Newest Literature Essays

James Hoyle theorizes that the main sources for The Tempest revolves around the Bible story of Joseph and his Brothers in which the spirit of envy and consequent, reconciliation and pardon predominates. This storyline markedly contrasts with the...

The Taming of the Shrew gives the reflection of marriage in Shakespearean society. Ideas of patriarchy, female domestication and submission, economic interest, and the employment of noise and love all unite in the plot of the play according to the...

Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness tells the story of a Mennonite teen, Nomi Nickels, and her response to the rise of conflict and tragedy in her family. This novel, however, explores not simply the life of a fictional coming-of-age young woman,...

In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred describes her life as a concubine in a dystopic and patriarchal world, where fertile women are forced to provide children to their corresponding commanders. Most notably, women are not permitted to...

“There was a dignity about her. She was not worldly, like Clarissa; not rich, like Clarissa. Was she, he wondered as she moved, respectable? Witty, with a lizard’s flickering tongue, he thought (for one must invent, must allow oneself a little...

Wake up, have a cup of coffee, and put on some makeup before walking out the door for the first time in twelve hours. The day ends with a phone call from a loved one as the makeup comes off and the sweatpants go on before sleeping in preparation...

Identity is an idiosyncratic definition of a person that can be constructed through many variables: race, gender, class and culture, to name but a few. The Turkish Embassy Letters, comes with a pre-constructed, orientalist ideal of the East, where...

Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon tells the story of Macon “Milkman” Dead, a character completely alienated from his community, family and heritage. In the novel, readers follow his journey to the fictional town of Shalimar that he takes in...

The rationale of the Dalai Lama has been a concept passed down from many generations. Being a line of reincarnations, very rarely have the morals deviated from the original Dalai Lama. Said to embody compassion, the Dalai Lama defined his duty to...

In the play An Inspector Calls, the character of Gerald Croft is extremely significant, as he is the only perpetrator not to be a part of the Birling household. He is also the character who knew Eva Smith most intimately and has many significant...

Almost everyone, at some point in their life, deals with heartbreak and loneliness from a broken relationship. In “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” Kevin Young utilizes literary devices to depict the cruelty of a past relationship. The poem...

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden was published in the 1950’s, a time when having a large family was a virtue and a source of comfort. Given the devastating psychological effects of World Wars I and II and the growing fear of the Cold War, people...

In his “Areopagitica,” John Milton claims “He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I...

The life and times of Joyce Carol Oates dynamically impact the short story, “Where You Are Going; Where Have You Been” in which music, myth and mores shape the social text corresponding with the 1960s. The 1965 rock song, “It’s All Over Now Baby...

Charles Darwin put forward the idea that nature showed prevalent consistency in a pattern of “survival of the fittest.” In the classic realist novel The Jungle, this concept is also present throughout the entirety of the story. The narrative of a...

Book VII and Book IX of Homer’s Iliad present opposing views on the significance of material wealth in relation to the heroic code, contrasting Hector and Achilles consecutively, who have already been established by the poet as polar in character....

The Conjure Woman by Charles Chestnutt is a frame narrative, retelling a story within a story and incorporating valuable information about the traditional African fetishism practiced by the slaves against their slave masters. Fetishism or Voodoun...

In a country where many are free to learn what they please, express themselves and feel a vast range of emotions, it is an outlandish thought to have these simple freedoms restricted or even relinquished. Lois Lowry’s The Giver follows Jonas, a...

From even the beginning of civilization, social hierarchy molded the formation and development of society. Whether it be the power of a single monarch or that of a democratic board of officials, authority always induces change in both the lives of...

One’s life is shaped and modified as we grow through the relationships one makes, however little, even daily encounters can drastically change the course of life as a whole. In the blink of an eye, something happens, or rather someone happens to...

For all the stereotypes and characterizations that modernism and its literary masters bear, any kind of overwhelming optimism is seldom cited among the accusations. Often summarized as a movement conceived in the wake of the horrors of the first...

In Wyatt's "They Flee from Me," the speaker considers all his previous sexual conquests (with a particular emphasis on one "special" partner), and then wonders why these women are no longer interested in him. Usually in love poetry, the man plays...

Antithesis is a rhetorical device in which two contrasting words or concepts are juxtaposed within a parallel grammatical structure (literarydevices.com). In this case, the repeated use of this literary convention and the balanced structure it...

The nature of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a controversial subject. Mildred Tonge suggests in her essay Black Magic and Miracles in Macbeth that the witches represent women that serve a dark power, most likely Satan, or even that...