Newest Literature Essays

The Coen Brothers' 2000 adventure film O Brother, Where Art Thou? is an American adaptation of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. This recent comedy follows three escaped convicts as they search for a hidden treasure. Despite the considerable gap...

“He looked like a phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost,” (114) can easily be regarded as one of the most impactful lines in William Faulkner’s Light in August. A very prominent theme throughout the novel is identity, which the...

Ella Cara Deloria’s novel Waterlily carefully considers the role of women, not only as respectful instructors of etiquette, dedicated sisters, and hospitable homemakers, but also as the primal maternal beings responsible for birthing the tribe’s...

In Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon, the names of people and even of places take center-stage as arguably the driving motif of the book. Names are used to create Biblical allusions and delineate legacy among related characters, but one of...

John Milton conforms much to the popular misogyny of his time - the belief that women are inferior to men, and wives subservient to their husbands. However, his epic Paradise Lost explores the positive and important role women in that society...

William Dean Howells publicly opposed the Spanish-American War of 1898, believing that it was more of an evasive attempt by the United States to achieve territorial and economical expansion of Spanish colonial nations like Cuba and the...

Dave Eggers is a playful author, wiling to experiment and take risks for his audience. At the same time, Eggers is aware of his ploys and sometimes uses these games as a way to pawn off the tragedies that happened to him over the course of the...

Dave Eggers utilizes unusual formatting tactics to present his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, including a lengthy introduction and acknowledgements section, inauthentic dialogue, personal commentary, and even an unconventional...

Benjamin Franklin has a reputation in American – and around the world – as a self-made man for rising from indentured servitude to become a wealthy, independent man. As a founding father of the United States, Franklin’s independence and industry...

Carol S. Dweck is an inspiring author who examines how the significance of an attitude can determine one’s outlook on life through her book, Mindset. The psychological analysis of how a mindset can influence people of all ages in any circumstance...

Southern aristocratic mothers generally did not take care for their children, and instead, they usually had an “African-American woman [care] for (and essentially raise) Southern white children” (Tucker, 35). Caroline Compson is the neurotic and...

Nature is an important feature of poetic realism, an offshoot of German realism in the late 19th century. Gottfried Keller, the author of the novel Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (Romeo and Juliet in the Village), is a Swiss writer who belongs to...

In coincidence with the clear feminist undertones of his novels, John Irving proposes opposing dichotomies: hypersexualized characters and societies, and the simultaneous criticism of sex. Irving builds societies where sex is inherent. In The...

In The Cider House Rules, Homer, the protagonist, after stifling all of the uncomfortable situations in his life would “lay awake [at night] because the phantoms of those days were not gone” (312). While Homer liked to think that he was in control...

The complex exploration of homosexual relations that break the boundaries between pupils and teachers should be typically identified as scandalous, and as a form of paedophilia in a school. However, Alan Bennett presents the issue at a modest...

The treatment of Asian Americans in the United States has been brought to attention through literature and popular culture, as well as through the self-representation technique by which Asian Americans discuss their own treatment. Frank Wu, author...

‘Toyota Celica / A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile…The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky.’

The twentieth century was...

In the short stories “The Lottery” and “The Interlopers,” the authors Shirley Jackson and Saki (respectively) use pacing, text structure, and strong moods to build suspense. Through the use of the literary elements mentioned above, the reader is...

Dave Eggers’s satirical and self-referential memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius documents his external and internal life. While the book is technically a work of nonfiction, Eggers externalizes and exposes much of his personal life...

In ‘Hamlet’, Shakespeare develops his various characters through the balance of two specific dimensions. He uses these two perspectives to give his audience the opportunity to view his play through two distinct scopes. Shakespeare chooses to do...

In a Prayer for Owen Meany the relationship between religion and faith is often contradictory to societal beliefs causing confusion. Johnny’s questioning of organized religion and his growing faith creates a tension. The last chapter of the novel...

When a man’s name is synonymous with greed and misery, most readers would not associate him with the shining image of a hero. The hero’s journey is a classic literary pattern in which a character goes on an adventure, faces challenges, and comes...

Published in 1856, the novel Madame Bovary is one of the first to explore the issue of women’s disempowerment in a pointedly modern fashion. As a woman, the protagonist Emma experiences a number of obstacles that prevent her from reaching what she...

In the form of a semi-autobiographical epistolary novel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) composed the highly emotional Die Leiden des jungen Werther within a matter of weeks. Suitably known as a “Briefroman” in German, the novel is a...