Newest Literature Essays

During the 1800’s, when Mary Shelley first began to write, she struggled to show her husband Percy that she was in charge of herself and her artistry. Shelley describes Percy as constantly being anxious about her having to prove herself and find...

"Bien Pretty," as the title implies, is a story that invests in appearance. Throughout the story, prettiness is used as a proxy for authenticity and confidence in one’s identity, while ugliness is a stand-in for performed identity. Flavio’s...

Pride and Prejudice is a novel that applies to many literary audiences of many centuries. This novel, in many ways, is a social commentary about manners. The emotion “pride” is one of the largest themes in this nineteenth-century novel. Austen...

The acclaimed novel The Great Gatsby was written by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald in the year 1925. Throughout time, the book has been recognized for accurately representing the Roaring Twenties’ society in the United States, a point in...

The relationship between sex and power within literature is incredibly complex. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway features the main character Jake, who faces the relationship between sex and power via his impotence, as well as his love for a...

Pilgrim’s Progress is a work by John Bunyan that is considered to be one of the most well-known allegories of a spiritual journey. For one to even begin to understand this work, it is necessary to embark on one’s own personal spiritual journey....

One possible analysis of Shakespeare’s Measure of Measure follows a natural progression of criminal justice over the course of the play. Angelo’s hardline punishments in Act One reflect the eye for an eye, measure for measure justice of the Old...

Money is arguably one of the oldest social conventions still utilized in the world, constantly expanding its influence on mankind. Money once bought forgiveness and respect; today, one can purchase influence in government and even extend life with...

In the book of Genesis, God creates humans to serve as caretakers for the world that he created. He creates a garden to nourish them and to provide a location in which he can speak with the pair. Even after Adam and Eve are expelled from the...

Prep, written by Curtis Sittenfeld in 2005, was a New York Times bestseller. This narrative gives a glimpse of the prestigious boarding school experiences of a poor girl named Lee Fiora who comes from Indiana. The author directly reveals...

Chinua Achebe, author of “Dead Men’s Path,” was born in a village in eastern Nigeria; because he was a the son of a missionary, he had a Christian upbringing. He was educated in England at the London University but finished his schooling at...

In Arcadia, Tom Stoppard presents a dynamic interplay of order and disorder that exists ‘eternally and creatively’ (Demastes 91). Order is generally associated with laws, structure, control, and in the play, it is exemplified by the Classical...

William Shakespeare’s The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice depicts an odd juxtaposition of love in the romantic sense with wealth in the monetary sense. The characters in the text acknowledge both senses as valuable virtues, yet...

Chinese culture and traditions are well known, on the basis of modern writing, for their originality and peculiarity. The book Spring Moon by Bette Bao Lord offers a rigorous explanation of this kind of lifestyle through the story of a Chinese...

The journey from childhood to maturity is guided primarily by the search for meaning. In All the Pretty Horses, protagonist John Grady Cole leaves home to find the place where he belongs in the world. Throughout the novel, John Grady chased the...

Piercing screams, angry chants, and heartfelt tears: that is the climate of change. Compare this to the placid clicking of keyboards, the casual transmission of emoticons; it is evident which situation will go down in history. This is Malcolm...

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll tells the story of a young girl's journey through a world of fantasy, imagination, and inner transformation. Alice begins as a seven-year-old girl who falls down a...

774 million adults around the world are illiterate. In many places, people are not provided the opportunity to get education. In Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Amir is lucky enough to learn how to read and write, while many people in his...

Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, exemplifies classic, African-American literature that raises serious questions about how deeply racial oppression damages Blacks. Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism exposes how racism subjects Blacks to the...

The American Dream: An idea that every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative (OED). Anyone willing to put in the work can achieve their dreams, but what if...

Ogai Mori, one of Japan’s most highly respected writers, was the author of the novel “The Wild Geese”. One of the primary characteristics of Mori’s work is its examination on problems that arise in people’s lives, specifically when their desires...

At the peak of the Civil War Movement in America on April 12th, 1963, eight Alabama clergymen made a public statement announcing that Dr. Martin Luther King’s protests in the streets should end because they promote “hatred and violence” (par. 5)....

Although the feminist movement began to make a solid appearance in the United States in the mid 19th century, successful results did not show until the early 20th century. In the 1800s, women held little importance in society and had little to no...

The Victorian Era is defined by the societal alterations that developed over the time period. This is particularly true when concerning wives, mothers, domesticity, and the like. Throughout portions of Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall the...