Newest Literature Essays

In the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, a father, Rex Walls, keeps his family from amassing substantial wealth. Rex buys hard drinks whenever the family begins to earn money. When he comes home he unleashes his anger onto his family by...

Through the many tales of heroic deeds that have been told over the centuries, a picture has been painted as to the appearance and interpretation of the archetypical character of the hero. This character has been portrayed as a masculine figure...

In 'A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment' by Anne Bradstreet and 'Love Poem' by John Frederick Nims, there are three possible ideas that could be gleaned from the texts. Such ideas could be the power of love overcoming faults and...

Initially, the salient fool in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night appears to be Feste -- a licensed jester. Yet upon further examination, we see that Shakespeare merely uses Feste as a critic of the comedic disarray in Illyria, which parallels the...

In eighteenth century England, a prominent social concern arose in regards to one’s social and economic status. Three broad categories of status existed, including the gentry (consisting of aristocrats and nobles), the middle class (consisting of...

The Romantic era began with the desire to create something new and pleasureful, and to leave classicism in the past. Parker explains that “Romanticism is the art of presenting to people the literary works which ...are capable of giving them the...

Virgil and Livy were the authors of two substantially different works; one a propagandist epic in the style of Homer, the other an informed account of Rome’s history. This said, it is interesting to note Virgil’s inclusion of short historical...

Many aspects of Heathcliff's personality are apparently “fiendish," complementing his role as the ‘Byronic hero’ of the Wuthering Heights, a character who is dark, rebellious, and antisocial. However, the Byronic hero is also seen to be an...

In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the female characters hold small roles, but they are in no way secondary to the male characters, as their roles are pivotal to the story. Through their roles as mothers, harlots, and goddesses, they manipulate the story...

Throughout Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin makes a series of references to David’s sense of fabricated manhood or masculinity impressed upon him by his father. In the first chapters, David alludes to the hollow jocularity between father and son. This...

Love is a complex concept, one that even ingenious writers have struggled to understand. While scientists confine their understanding of love to ‘chemical reactions’ involving dopamine and serotonin, one cannot deny the qualitative nature that...

Humans are social creatures who build connections with others and thrive as companionship increases; however, relationships are often susceptible to failure. Holden Caulfield, the main character in the novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D....

John Fowles’ 1963 novel The Collector is a deeply disturbing, intensely psychological book based around the principles of beauty, power, control, and class. The story follows Fred Clegg through his capture and abuse of Miranda Grey, an attractive...

Women and Roses by Robert Browning explores the idea of dreams concerning love, in particular sexual love. The speaker imagines the three women of time as roses: the past, present, and future. Though this poem appeared within the repressive...

Queen Herod is taken from Duffy’s The World’s Wife, a collection which inverts gender roles to celebrate female characters and display the injustice of men’s generalizations. This poem inverts the gender roles in the biblical story of the arrival...

Hawthorne’s science fiction short stories, such as ‘The Birthmark’ and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ are set in the seventeenth century. His novels, however, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, are set in the nineteenth century,...

Henry James had written The Turn of the Screw in such a way that some Marxist critics have argued that it reflects the controversies and anxieties of the extra-textual world. However, while in an epoch in which upward mobility was very difficult,...

British novelist Ian McEwan’s masterpiece Atonement can be appropriately compared to American writer Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men with the common denominating theme of intense experience—its opportunities and its ramifications....

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a difficult text, one so littered with ambiguity that the lack of clarity between characters becomes a significant plot element. The governess works to dissolve this ambiguity and does everything she can to...

Guilt, like a disease of the mind, has the power to consume one's sanity, govern one's emotions and demolish one's life. In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare and in the novel Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, guilt dominates the lives of...

By looking at Emily Dickinson’s poem 666 “I cross till I am weary,” we can see the poet’s connections between the nature of life or spirituality and the subtleties of rhyme as well as meter; this link is important because it sets a tone for the...

In the seventeenth century, genuine scientific breakthroughs were ideals of the future. The reality was alchemy, an extremely basic science in which procedures were practically guesswork. It is this sense of the unknown that induces both fear and...

In tough times, it seems that many people turn to their faith. In moments of weakness, when it seems that everything is lost, many people find that a certain hope remains in God. Others turn to God for a "why"; a reason that circumstances are the...

Philosophers have waxed long and eloquent on the ideal government and therefore the ideal sovereign; this short essay will serve to compare two works on the subject, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Machiavelli’s The Prince. This paper will analyze...