Newest Literature Essays

In 1919, the year “The Second Coming” was written, World War I, one of the deadliest wars in history, had just ended and Ireland was in the throes of a war to fight British control. Tensions between Catholics and Protestants and those of different...

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, documents both the triumphs and tribulations of a village called Macondo and its founders, the Buendía family. José Arcadio Buendía and his wife, Úrsula Iguarán, establish Macondo in early...

There comes a time for many people when the gruffness and chaos of the real world becomes too much and they crave a break from it all. Throughout the poem "Fishing on the Susquehanna in July," Billy Collins is able to convey this desire to remove...

Every text represents an experience that both the author and the reader jointly construct; the author writes the details, drawing from empirical influence, and the reader filters those details through his or her own experience. When the reader is...

Following a tradition in anything is easy. The pattern is set, the style defined. Only your originality is required and there you go with the flow. But it is certainly very difficult to go against the main current, challenging traditional stock...

Cheryl Strayed is an unsympathetic character but a lovable person; this is not a contradictory statement. In her memoir Wild, she stars as a grief-stricken yet naïve young woman, making her the main (and unsympathetic) character of this story. In...

In “Adventure” from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the protagonist, Alice Hindman, embodies the truth of marriage. As Alice’s story demonstrates, however, marriage leads to two seemingly contradictory traits when it is taken as a personal...

In David Malouf’s novel Fly Away Peter, several key ideas are introduced by being paired with the natural environments that surround the central character Jim. Malouf presents the ideas of the horror of war and the destructive nature of humanity,...

In the short story “The Dead,” James Joyce displays his character Gabriel as pretentious and misogynistic through emphasizing his wealth, education, and presumed superiority to the women in his society. Gabriel, who requires constant reassurance...

For many immigrants, coming to America was an opportunity to leave their home country in hopes of finding a better life in a new land. In this vein, Anna Yezierska writes about the struggles of an immigrant Jewish family living in New York’s Lower...

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is regarded as a striking Caribbean novel, lying between the world of capitalism and post-Emancipation West Indies. However, many critics frequently tend to overlook the marginality of women in the post-colonial era...

Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus explores the life of a wealthy Nigerian family with the protagonist Kambili, a young girl who tries to find her own voice in an oppressive society and home. Throughout the novel, the author uses a number of symbols to...

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is a powerfully unsettling novel concerning a lost man in the grotesque, dark world of the American South. Published in 1949, Wise Blood’s protagonist Hazel Motes serves as a reflection of the power of mythology that...

Power is the underlying current that runs through both Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, a 17th century revenge tragedy, and Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, a 20th Century modern domestic tragedy. Both plays offer stark representations of...

Ernest Hemingway is praised for his mastery of language and descriptions but his shortcomings are prevalent in his portrayal of female characters that are constantly defiled by his male ideals. In his novel A Farewell to Arms, his female...

There are drastic differences that are seen in people who are born in different generations. One may argue that the younger generations are more impressionable and naive while the older generations are very hardheaded and assertive. By creating...

In writing Clear Light of Day’, Anita Desai has brought to out a new and distinct aspect to fiction. She examines deeply the human character and brings them out in a sharper way. The protagonists in her story are not still figures but instead go...

New York City is an iconic hub of activity and acts as one of the most distinctive cities in the United States. Many people, mostly young, move to the metropolis each year seeking fame and fortune, and in the early sixties, Joan Didion adopted the...

The natural cycles of the universe promote continuity through repetition. Emily Brontë had a very cyclical outlook on life, and uses these cycles throughout Wuthering Heights to exhibit this. The story itself comes full circle and death is a...

In an era driven by rationalism and logic, the poets and authors of the Romantic era sought to defend what they understood as a more natural system of values. Among the themes prevalent throughout the era, the theme of the imagination's power is...

Few subjects seem better suited for traditional Victorian drawing room conversation than that of social class. Written in 1910, E.M. Forster’s Howards End has just enough Victorian influence to concern itself with the struggles of social class,...

The introduction of the novel – or long form narrative prose in general – granted the writer a unique, widened canvas on which to blend rhetoric and art. Here, the writer is invited to both persuade and entertain, sometimes veiling one with the...

A slim volume seldom exceeding two-hundred pages, a cursory survey of Mrs. Dalloway hardly suggests the astronomical weight of literary and social significance critics have harvested from Woolf’s prose since it’s publication in 1925. At once...

While long form fictional prose may seem like a simple enough concept, the novel – despite the prevalence and relative ease with which it rests in the modern consciousness – is a far more complex entity than any such one-dimensional definition can...