Newest Literature Essays

John Okada’s No-No Boy illustrates the racial conflicts between the Japanese-American community and American popular culture as well as differing views on assimilation among Japanese-Americans themselves. Kenji, who suffers from a fatal wound...

In no other part of The Divine Comedy does Dante present his vision of the Church Militant, or the body of living believers who must struggle against sin and reach for virtue, than in Purgatorio. Striking parallels exist between the experiences of...

In both Journey’s End and "Exposure," war is generally presented in a gloomy light as Owen and R.C. Sheriff, respectively, focus on the attitude of the soldiers throughout their experience on the frontline. Whilst Owen draws more attention to the...

In Love Visions, Chaucer uses the medieval tradition of dream exposition to comment on the societal draw toward the love idealized in a subset of medieval literature. Throughout the first three poems, Chaucer deftly parodies societal norms: his...

March 20th, 1852 was an important day for the United States of America. Harriet Beecher Stowe finally published her much debated story, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on this exact date. Recent stringent changes in fugitive slave laws had inspired the...

The works of Euripides differ largely from those of the arguably more iconic Sophocles, nominally in the regard that they lack individual Aristotelian tragic heroes. Instead, despite having a central and typically eponymous figure, each play tends...

Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential theologians of his time, deals with many hotly contested topics regarding the nature of God and God's dealings with mankind in Summa Theologica. In the fifth question of Part IIIa, Aquinas discusses...

Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet depicts characters who naturally challenge the conventional perceptions of race, gender, identity, and other socially constructed aspects of humanity. The text is set in the United Kingdom in the early to mid twentieth...

The differing treatments of knowledge in the early stages of the Book of Genesis and in the tragedy Oedipus Rex reveal a fundamental difference in the representative traditions of Hebraism and Hellenism. Hebraic obedience to divine authority is...

Early European settlers did not understand that, as the original inhabitants of Australia, the Aboriginal people were entitled to the land, yet they did not claim ownership of it for their possession. However, the Aboriginal people belonged to...

The Romantic Era was a period in which poets and intellectuals challenged the emphasis on reason and science espoused by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Lord Byron, or George Gordon Byron, was a leading romantic poet who lived...

William Shakespeare’s usage of the trope of courtly love in The Tempest is not what it seems. In The Tempest, a man trained in the art of magic, Prospero, causes a shipwreck on his island. On this ship is his brother, Antonio, who usurped...

The poems "Marriage" by Marianne Moore and "Home Burial" by Robert Frost demonstrate a clear separation between men and women. Equality between genders is a controversial issue today, but truly began to arise during the late 1800’s and early 1900’...

Tokyo Story, directed by Yasujiro Ozu, is a deeply meditative film. The plot is deceptively simple: an old couple visits their adult children in Tokyo. However, their children does not treat them well. On their return, the wife falls ill and...

When one thinks of the things that could kill them in a zombie apocalypse, their minds will likely go to disease, starvation, or obviously, zombie. However, there are means of death less talked about yet just as deadly. For example, pharmaceutical...

Love relationships consume a substantial portion of public attention, whether in regards to legitimate bonds, media exposure, or literary portrayal. In The Great Gatsby, a number of love relationships are introduced and explored, including the...

The poet Carol Anne Duffy presents two different attitudes towards religion in her poems “Prayer” and “Confession.” In "Prayer," Duffy contemplates how, in the absence of organised religion, comfort can instead be found in ordinary, prosaic...

Throughout scenes 1 and 2 of A Streetcar Named Desire, playwright Tennessee Williams presents Stanley as extremely powerful and authoritative through the use of dialogue as well as stage directions. The audience immediately learns how strong...

Throughout Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947 masterpiece Midaq Alley, the alley’s microcosmic nature turns its powerfully crafted characters into living renditions of sin. More specifically, Mahfouz creates characters to represent the Christian church’s Seven...

Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha attempts to tell the story of one man’s journey to enlightenment. Siddhartha, a young Brahmin, leaves his comfortable home and family in order to learn more about himself. Throughout his journey, he overcomes many...

During the Middle Ages in England, a tripartite society existed, consisting of three estates: the nobility, the clergy, and the workmen. This tripartite system is often referred to as “those who fight, those who pray, and those who work” because...

In devising the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers used the work of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government as an ideological framework. The similarities are mainly notable in the claims against the King, but can also be found in...

The speaker in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet “Love Is Not All” describes reality and crushes the fairy tale belief that love brings infinite happiness and solves all problems. This narrator expresses her thoughts on falling in love throughout...

As the work of a regionalist writer, Jewett’s short story ‘A White Heron’ consists of symbols that reflect the impact which drastic changes in landscape have had on those who are sympathetic to nature, such as Jewett herself. Jewett’s first-hand...