Newest Literature Essays

Yin and Yang is the idea of creating balance in the universe. While one side represents good, the other represents evil and when both sides are balanced, one achieves perfect harmony. The two sides fit together perfectly, each conjoined to the...

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the will to overcome it. Jamie Ford’s novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet shows this characteristic as a central element of its narrative. Henry is a Chinese boy who is living during World War ll,...

Social class, in its simplest terms, is a way to divide a populace into strata based on their wealth, or access to power, or some combination of the two. It is also a subjective measurement which often needs only to be implied to exist, so while...

Feminism is the equality of the sexes in social, political, and economic standards. Balzaccand the Little Chinese Seamstress shows how many assumptions and expectations there are of women, compared to those of men. This piece of literature does...

The appearance of the Gothic in architecture of the Middle Ages was the start point and muse of Gothic Literary. The lack of simplicity, symmetry, regularity and nonconformation to nature inspired the features of Gothic Literature: horror/ terror,...

In 1950’s America, women were ensnared in suffocating gender roles. It was a retroactive decade in feminist history compared the power women had in the work force in the 1940s and the progression to come in the 1960s. Bound to the home and...

Owen Meany is a character who commands attention, not only because of his small stature and high-pitched voice, but also because of his blind and undying faith in God. Yet, even with his God-like qualities, Owen’s attraction to John’s mother,...

What describes family is not the people who are blood related or someone who has an obligation. Family is loving someone unconditionally and mutually; family is those who greet the worst self of someone without judgement and still stick around...

Novels are often written to convey an inherent truth of life. However, when a nonfiction book is written and the inherent truth is still prevalent, one must take notice of the lesson to learn. This concept occurs in The Devil in the White City, a...

The Ender’s Game, written by Orson Scott Card, presents a futuristic setting where the government selectively chooses, controls and trains young prodigies to win the endless battles against the “buggers” or aliens. Ender, the main character of...

In the early 1900s, a woman’s purity was viewed as her most important aspect. So much so that it effected society’s perception of her personality and subsequent treatment of her. It often was a deciding factor in marriage arrangements. In fact, if...

Through stories of American-Bengali collision, Jhumpa Lahiri explores the nuances and complexities of cross-cultural relations and desires. In her three distinct works, “Interpreter of Maladies”, “Sexy”, and “Hell Heaven”, Lahiri examines how one’...

Childhood Trauma in the MaddAddam Trilogy

Memories of youth and adolescence are an integral aspect of one’s maturation. The consequences of traumatizing childhoods can affect children throughout the remainder of their lives, as those who fail to...

Feminism is the advocacy of equality between men and women socially, politically, and economically. In Dai Sijie’s novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, the narrator and his friend, Luo, are set on civilizing a young village girl who...

William Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew is set in Padua, where Katherine, the stubborn “shrew” the title refers to, is pursued by a bachelor named Petruchio who is in search of a wealthy wife. Katherine is known as the most ill-tempered...

In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Shug Avery introduces the novel’s protagonist, Celie, to the concept of religious embodiment. Critic Anne-Janine Morey, in her book Religion and Sexuality in American Literature, defines embodiment as “the...

Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” reflects on an author’s feelings to her book after it is published and critiqued as an unfinished product. The poem uses the controlling metaphor of an author and her book to the relationship of a loving...

The romances Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Marie Borroff, and Le Morte d’Arthur, written by Sir Thomas Malory, tell of the heroic adventures and chivalrous deeds of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Through...

Alexander Portnoy, the narcissistic, sex-obsessed protagonist of Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint is a classic example of Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal Complex in action. The Oedipus Complex, as theorized by Freud, refers to a young boy’s...

Japanese culture differs significantly from culture in the Western world. In Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being, these differences are prevalent as Nao visits bathhouses, discovers manga, and witnesses the significance of suicide in her...

In The Creative Process, James Baldwin describes the purpose of the artist – “to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the...

All people go through change over the course of their lives, some fast, some slow, for better or for worse. Often events in one’s youth can be traced to be the origin of such change in direction. In many cases teenage years are the catalyst for...

Each person has a unique worldview, which is largely shaped by one’s environment, knowledge, beliefs, and more. Those who identify similarly are largely grouped with others who may have the same background. Both Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie...

During the early 1900s, an emergence of new forms of music such as blues and jazz brought a host of new musicians, many of them female. These female performers, even when wildly successful, were constantly subjected to unfair scrutiny and...