Newest Literature Essays

‘Mrs Midas’ is a revisionist version of the King Midas story told from the female perspective: traditionally, this ancient Greek myth was about a man who could turn everything to gold with a touch. This poem explores the sadness Mrs Midas feels...

As one of the most widely read female poets to this day, Emily Dickinson has been analyzed for generations. Her poems touch on profound human issues such as death, religion, and, perhaps most subtly, gender. While Dickinson’s predominantly...

Exclusively raising opposition to commonplace phenomena can only go as far as just that: talk of a new contrary, and usually unwanted, opinion. The crucial ingredient in making a significant impact with a foreign idea is to make a claim so...

Giorgio Bassani’s novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is told from the perspective of an unnamed speaker who is recalling his time spent with the Finzi-Contini family prior to the family members' deaths in the Holocaust. This is an Edenic time,...

Human nature has a tendency, a fad if you will, to display traits of selfishness and a "me first, you later" attitude. This sort of thinking often leads people to do unjust or politically incorrect things, and it gets them in trouble with the law,...

Apocryphally labeled a novel confined to the voracious appetite of mental illness, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath truly explores the societal ills in the role of young women in the 1950s. Despite the inevitable and universal recognition of internal...

Beginning at the time of early settlements in the 5th century and spanning until 1150 A.D., the English language and that spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons during this time is referred to as Old English or simply, Anglo-Saxon. The influence...

Though they were written centuries apart and in completely different societal conditions, Plato’s Phaedrus and several of William Shakespeare’s sonnets share distinct similarities. The more obvious, surface correlation is that they each describes...

In Drown by Junot Diaz, there are decisive spaces for men and women within the text. Yunior and his mother demonstrate a compelling and complex dichotomy between a dependent maternal figure and an independent male figure. These two figures are...

The life expectancy in the United States is about seventy-eight years. Zambia’s life expectancy is roughly thirty-three years. Does this mean it is impossible for a person in Zambia to have a more fulfilling life than a person in the United...

Artists often use their work as an expression of their innermost thoughts and feelings. In his poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” W.B. Yeats describes a metaphorical journey to Byzantium, an ancient city filled with timeless art, that the poem’s...

The Marxist communist ideology is possibly one of the most misunderstood political dogmas of modern times. It is a theory in which, through the historical events and practices of his time, Karl Marx had predicted the next steps towards communism...

The Scarlet Letter, perhaps the most notable work of prodigious American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, was first published in 1850 and has since been subject to a plethora of literary criticisms, including those from psychoanalytic, new historical,...

An “unreliable narrator” is defined as “a narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised.[1]” The phrase itself was first coined by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961): in the course of his analysis, Booth goes onto argue...

As a professor of psychology and the author of a host of books that examine various psychological elements at play in some of the most recognized pop culture mainstays within the science fiction genre, Sherri Ginn seems more than qualified to...

“If marriage be such a blessed state, how comes it, may you say, that there are so few happy marriages?” (Astell 2421). Marriage is one of the main themes of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a key motivator for many of its characters. Set during...

The interpretation that “we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” greatly applies to the Importance of Being Earnest. The Importance of Being Earnest is a...

James Baldwin and Richard Wright focus most of their works on the suffering of blacks in opposition to the overwhelming and repressive nature of racism that contorts the very existence of black bodies, specifically men. Wright and Baldwin assert...

Richard Wright and Toni Morrison are considerable influences within the African American canon, authoring works that reflect the expansion of the human condition to the conditions of the oppressed. Both authors highlight, within their narratives,...

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie is a literary tour de force that examines Nigerian culture through the lens of three main characters. The novel focuses on violence and the familial relationships of core characters over a significant...

A common interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, based on the widely read Folio edition of the text, is that the titular character is motivated by darkness, exhibiting depression and suicidal tendencies. The young prince often refers to suicide,...

On one Tuesday in One Hundred Years of Solitude, José Arcadio Buendía, the Buendía family’s enigmatic patriarch, comes to the sudden realization that “it’s still Monday, like yesterday” (Márquez 77). At first, this may seem like lunacy; the...

Life is about overcoming obstacles and fears to become truly happy, a message that The Perks of Being a Wallflower teaches its readers as Charlie matures through the coming-of-age process. The story follows Charlie as he encounters drugs,...

Despite disparities in the poetic styles of Sterling Brown and Arna Bontemps, each author was equally effective in conveying the “new voice” of the black American during the Harlem Renaissance. The idea of a more suitable expression for African...