Newest Literature Essays

Farewell My Concubine takes place during the Chinese cultural revolution, and throughout the novel the political and social aspects of China are constantly changing. As the novel is based around the Peking Opera, the role of beauty is greatly...

In The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector includes a page prior to the story providing alternative titles that she was considering for the book. These titles are significant in the analysis of the novel as several of them originate from...

Comparing The School for Scandal and Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son has provided an interesting venture into the society from over two hundred years ago, representing society and their expectations. Brinsley recognizes the issues in the...

Arthur Miller’s All My Sons explores the relationship between father and son, and the lengths a man will go to for his family and for himself. The main character, Joe Keller, is a father who believed his greatest achievement was his son, and the...

The graphic novel Fun Home by Alison Bechdel opens with a series of panels portraying how she and her father used to play airplane. At the same time, Bechdel makes a connection between them playing airplane and the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. It...

In Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story novel we are introduced to a dystopian society that is eerily similar to our present United States of America. The story revolves around the complicated, paradoxical relationship of Lenny Abramov and...

Angela’s Ashes is an absorbing memoir by Frank McCourt, a book that details his early childhood in Brooklyn, New York. However, it tends to focus more on his life in Limerick, Ireland through various anecdotes concerning the author's young life....

Tayo, the protagonist of Ceremony, lives in more than just one reality; he lives in worlds that exist once you begin to feel their touch on your skin. Worlds where nightmares occur while you’re awake, people and animals that say and do things you...

The opening of a play is naturally one of its most important parts, serving as an introduction to its setting, characters and themes; the best openings also encapsulate both the intentions and style of the playwright. In A Streetcar Named Desire,...

Historians, philosophers, and writers alike can attest to the human struggle to follow a certain moral code; history shows a constant rift between what humans claim they should do and what they actually do. If this rift did not exist, many a...

“ I think we must agree that fools are in a terrible, overwhelming majority, all the wide world over. But how in the devil’s name can it ever be right for fools to rule over wise men?” (113). This quote describes Henrik Ibsen’s philosophy towards...

The need to escape from agitation into tranquility is often sought after means to terminate suffering. The term “escape”, derived from the French “eschaper,” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun, “the action of escaping, or the...

Shakespeare’s two plays King Lear and Macbeth take place in two contrasting settings that, from the first scenes, influence the characters’ paths and shape the course of the plays’ events. The action of both plays alternate between the settings of...

Many plays use the balance of power as a theme to drive the plot forward and to define their characters. In A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller, the patriarchal figure of Eddie becomes a tragic hero through his loss of power and reaction to...

In many books, movies, or plays, a writer sometimes includes an outside perspective aside from the perspectives of the main characters, that of someone who recalls specific details or events of that storyline. Generally in these stories, this is...

What would you do if a loved one nonchalantly informed you that later on in the night he or she planned to take his or her own life? This is the news Thelma Cates is faced with after returning home to her daughter Jessie, in the play 'night,...

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was characterized as a time of growing change for women in terms of rights and freedom. As evidenced in “Editor’s Note: Contexts of The Awakening,” women’s acceptance of traditional female roles...

In Now We Will Be Happy, Amina Gautier’s collection of short stories about Puerto Rican families and relationships on the mainland, the ability to connect to Puerto Rican culture is framed as a very important type of power and agency. Families...

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a dystopian novel set in London, focusing on the lives of special humans called donors. These donors are actually human clones, who are raised in private schools until adulthood, when their vital organs can be...

Marlon Brando gets no more than eighteen minutes of screen time in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but his performance goes down as one of the most legendary in cinematic history. His portrayal of the Colonel Kurtz painted a dark picture of...

Shakespeare’s minor characters are as often as diverse and essential to the plot as their protagonist counterparts, used within his plays to illuminate the main characters’ goals and feelings. The presence of these personages also expands upon the...

The first two settings that Steinbeck exposes to his readers in Of Mice and Men are the countryside and the bunkhouse at the ranch. Both of these are quite crucial to the development of the characters, as well as the progress and proper...

Sons and Lovers renders a fractured narrative capturing the dynamic nature of the ‘interior of the text’ through a rigorous analysis of its characters (and their actions); this is achieved by the narration’s rhythmic pattern of theses and...

Despite the wide range of worlds occupied by different fantasy series, a universal theme of the genre is the presence of evil forces working in opposition to a band of heroes. Most often the band of heroes is embarking on a quest to vanquish evil...