Newest Literature Essays

Over the course of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes suspends belief in all material and metaphysical substance before rebuilding from the foundational element of the thinker’s existence, eventually concluding that God exists...

‘Jacob Marley was as dead as a doornail.’ The celebrated author Charles Dickens accentuates this inert nature of a door nail to the society to 1843 England through his classic novella ‘A Christmas Carol.’ The novella’s titular character, Ebenezer...

Mankiewicz’s All About Eve uses the theatre as a medium in which the female protagonists, Eve and Margo, are victimized at the hands of varying internal and external factors. The film clearly portrays Margo as a casualty of lies and scheming, as...

Throughout the poem “Wind”, by Ted Hughes, there are two significant symbols. In the poem, the house (and its surroundings) is one of the main subjects and symbolizes a relationship between the writer and another person. The second symbol in the...

Everyone, at some point, has an experience that so profoundly alters his or her life that it seems to define time itself. For many Americans, the tragic terrorist attacks that took place on September 11, 2001 fractured life into two pieces: before...

The Sexualization of the African-American in “Going to Meet the Man” James Baldwin’s short story “Going to Meet the Man” explores the interweaving of racism with the sexual violence against the African-American in 1965 southern America. Baldwin...

The concept of redemptive and destructive love is common in all modes of texts, no matter the location or the time period. This is because love itself is timeless; it is a moving force that pushes people to act, an emotion which can cause both...

At the table of an unassuming cafe in Old Anarkali market, Lahore, Changez relates the story of his citizenship within America and charts the nature of his stay. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid is able to successfully employ a rare...

Captivity and slave narratives allow insight into the trauma that the victim experiences; however, the victim’s narrative is often influenced and therefore, altered, to conform to the society’s pressures at that time. Focusing on the reception of...

As members of a patriarchal society, the women in A Midsummer Night's Dream are obligated to be subservient to the men. Power is only extended to women in the fictional world of Fairyland. This exemplifies the misogyny of the time, where women had...

Laden with allegories, dualisms, and symbolism, Hawthorne’s "The Birth-Mark" makes light of a variety of multi-faceted and complex issues, foremost among them those of sexuality and humanity. While the character of Aylmer seems both emotionally...

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is set in Nazi Germany in World War II. Narrated by Death, the novel takes as its protagonist Liesel Meminger, a girl who grows up in a foster home where Jews aren't seen as evil, in a departure from attitudes in the...

As First Lady Rosalynn Carter once said, “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be,” applies to many leaders and one of them is Ralph. In Lord of the Flies by...

Throughout F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterwork The Great Gatsby, the remarkably capricious character of Daisy Fay Buchanan succinctly epitomizes the ideas of aristocracy and superficiality so readily present in the hedonistic society of the roaring...

Emily Dickinson once said: “We meet no stranger but ourself.” This quote relates strongly to the theme of identity within her poems. It can be taken to mean that it is easy for us to get to know others. To understand oneself, however, is a much...

Who we are is shaped by where we are from.

This is a common thread in the human experience; our backgrounds give way to our personalities. But what happens when a person disagrees with the confines of their nation upon their identity? The English...

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience exemplifies his ideas on the nature of creation. They demonstrate the innocent and bucolic world of childhood, versus an adult world of depravity and repression.

Blake stands outside innocence...

Over time, the presence of patriarchal ideologies in the Western world has lessened drastically. Yet in the past, women have lived in brutal societal conditions that most people, especially men, cannot imagine. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the...

In Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, the concept of influence is clearly reflected in two different characters and in two different forms, and juxtaposes them though the main character and his reaction to the two clashing ideologies...

From the witch hunting hysteria of the 17th century, to the biblical belief that all objects touched by a menstruating woman became unclean, female sexuality has been regarded by men with fear and hostility for thousands of years. Accused by...

Throughout the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout’s feelings and notions regarding Arthur “Boo” Radley change from her initial preconceived impression that he was a monster, to accepting Boo as a person and empathizing his perspective of the...

Being John Malkovich

Endless riches, untouchable fame, authority that would never dare be challenged. Isn’t that the goal? To live in a world where one can walk out of their beach house into their new Lamborghini knowing they don’t have a worry in...

The practice of theatrically adapting Shakespeare’s works has been popular for close to four hundred years (Fischlin and Fortier 1); the high points of appropriation were the Restoration and the second half of the twentieth century. Recent...

Throughout the novel, The Centaur (1963) by John Updike, the theme of self-acceptance is prevalent. The protagonist, George Caldwell, who also symbolizes Chiron of Greek mythology, struggles to come to terms with his life as it is and always looks...