Newest Literature Essays

Decolonization is more difficult than simply removing the physical presence of the colonizer. Colonialism imprints on a multitude of levels on the lives of both the colonizer and colonized; the prospect of undoing years of institutionalized and...

Shusaku Endo’s Silence follows the experience of the young Catholic missionary Father Rodrigues and his companion Father Garrpe in their attempt to help the brutally oppressed Christians of 17th century Japan. As a 20th-century novel, Silence...

Because disguise and mistaken identity is such a central theme in many of Shakespeare’s comedies, so too then is gender ambiguity, with many female characters disguising themselves as men. The fact that young male actors played these characters,...

Virgil’s The Aeneid and Homer’s the Odyssey share several structures such as the Epic Exordium and Homeric Epithets, yet the movement and organization of time tie them together by grounding the stories in the real world as much as possible. This...

Tstisi Dangarembga, author of Nervous Conditions, depicts Nyasha, Tambu’s first cousin, as a product of the hybridization of British and African culture throughout the entire novel. Certainly, Nyasha’s British customs are very prominent even when...

In An Inspector Calls, J.B. Priestley expresses the importance of the interconnected nature of society through his exploration of how his characters react to their responsibility; this theme is also addressed through ideas of society present both...

The significance of March lies entirely in the recorded facts, in the story it tells. This is not solely because they have happened, but because of what it meant when people were inspired to engage in the collective actions that can be described...

People must make sacrifices every single day. Whether such sacrifice serves to benefit them, those around them, or society in general, people find that decisions to give up aspects of their lives are prevalent in human nature. Both spectrums of...

Sherman Alexie uses embedded analeptic narratives throughout the chapter “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” in Tonto and The Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven to emphasise the importance of both the characters memories and pasts on...

Within Survival in Auschwitz, author Primo Levi endured a struggle with resisting dehumanization. He had been put in a place where no man is considered human anymore and where within this place, if a man wants to survive whether mentally or...

"At an Inn" is a poem written by Thomas Hardy, a composition showcasing Hardy’s longing for another woman who is not his wife, Florence. In this work, Hardy focuses on the misinterpretations of the nature of the two’s relationship from strangers...

A majority of the world would agree that random murder is unethical and deserving of severe punishment- especially if this murder is done to an innocent, kind family. However, there is a great debate over the extent of punishment which random...

The Time Machine is a 1960 science fiction film that was produced and directed by George Pal. Based on an 1895 novel of the same title by H.G. Wells, the film portrays an inventor’s journey into the distant future and his findings. As George, the...

Edward Abbey’s second novel, The Brave Cowboy, is intensely critical of modern life. The book celebrates wide-open spaces and freedom through consistent comparison to an adjacent reality: the hustle and bustle of the city. As the novel continues,...

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a committed abolitionist who viewed slavery as an abomination and the Civil War as a just cause for the Union, as long as it resulted in an end to slavery and subsequent reconciliation between the North and South. “...

A melodrama is a film which appeals to the emotions of its audience, on a higher level than the simple “drama” genre. The characters of a melodrama are often stereotyped and exaggerated to indicate something about the culture of the times, making...

Jamaica Kincaid has portrayed troubled mother-daughter relationships extensively throughout her work, but her 1978 story “Girl," from her first short story collection At the Bottom of the River, remains her most succinct depiction of this theme....

In the novel The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, the main character, Gogol, is forced to adjust to many different environments as he ages; including Calcutta, the different apartments he occupied throughout college, and his ex-girlfriend Maxine’s...

Written during The Year Without Summer of 1816, Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem “Darkness” reveals a world of chaos and pervading death due to the unremitting darkness and cold from the blocked out sun, the result of the dust in the air from a...

J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings is one of the bestselling books of all time and has captured the imaginations of readers for decades. The story became even more popular when in 2001 director Peter Jackson released his...

First acknowledged by Francis Galton in 1874, birth order remains a psychological theory within social sciences today. The theory itself states that the order of the birth of siblings establishes certain predetermined traits for each child....

Why would a writer choose to write a Christian allegory? It is not a new concept, nor is it easy to create a presentation of the Christian allegory with new and interesting insight to captivate readers. Bunyan wrote his Christian allegory, The...

In the memoir Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf reminisces on a sailing trip she experienced when she was younger. She is walking in the boring streets of London when she thinks of something that was more exciting. Afternoon sailing is revealed to...

Edward Albee’s The Goat and Sam Shephard’s Buried Child are both twentieth-century Pulitzer prize winners, two compositions which reveal challenges to conventional norms of family, love, and relationships. Both of these plays display numerous...