Newest Literature Essays

Written in 1893, Anton Chekhov's short story "The Black Monk" is one of the most potent and revealing works of the writer. It reflects the profound philosophy of the author, as well as the feelings of worry and anxiety which, according to the...

American Pastoral is narrated by Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, a friend and admirer of the Levovs, in particular of Seymour “The Swede” Levov. Zuckerman tells the story of The Swede’s tragic fall from youthful perfection due to his daughter’s...

Terror in the soul of an individual was one of the main topics in the work of 19th century American writer, poet, journalist and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe. Inspired by the English Gothic novel, he tried to depict the horrors and fears in...

In Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, a quote by psychologist Karl Menninger appears in the dedication. It goes, “When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins a fight which results in struggles and...

In today's society, movies in all genres thrive on romantic plots and subplots. There is often a form of "Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back" or a variation of that, wherein the guy's decisions are all centered around securing a...

Wertenbaker wrote Our Country’s Good in order to depict a developmental process for the characters. Through the Howardian theory of redemption, by learning from each other, and by acting in their production of The Recruiting Officer, they...

Arthur Miller wrote A View from the Bridge, a work set in the late 1940s, as he became interested in the Italian immigration at the Brooklyn docks. Fascinated by the life of Pete Panto, a longshoreman who challenged the work of the Mafia, Miller...

Steinbeck makes the confrontation between Crooks and Curley's wife a shocking moment in Of Mice and Men by showing how prejudices produce strong reactions in characters: they can encourage loyalty in the face of adversity, or resentment and...

Specifically from a literary perspective, the Harlem Renaissance—also known as the New Negro Movement—is often held up as one of the most artistically prolific, localized movements in Western literature, producing writers such as Gwendolyn...

In Uzodinma Iweala’s novel Beasts of No Nation, Agu’s diction immediately sticks out. While foreign at first, Agu’s narration quickly becomes easy to understand. The voice Iweala has created for Agu, though critical in order to convey the...

In Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God, tragedy is the driving force of the plot and the development of Ezeulu’s character. Contrary to the popular saying “that which does not kill you makes you stronger,” the successive and increasingly personal...

The movie Citizen Kane depicts the life of the successful businessman Charles Foster Kane through a series of flashbacks derived from interviews of his acquaintances. Through these interviews, Thompson, a newspaper reporter, attempts to solve the...

Humankind has a tendency to inject their values and cultural beliefs into whatever they create or come into contact with; this explains partially why America left the flag on the moon and why there is such a conflict between western democracies...

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in reaction to her own epiphany concerning the immorality of slavery, which accompanied the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law. Indeed, she developed a novel worthy of protest literature. With each...

In American Pastoral and A View From the Bridge, Philip Roth and Arthur Miller respectively present family life as a tense realm of activity where relationship ties are easily stretched and broken. By setting their novels in Rimrock, New Jersey,...

The late Ed Koch once said that “stereotypes lose their power when the world is found to be more complex than the stereotype would suggest. When we learn that individuals do not fit the group stereotype, then it begins to fall apart.” In Marjane...

In "A Report to an Academy," the marvelous transformation of the fictional ape Rotpeter offers striking insight into human adaptive behavior, and blurs and then elucidates the differences between man and ape. The short story, written as a letter...

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and Passing by Nella Larsen both feature black females as their main characters. Hurston’s novel follows a woman named Janie through her life, while Larsen’s follows Clare, a black woman who...

Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes embodied the subtle status of African-American culture during his career as a novelist, poet, and scholar. Hughes was a unique poet, in that he sought to communicate the voices of black America and...

Some people do not realize what is really happening in front of them, no matter how obvious it seems to other people. In the case of H.H. Holmes, he is able to lie and charm his way into making people trust him so that he can get away with murder....

In superstitions, a mirror is thought to be a reflection of one’s soul; this is why shattering a mirror was and still is considered bad luck. In Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the concept of the reflected soul is used as an important...

In Luce Irigaray’s “Women on the Market,” she argues that, in patriarchal societies, women are essentially reduced from human beings to commodities whose exchange is controlled by men. According to Irigaray, this exploitation of women is so...

In some novels, even the most minuscule ordinary objects are subjects of great importance and symbolism; after all, symbolism which adds meaning to the text that cannot be overlooked. In the work The Stranger by Albert Camus, outerwear holds a...

If one were under a small tree and were hit by an apple that dropped off a branch, the main conclusion one would reach might be that the event was slightly annoying and random. One would then stop thinking about it and go back to doing whatever...