Newest Literature Essays

Young Adult Literature is shadowed by misunderstandings and biases. The genera is seen as a negative influence upon young adults or it is seen as a stepping stone in which teens use to work their way up to the “classics.” The stories in YA novels...

Can a man living in society be content? In the essay, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, author Jean-Jacques Rousseau addresses this very question. Man first originated in the state of nature, where he was alone and only dependent on himself....

Ernest Hemingway is widely regarded as one of the finest modernist literary minds, and his first novel The Sun Also Rises (also known as Fiesta) is held in as high regard. It is based on real events in Hemingway's life, ones which he novelized...

When looking at A Streetcar Named Desire – a tragedy, after all – it is traditionally required that there should be a selected antagonist, a ‘villain’ so to speak. Stanley Kowalski, you could argue, is that ‘villain’. It is evident that throughout...

Both The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley are novels that introduce dangers in the form of an ‘enemy’ – the details of which enemy are largely unknown by the reader. Wells and Shelley, though dealing with enemies...

A national ethos of the United States, the American Dream, is the ideal that all U.S. citizens should have an equal opportunity to achieve prosperity and success through persistence, determination, and hard work. There are countless stories,...

Lewis Carroll’s depiction of a fantasy world in the novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) captures the attention of the reader via the incorporation of talking animals, “curiouser and curiouser” (Carroll 2012 [1865], p.12) events and the...

“There are times when even the tiger sleeps.” This Chinese proverb is essential in understanding the character of Lindo Jong, mother of Waverly Jong, in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. The book, written as a series of interwoven vignettes, delves...

Propelling subjects into action, inciting inanimate objects into movement; verbs meet and surpass these functions. Without verbs a sentence would fail to be such, a clause would fall in rank down to a phrase or a simple phrase. There are three,...

According to Plato, true knowledge originates in the realm of the Forms, or universal, eternal, constant, and absolute truths that only the mind can access, such as the Form of the Good or the Form of the Just. Forms are not part of the visible...

Martin Luther King and James Baldwin lived in the era of racial inequality and the civil rights movement, an era when African-Americans were still fighting to find a place in society. In 1963, King wrote a famous letter from jail while in 1957;...

Many authors have identified the self-absorbed behavior of Emma Bovary as the key character quality that leads to her downfall, and modern analyses point to lack of social and educational opportunities as the root cause of the decline and death of...

“O, brave new world!” John joyfully proclaims after being told he will have the chance to live in the World State with Bernard and Lenina (Huxley 93). Upon first reading dystopian literature, one might feel much like John, assuming a more...

Although most men and women recognize how traditional gender roles dictate their actions in hopes of being accepted into society, very few can claim that they have been completely exiled from their community because they appear too “masculine” or...

Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a simile as, “An explicit comparison between two different things, actions, or feelings, using the words ‘as’ or ‘like’…” (Baldick 334). In his critically-acclaimed epic poem, Omeros, Derek Walcott uses...

What is “normal”? We spend enough time, collectively, trying to figure out just that, but if women think it’s complicated now, what about women making their way before us? Expectations were rigid, gender roles carefully defined, and opportunities...

In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton paints an intimate view of New York culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wharton does this by masterfully presenting a slice of New York, focusing on a few intricately developed...

In his play, Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare presents duty and desire on a metaphorical spectrum through the individual narratives of several characters including Antony, Cleopatra and Pompey. When presenting duty and desire in Antony and...

Malouf’s Ransom explores man’s quest for meaning, underscoring the importance of hearing and telling stories as they influence basic human understanding and interactions. Priam’s anecdotes illustrate the ability to cement our identity and...

One of the most famous passages in Plato’s Symposium and one that seems to receive the most attention in contemporary philosophy is Diotima’s Ladder of Love. Diotima explains that love is an ascent through a number of stages or steps on the ladder...

The story of the flood in Genesis 6-9 in the Old Testament is familiar to the readers of the Bible, but the record of such a flood first appears much earlier in ca. 2,500 B.C. on the eleventh tablet of the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Although...

When Albert Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus [1], he demonstrated the absurdity of human existence in the indifferent universe with the ridiculous task of pushing a rock up a hill an infinite number of times. Every time Sisyphus pushed the rock to...