Newest Literature Essays

Perhaps one of the most influential elements of literature, a setting may potentially dictate the plotline of a story, establishing culture, tradition, and a backstory. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart sees an African world that largely revolves...

Aeschylus’s play “Agamemnon” seeks to show his audience that revenge only leads to more violence. This is shown prominently through the character’s central beliefs and motives that are encouraged through the actions of others, which inevitably...

Life, on the basis of modernist fiction, is meaningless. In a sea full of people, a single person is just a speck. A small, insignificant part of a larger heterogeneous group in which our life has no value. Using his short story “A Clean,...

The novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro examines the different facets of dignity. The protagonist, a butler named Stevens, adamantly seeks to become a great and dignified butler, a task that he believes only the most imperturbable can...

In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Milkman’s progression from an immature teenager to an adult possessing moral rectitude is displayed through encounters where Milkman learns about and pursues knowledge about his past. We first meet Milkman as a...

Candide journeys through life with a childish naivete and shies away from making his own philosophical proclamations, often allowing others to do his thinking for him and serve as his surrogate brain. Instead of stepping back and truly pondering...

As proposed by Immanual Kant, the Enlightenment consisted of having “the courage to use your own understanding,” and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Descartes’ Meditations, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote collectively provide instances that both affirm...

In Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin discusses the power that can be found in secularity and in religion. The novel starts with John Grimes waking up to his fourteenth birthday in Harlem, 1935. The entire novel spans a few days, but as the...

Both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin used classification to enhance their ideas; human classification in particular. Marx classifies humans in a society as either part of the bourgeois or the proletariat while on the other hand, Darwin classifies...

In T.C. Boyle’s transcendent short story “Greasy Lake,” the eponymous lake reflects the evolution of the boys from naïve greasers to enlightened, mature teenagers. At the start of the story, the boys relish their bad boy image as they drive up to...

Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve explores the inability of women to find fulfillment in the roles offered by the theater. For a “true star” like Margo or simply a “carbon copy” like Eve or Phoebe in the harsh world of the theater, Mankiewicz...

Natural decay directly influences moral decay in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and John Hillcoat’s film adaptation by the same title. The end of the world in this narrative is so severe because of the loss of nature. When humans see the end of their...

Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (1991) is a fantastical and vivid exploration of the lives of the 20th century ‘Aussie battlers’ whose reputations fabricated the Australian identity present in today’s society. The novel resonates the idea that this...

Every text is a confluence of other texts, containing parallels and fragments that give meaning and timelessness through prevalent themes that transcend generations. An exploration of explicit and implicit connections between a pair of texts...

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is a novel about a family that travels to Jefferson, a town in Mississippi, to fulfill the wish of their deceased mother to be buried there. The long journey reveals the true character and motives of each family...

The short story "The Garden Party" was penned by Katherine Mansfield, a burgeoning short story writer from New Zealand; this work of fiction was first published in 1922 in The Garden Party and Other Stories. This short story delves into modernity...

Most of Alice Munro’s major characters are women, whose social and interior lives are portrayed in great detail by their author. All of these women tend to give the reader an overview of what being a woman signifies in a society mostly ruled by...

Director Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve utilizes a circular narrative to conceal the truth of Eve’s story. However, the impact that Eve’s story ultimately has on Margo is more important than Eve’s story itself. This is because fabricated nature...

Nothing can stand the test of time greater than the form of relation or sympathy. But even greater than that is the ability to force that compassion and relation into the reverse perspective... in other words, rather than feeling emotion upon...

In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato asks us to consider that the world we are living is the equivalent of a cave; in order for us to enter into this “sensible realm” of truth and knowledge we must actively pursue these values. In his First...

'You thought I was a native! You dared! You don't know anything about natives! They are not people - they're servants who must salaam to you. You know nothing about India.'

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (32)

The Secret Garden is one...

Emily Bronte’s literary dexterity heightens both the inhumanity and passion of her lurid tale, in that she does not tell it herself. Rather, it is the act of storytelling from the words of Lockwood and Nelly that serves as the basis of the...

Although humanity survives The War of the Worlds, the ending of H.G. Wells's novel really is not reassuring at all. Though there do seem to be some positive effects such as advances in science, the Martian invasion obviously has its bad effects...

Piety was an important concept in ancient Greek civilization, as it shaped the culture and actions of Greek citizens. What exactly piety means has varied over time, and the definition differs throughout Greek literature. Characters such as...