Newest Literature Essays

Human government and military seldom see eye to eye, no matter how vital each is to the other. Homer’s Iliad illustrates such a struggle quite well in its capture of the tension between political authority and military force, most notably the...

In the government of any civilization, virtue is not only a preferable characteristic of the ruler or rulers, but a necessary one. Of the virtues, perhaps the two most intrinsically necessary for political decisions are justice and clemency. These...

Language is the basis of all human communication; one could even say language is the basis of humanity itself. In the essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell explains the significance of proper and effective language. He examines...

Human history is rife with episodes of mass purgings, genocides, and tyrannies, driven by an ideal for purity that transcends all else. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, a dystopian society re-establishes itself in the...

While it may be easy to underestimate the importance of scenic descriptions, setting plays an important role in most literature - including character-driven fantasy. Setting can be written to represent conflicting forces or ideals, and to help...

Within The Namesake, Lahiri presents the relationship between men and women as heavily shaped by their environment, heritage and socio-economic background. The relationship between the Ratliffs, Maxine’s parents, Gerald and Lydia, is directly...

“The Island At Noon” by Julio Cortazar follows main character Marini, who works as a flight attendant flying over the Aegean sea and wishes to travel to an island he observes out the window. However, when he makes it to the island, while he finds...

Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wild fell Hall is a novel in which the plights of the female protagonist overlap with the issues faced by the majority of women in the Victorian Era of England. The book raises questions of the Brontës’ family’s sisters...

Throughout the opening scenes of Priestley's An Inspector Calls, Eric is portrayed as little more than a drunken child ('only a boy', as his Mother would have put it). If the work is considered to be a morality play, then Eric is perhaps guilty of...

Cultural divides are difficult to overcome in storytelling, because readers must both re-orient their largest cultural assumptions and understand the ideas of specific, unique characters. However, in The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan effectively makes...

World War II had a profound impact on American culture. Essentially every person in the country was affected in some way, but the war’s impact of African Americans was unique. Although African Americans were indeed Americans they were often...

In Socrates’ Oedipus the King, the character of Jocasta plays a pivotal role in the plot. How one views Jocasta, the mother, and later, unknowingly, wife of Oedipus, is integral to progression of the story and to how one judges the various...

In Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas explains that her father, Kazem, had studied and worked in America and “often spoke about America with the eloquence and wonder normally reserved for a first love. To him, America was a place where anyone, no...

Louise Erdrich’s novel Love Medicine conveys the state of Native American life in today’s society. Her symbolism stands out to me above all else in the book. While Erdrich uses many symbols and motifs, the most poignant is her water and river...

The House on Mango Street is a story told through the observations of Esperanza, a girl of Latino heritage, as she views the world around her. Esperanza interprets the world she sees around her on Mango Street while paying special attention to the...

In her collection of short stories entitled Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri illustrates the difficulties that immigrants face when displaced and distanced from their culture. Each story serves as a different viewpoint on cultural...

In his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz brings to light a piece of Dominican history that he sees as both relevant and problematic. Within the first few pages of the novel, the speaker identifies his story as a fukú story....

The women of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Love’s Labour’s Lost play very different parts in their respective stories. The women in the two plays have differing roles, responsibilities, opportunities. The women in Titus Andronicus are rarely...

Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ is an inherently Marxist novel, from its subject matter to its characters, and proposes its message through allusions to reification and the possible threat posed by science and its discoveries. Although some elements...

There are few identities that fit neatly within conventional, binary systems of thought. Binary oppositions that exist within the spheres of race and gender are exclusive of individuals who occupy intersections of these identities. In The Woman...

Wordsworth said that ‘poetry is passion, it is the history or science of feeling’. In conjunction with Shelley’s quote, this is a bold statement to make. Not only does Wordsworth name poetry as the ‘science’ of emotion –creating an authorial sense...

Gender in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is caged within a static binary composed of the masculine and the feminine; relative opposites within which individuals are expected to conform to a certain quota of behaviors – for to fit into neither...

Ernst Cassirer states in his book The Myth of the State that “The Prince is neither a moral nor an immoral book: it is simply a technical book. In a technical book we do not seek for rules of ethical conduct, of good and evil. It is enough if we...

Larkin’s poetry reflects a certain dark humor, with an often-witty conveyance of a powerful message. There is certainly control and elegance in Larkin’s work; the subject matter is apposite and therefore has an impact on his reader rather than an...