Newest Literature Essays

Somewhere along the normally parallel lines of reality and fiction, the two opposing entities meet in what has proven to be a breeding ground of entertainment. Its own kind of uncanny valley, there is something infinitely fascinating about that...

'In my memory / Again and again I see it strangely dark / And vacant of a life but just withdrawn.’

Edward Thomas’s The Chalk Pit suggests a number of ways of considering the correlation between memory and writing. The line is at once visually...

“Human beings can be awful cruel to each other” (Twain 294). Nobody understands the human condition better than Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Though he is just of boy of little education and lacking sophisticated culture, he...

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, conflicts involving hunger are clearly of significance, appearing throughout every chapter of her memoir from “No Name Woman” to “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” Paul Outka’s “Publish or Perish:...

Many people have varying opinions on parenting, usually motivated by deeply personal beliefs. These differing outlooks on raising children develops children themselves into different people with very specific values instilled in them by their...

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy are two works that give their respective characters a choice between love and duty. Although these works differ drastically in historical setting, how love and...

Incest, violence, gambling, and the North of England - just several topics central to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights that were abhorrent to the polite Victorian elites who originally devised the principle of 'Canon'. The Literary Canon of the...

Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate shows contrasts in many of the characters throughout the lifetime of Tita. Tita’s role as the protagonist reveals her struggle within the family, but also her development as a care-taker and nurturer...

Franco Moretti posits in The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture that “Even those novels that clearly are not Bildungsroman or novels of formation are perceived by us against this conceptual horizon; so we speak of a ‘failed...

The issue of gender equality is a pressing topic in our modern society. Over the course of the past century, we have established human rights, racial rights, and even animal rights. So why is it that when a woman demands equality, she is looked at...

For a novel rife with references often complicated for non-native readers to understand, the narrative discord created within Tracks between Pauline and Nanapush only complicates the reading further. The variations in distance between the...

During the Victorian Era, most poets did not focus on nature and the divine world, but instead on cultural and societal issues occurring in England during that time. But Gerard Manley Hopkins chose to not pursue the path of his fellow poets, and...

Sand in The Woman in the Dunes is an omnipresent force that cannot be easily escaped. In the novel, sand is defined as an aggregate of rock fragments, sometimes including loadstone, tinstone, and more rarely gold dust, with a diameter of 2 to...

Without a doubt, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses stays true to many common tropes within the Western genre. However; what makes this novel so unique is how McCarthy manipulates some of these important tropes. They are still present...

The mind can only be controlled if at some point, the person starts to believe what is being told to them as truth. It is at that point they will question their own opinions. In the novel, The Circle by Dave Eggers, the protagonist, Mae Holland,...

Brimming with death, destruction, and despair, the plots of Greek tragedies are often considered the darkest of theatrical genres. However, it is this same dismal theme that occurs in one of the most well-known works of ancient Greece, Aeschylus’...

Communities normally yield an exclusively physical connection that may not cause any emotional impact. American modernist William Faulkner incisively outlines this situation one of his short stories, in which the protagonist is continuously...

In Mother Teresa’s poem “Do It Anyway,” the famous missionary reflects on the numerous misfortunes that occur in daily life and advises people coming face-to-face with these issues to continue acting benevolently. As she advises her readers: "Give...

Any time a play or a novel is adapted into a film portrayal of the text, critics will evaluate the film either in a positive or a negative manner. It is necessary to understand the freedoms a director has, and understand that an adaptation allows...

In the novel The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, the domination of women is a common theme that is manifested by each of the generation in the novel. Roy writes about the fraught social issues that plague Indian society; she wrote The God of...

The Iliad by Homer, the text which is often referred to as the beginning the Greek literary tradition, begins with an argument between Achilles and Agamemnon over a woman. This fight takes place within a war which started because of Helen, who was...

Dürrenmatt draws attention to loss of human qualities and the innate flaws of humans in his play The Visit. He does so by making the aim of the protagonist, Claire Zachanassian, to avenge the false testament given in court by Alfred Ill when he...

Rhetoric has been used throughout history, including the Classical era. In fact, it was often celebrated in Ancient Greece, where rhetoric was often seen as a skill, and even an art form. Since then, it has evolved and modified to what is now...

In Silko’s Ceremony, Tayo’s healing process is very extensive, and he faces many crucial challenges in order to let go of traumatic past events. While on this journey, Tayo encounters many symbols that aid him in developing a sense of appreciation...