Newest Literature Essays

Hiding truths and replacing them with lies are often very devastating to family members and even more so when a son’s whole life has been built upon these lies. Mark Haddon, in the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, ...

Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is without a doubt a reflection of its author and its time. As an academic, social, and political figurehead of late 19th century London, Wilde was highly engaged in the ongoing public dialogue surrounding the...

Comedy of Manners was a theatrical genre that flourished during the time of the British Restoration of the 17th century. These plays sought to deride the upper social classes by exaggerating their manners and customs. Comedy of Manners used stock...

While many scholars are of the belief that Vergil penned the Aeneid to provide the Roman people with a propagandized epic glamorizing their own history, there is great evidence for Vergil’s intending the Aeneid to be something vastly more...

Most literary representations of the sexes include implicit and binary differences between women and men. Women are typically written as pure archetypes who strive to find constancy in their relationships. In contrast, men as seen as libertines...

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud theorized that as a manifestation of the Oedipus Complex, people tend to choose partners who share physical features and personality traits with their opposite-sex parent. The bond between lovers can only be rivaled by...

Many philosophers have believed for centuries that no intrinsic meaning exists in the universe. From this belief emerged many responses, including absurdism and existentialism. Although all are heavily influenced by the beliefs of Søren...

The literature of the American Renaissance is rich in symbolism, and in no author's work is this more evident than in that of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Perhaps the most popular of his works, The Scarlet Letter has long been dissected and analyzed by...

Jack London is known for using naturalism and brutality as themes in his novels; however, it is also common for him to use philosophical ideas to advance his plots. One example that effectively shows this is London’s White Fang, which is...

Poscolonial narratives and rewritings attempt to deal with minority responses by recovering their untold stories as a result of European colonization (Reavis). This literature addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a...

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, tracing the muzhik image throughout the novel provides an insight into Anna Karenina’s psyche and subconscious. The peasant is encountered at the time of Anna and Vronsky’s first meeting, a wretched peasant crushed to...

Wilfred Owen utilises poetic techniques to create vivid imagery, expressing the trepidation and squander of war. This is most prominent in the poems ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ as well as ‘Insensibility’. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ disruption of the ode...

“Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing… There is a vast upheaval of matter." (Woolf 89). In Virginia Woolf’s 1917 “The Mark on the Wall”, the narrator is reflecting on the day she saw a marking on her wall and became utterly perplexed...

Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” was written when Cromwell’s Calvinism constrained liberty and free-will, and the poem exemplifies an unconventional assertion of love and sexual propositioning, while validating the request to yield in sexual...

Maxine Kingston’s The Woman Warrior wrestles with the importance of language for Chinese-American women, using Kingston's own life experiences as the novel’s foundation. In the book’s final chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” she details...

Symbolism is a literary device used throughout literature in which a concrete image represents something deeper and more implicit. It is an effective strategy used to enhance the meanings of novels and memoirs and also to reveal certain things...

As wealth inequality reached its zenith at the beginning of the 20th century, Marxist concepts such as social injustice and economic inequality became a major subject of discussion in western literature. With the death of Karl Marx in 1883 and the...

‘Persuasion’, written by Jane Austen in 1817, is a novel which grapples with the key social and cultural issues of living in a patriarchal society, in which social class is viewed to be very important. Due to this, we are able to draw contrasts...

Courtship is the behaviour in which, normally, the male attempts to persuade the female into a romantic relationship or marriage. In ‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen, as well as ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ by Thomas Hardy, courtship is displayed in a...

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, or in translation, “the beautiful lady without pity” is a phrase appropriated by John Keats as the title of his 1820 poem depicting the story of a seductive and deceitful woman who tempts men away from the world of...

The opposition between the natural and the unnatural is particularly prominent in gothic literature and the transgression of the boundaries between the two is often seen to be condemned. In Shakespeare’s play Macbeth(1606), Mary Shelley’s novel ...

Throughout Greek literature, the divine has always played a significant role in the development of the mortal world. In The Aeneid of Virgil, it is clear that though the story takes place on earth, the central plot revolves around the actions of...

In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer uses three different narrative voices to bring life to his story. The first and most prominent, as well as the one used to narrate the ongoings of the present day, is that of Oskar Schell. The other...

Sigmund Freud, as a nineteenth century neurologist, intricately studied the workings of the human mind, leading him to develop a controversial theory termed psychoanalysis. He differentiated between that which we knowingly do and think, and what...