Newest Literature Essays

“Everything centers around the bull and the bullfighter. The bull can represent anything we choose: the unknown, the “other”, fear, money, sex, work, romantic relationships, etc. It is something that you have to see to understand. The most...

In the text Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, the main character, Antoine Roquentin, experiences both struggles and triumphs when it comes to understanding existential philosophy. The author has been famously quoted regarding his own existential views,...

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway seeks to address changes of life and attitudes following World War I through the disjointed lens of the narrator, Jake Barnes. Told through his stream of consciousness, the novel investigates psychological...

Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847) is commonly read as a feminist metanarrative of women’s writing in which a young English woman rises out of class-based oppression and finds her independence. There is a tendency to read Jane Eyre as an...

By the time she speaks her famous closing line about depending on the kindness of strangers, it has become apparent that the ability of Blanche DuBois to survive in a world of men—and not just animalistic throwbacks like Stanley Kowalski, either,...

Upon its initial release, few moviegoers could possibly have predicted that The Truman Show would not remain pure fantasy for decades to come. The very concept that millions of Americans would ever sit around 24/7/365 watching what essentially...

An opening title card introduces the 1996 movie Fargo as one that is not only based on a true story, but with the exception of name changes made at the request of the survivors, a film that proceeds to present the events of that true story exactly...

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and first published in 1848 [1], precedes the writing of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty by more than a decade. Although Mill and Marx were both living in England by the time On...

A House for Mr. Biswas, written by V.S. Naipaul, is an epic that tells the story of Mohun Biswas, a poor boy believed to be a bad omen from birth, and his life in Trinidad. The life of Mr. Biswas is presented in the form of an epic, narrating his...

In the novel Reef, there are a series of events that mark Triton’s (the protagonist's) coming of age. To understand Gunesekera's novel, a reader should heed these events and consider how these occurrences have shaped and affected the protagonist’s...

In Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), the main character Jane is an up-and-coming documentarian. She is offered a job on the set of a new television show called My American Wife! and happily takes it. The show is sponsored by a special interest...

Most people do not focus on the writing style of a novel and tend to pay more attention to the broader contours of the story line. When reading Gary Schmidt’s Trouble, the reader should pay attention to writing style because it is different from...

Gwendolyn Brooks's poem “The Bean Eaters" highlights the loneliness and poverty of an old couple, people who have been forgotten by pretty much everyone. They have been forgotten by their kids who have grown up and moved out; they have been...

Within any genre the individual gears and cogs of a film may vary in degrees, but the film still ascribes to a set of rules preordained by the genre’s progenitors. Like a meme, genre films such as the Western will warp and intentionally borrow...

In Arthur Miller’s 1945 novel Focus, there are many prejudicial attitudes that manifest themselves throughout the action; Miller clearly takes a stance that all of these anti-Semitic views are irrational. The setting of the novel is in mid-1940’s...

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner depicts the lives of two Afghan boys who grow up in the turmoil of invasion, heartbreak and war. Amir, the protagonist and narrator of the story, is Pashtun and Hassan, a Hazara boy, is Amir’s servant with a cleft...

‘I may assert eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.’

(Book I, II. 25-26, p. 4)

It would be strange for any reader not to see that John Milton’s most famous work, Paradise Lost, is a deeply religious text, simply by glancing at...

That Virginia Woolf’s epic essay “A Room of One’s Own” would be greeted unenthusiastically by its 20th-century male critics goes without saying. That it has managed to become a foundation of modern feminist thought since its publication is also...

Poverty is one of the most important themes of The Visit, and serves as the foundation for the entire plot. If the town of Guellen had not fallen into deep poverty, Claire Zachanassian would have never had to visit the town and present the...

In his seminal work Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison depicts the dramatic and enlightening account of the life of the novel’s main character as he grows in understanding of himself and the reality of the world he inhabits. This unnamed narrator, a...

In the novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, the character of Mrs Danvers is presented as a foil to the narrator: a character who provides a contrast to the narrator in order to highlight her attributes. Mrs Danvers is the housekeeper at Mannerly...

Jonathan Edwards straddled two definitive eras in American history: the hardline beliefs of the Puritans he was raised by in the Connecticut Valley and the freethinking, logical reasonability of the Age of Enlightenment (Norton Anthology 396)....

“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is one of the most anthologized, widely-read, beloved, and analyzed poems in the American canon. A short poem consisting of four stanzas of five lines each composed of simple direct language constructed...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a tale in which one simple action leads to a tumbling of catastrophic events. When the Mariner shoots the Albatross, a bird who has brought him and his sailors good fortune, he does so...