Newest Literature Essays

The dominating theme of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief is an ironic one. Here is a novel where a main character is nothing less than the symbol of mortality itself, Death, yet the story continually celebrates the life spirit that is contained...

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser are two extremely different books about the same topic: the American food industry. Paired excerpts explore the behind-the-scenes work that goes into processed food and how the...

The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 represented a triumphant moment of success for the city of Chicago as well as for the entire nation. Yet, the grandeur of the fair was paralleled with an equally great amount of corruption and abuse. During this...

A sense of identity is what defines the human being, what sets each person apart from the next, is the constitution of an individual. In the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the author uses information from...

Chapter 17 sees all members of the Ramsay family and their guests at dinner. The interaction of these characters in this chapter allows for themes such as challenging expectations and, more importantly, the theme of communication to be explored....

The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers discusses the life of a 12 year old girl, Frankie, who is transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Frankie feels disconnected from the rest of the world, having lost her mother when she was born,...

The first president of the United States, George Washington, famously stated, “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter” (Washington). Often an uneducated working class is exploited for...

Growing up in a multiracial family can be confusing, especially if one’s family history has been kept a secret for years. This is the problem for James McBride, whose lifelong struggle of self-identity kept him from truly understanding and...

In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas argues that true human fulfillment stems from one’s closeness to God. Worldly pursuits, like fame or glory, fall short in comparison to the happiness that comes from arriving at a vision of the divine...

In the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, the human race is characterized by a constant desire to achieve immortality. For the scientists at the CorpSeCorps, this means creating the Anooyoo Spa and the genetically mutated pigoons—symbols of...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that explores what is universally thought to be one of the most bewitching and relatable themes present in literature: love and longing. There is something about the notion of love or romance that has the power...

Margaret Atwood, renowned author of many novels, crafts the beautiful Maddaddam trilogy, consisting of Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood, and Maddaddam. The series is portrayed as a work of feminism, environmental activism, and even...

Alcoholism is one of the most commonly seen problems in familial environments. It not only affects the health of the person consuming the alcohol, but also has an impact on the wellbeing of those surrounding him or her. Jeannette Walls’s memoir ...

A mother is arguably the most important figure in a child’s life, especially during his or her developmental stages. However, too much love, especially while a child is learning to bond, has the potential to create a mother complex and permanently...

"To Celia" is a four-stanza poem written by Ben Jonson that has been said to be centered around his fellow poet Lady Mary Wroth, who had also been the subject of his other poems such as 'To Penshurst' and 'Sonnet to the Noble Lady, the Lady Mary...

Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is one of history’s most raw and multifaceted arguments for the abolition of slavery. Seized and forced into the slave trade when he was only eleven, Equiano tells his...

Though Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hobbes lived during different time periods and never had the opportunity to meet each other, both shared several ideas regarding human nature while they also harbored a few differences in ideologies. Conrad’s Heart...

Feminism is defined as “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes and the organized activities on behalf of women’s rights and interests” (Merriam-Webster). This includes liberation from sexual, religious, legal, and...

While Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is known primarily as a feminist text, it is Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy that influenced Beauvoir’s writings. As existentialists, these philosophers argue that philosophical thinking...

Upon encountering Eavan Boland’s poetry, readers will discover representations of human experiences that are largely accessible, as such facets of existence are expressed in a sincere manner. In the poem ‘Love,’ for instance, Boland explores the...

In society, people view children as innocent and ignorant beings because they lack worldly experiences. As a result, the fact that children can cause and shed light on problems in adult relationships is often overlooked. Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection...

Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is filled with many complex characters that make up the Tull family. However, throughout the interconnected lives of siblings Ezra, Cody, and Jenny, the one key figure they lack is their father, Beck....

Dreams are usually experienced when a person is sleeping, but idealizations and memories can turn into dreams as well. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between dreams and reality, especially when thinking of the past. People may mistake what...

Appearances and Unhappy Couples In Jhumba Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, there is a common theme of glossing over the truth. Many characters preoccupy themselves with appearances in hopes of escaping the reality of their unhappy relationships....