and setting lighting in order to not only divert...

Despite the termination of slavery following the civil war in America, oppression continued to exist through prejudice without any necessary halt. In Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, a black man in his youth stumbles upon the troublesome...

“How will you like being made exactly like other people?” is a question that echoes through Antoinette’s mind early within Jean Rhys’s responsive and revisionist text, Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys 22). Constructing her protagonist from Charlotte Brontë...

Henry James digs deep into the nuances of insanity and prompts the reader to see his protagonist’s madness with a “discerning Eye” in his novella The Turn of the Screw. Insanity, though shunned and often feared by the world, must be attempted to...

Beyond the realms of imagination stands a dark stained door, gleaming with light between the hinges. Tree-Ear, a young boy in the book A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park, in some ways leads the representative life of a poor individual in 12th...

Charles Dickens’ novel Dombey and Son displays the patriarch Mr. Dombey in his obvious and complete disappointment in his daughter. Florence, as the only surviving heir to Mr. Dombey, has no worth to him, which he outwardly acknowledges, yet...

Loneliness and isolation are themes explored in various differing ways throughout Tennessee William’s play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1947) and Colm Toibin’s novel ‘Brooklyn’ (2009), mainly through the way their protagonists are presented and...

As an Absurdist, Albee believed that a life of illusion was wrong as in consideration it created a false content for life, it is therefore not surprising that the theme of ‘truth and illusion’ throughout Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf plays a...

An extensive bureaucracy is one of the identifying features of the modern nation state. Distributed government administration allows for those factors which drive the state to function smoothly; without it, enforcing legal codes and economic...

Sometimes the application of a critical response can limit rather than expand our understanding and appreciation of a film.

‘Talk to Her’ is a 2002 Spanish film that is written and directed by Pedro Almodovar. When studying Almodovar, I...

As Benedict Anderson makes evident in Imagined Communities, literature and the nation are often intertwined in a multitude of ways. In the case of Goethe’s Faust, a single work of literature became so meaningful to the German people that they made...

Though written primarily for a young audience, C.S. Lewis’s fiction overflows with Biblical allusion and religious imagery. A Lewis narrative, indeed, becomes a vessel through which he is able to infuse his writing with his own complex theological...

In the novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding explores the savagery and bloodlust in humanity. Written right after the end of World War II, this narrative depicts roughly 40 children as they try to stay alive on a desert island in the middle of...

In the book the Wednesday Wars, Holling Hoodhood is a seventh grader at Camillo Junior High in suburban Long Island in the 1967-1968 school year, with the entire book set in the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Holling's teacher is Mrs. Baker, whose...

Sonnets are traditionally fourteen line poems written in iambic pentameter. They often adhere to either a Shakespearean, Petrarchan, or Spenserian rhyme scheme, or they can contain a mixture known as a diaspora rhyme scheme. Many times, sonnets...

Jhumpa Lahiri and Christopher Soto, in their respective pieces “Hell-Heaven” and “Winter Sundays”, discuss the restrictions on cultural expression for minority groups. The claim of both authors is that there is a unique cultural identity for each...

Stereotypes and presumptions about sex have always permeated American culture and society. From taboos to perversions to fetishes, sex and the things that come with it; relationships, marriages, and all else, have been fraught with...

The theme of childhood is typically presented as one of happiness and youthful freedom. James Joyce takes a different approach, however, as he exposes the vulnerability that naturally comes with childhood but is often not expressed in literature....

Justice and revenge are two similar terms between which exists a very thin line. Both have the intention of correcting some wrong action, whether physical or intangible. The difference lies within how action is taken against the wrongdoer: revenge...

Stanley Kowalski stumbles home drunkenly to his upstairs apartment. He sees his pregnant and glowing wife Stella preparing him dinner. Without explanation, he feels an uncontrollable rage of emotions. Stella is confused and frightened. Stanley...

Money is one of the key themes in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, with all of the characters appearing to be influenced by the promise of wealth in some way. The conmen, Face and Subtle, hold money as being greatly important, as they trick all of the...

In D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, the nature of Paul is epitomized in one particular scene in which he sacrifices Annie’s doll after accidentally breaking it. Lawrence reveals a central idea here about Paul that not only parallels the character...

Margaret Hale in Gaskell’s condition of England novel; North and South enters the public sphere of industrialised Milton. As a form of Bildungsroman, this ‘Manchester’ novel illustrates the representation of industrial life and their purchase on...

Alienation is a core aspect of Marxist thinking. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argue in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism is the cause alienation. The theory is that the estrangement, or alienation, of people, is a consequence of living in...