Newest Literature Essays

Existentialism emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. Contrarily, environmental determinism suggests that society shapes individuals, allowing...

Suzanne Collins captivates readers of every age, race, and sex with her dystopian, slightly Orwellian novel, The Hunger Games. Aspects of it are reminiscent of Lois Lowry’s The Giver in that the society depicted is one in which mankind has...

Percival Everett writes Erasure with an incredibly avant-garde structure for a fiction novel. The primary narrative is actually a frame story in which a plethora of writings stemming from a myriad of genres are skillfully embedded. The work...

Margaret Edson’s play Wit, devalues the question ‘how are you feeling today?’ by the lack of emotion and the harsh clinical empathy that ruins the effect of the query in order to highlight the professional, physical, mental, and spiritual...

Plato’s Republic utilizes a political approach to answer what is essentially a moral question. In attempting to identify justice in the individual, Socrates takes an unmistakable turn toward the direction of political philosophy, describing the...

In The Histories, Herodotus offers an account of the events leading to the Greco-Persian Wars between the Achaemenid Empire and Greek city-states of 5th century BC and attempts to determine “the reason why they fought one another” (1.1). In...

The play Trifles by Susan Glaspell depicts the repressed roles of women in 1916 and holds underlying tones of the feminist movement shown through the two female lead characters, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale. This play paved the way for female writers...

Colson Whitehead has written an inordinately compelling post-apocalyptic science fiction novel centering around the zombie archetype. In Zone One, he deftly uses the zombie model to create a mediocracy—a populace of dependent thinkers who accept,...

Throughout the course of history, mystical concepts and magical elements have been woven into virtually every civilization’s culture. From angels and demons to fantastical creatures like unicorns and leprechauns, supernatural beliefs have...

August Wilson’s Fences is a classic play about African-American life written in 1983 and set sometime in the 1950s. It serves as the sixth installment in Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” which spans ten installments in total. Fences is a period piece...

Mysterious Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy about how arbitrary love is. The play shows a cast of characters with conflicting love interests, and midway through the text, many of their...

Ray Lawrence’s film Lantana and Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement share several key ideas that can be conveyed to the audience in similar ways. The guilt of betrayal, differences in class and the idea of love are all explored in depth by both author...

“Does this dress make me look fat?” It’s a common conception; women tell each other to wear black because the contrast is slimming. Politicians run attack ads on components to make themselves look better in comparison. The literary technique of...

John Locke proves that mathematical knowledge is not innate in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by contrasting Plato’s theory to learning through sensation and perception, thus curating the theory of empiricism. Through his arguments, Locke...

Sometimes, the Devil—or, at least, one of his most trusted minions—really is in the details. In Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, the most compelling hero is not the eponymous main character. Doctor Faustus, with...

‘I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they’re in a world they thought they knew, but...

Marxist Criticism of The Watsons Go to Birmingham

Christopher Paul Curtis certainly makes a point to address class in his telling of the Watsons’ story, but beyond this, The Watsons Go to Birmingham carries more direct allusions to specifically...

In the drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee meticulously constructs Daddy as a character who is both ever present and tied to the representation of major themes in the play. Albee uses the looming yet absent presence of Daddy to...

Literature has many essential elements like theme, plot, structure, and character development. But in The Inferno by Dante there is said to be little to no character development. So the question must be asked: is character development actually...

War has always been one of the most shocking and destructive staples of human history. In his novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, Canadian author Steven Galloway seeks to encapsulate the effects that war has on individuals. Galloway emphasizes that...

The poem "My Papa’s Waltz" by Theodore Roethke is a work rich in ambiguities, which are shown through the language used in the work as well as in the relationship between the speaker and his father. Readers can detect two sides to this poem. One...

Through his work in poetry, literature, and other media, Walt Whitman is often considered one of the most significant American writers and theorists. He arguably popularized all-American literature with his work, injecting American writing into an...

Throughout both Roman and Greek ancient literature, well-renowned writers ranging from Aeschylus to Thucydides have demonstrated the major character flaws of mortals and the effects of their failings on their life and well-being. Although the...

Dalton Trumbo is perhaps best known for his Communist viewpoints and for his involvement in the HUAC committee in Hollywood and for his work in the movie industry. However, Trumbo’s novels are widely regarded as some of his best work. In one of...