Newest Literature Essays

In the Gothic novel Dracula, Bram Stoker largely presents good and evil in stark contrast in a very simple manner. This perhaps mirrors Victorian views of good and evil as opposed yet inextricable, a strict view of right and wrong in a religious...

In the short story, The Dead from the novel Dubliners by James Joyce, readers are led through a bustling, yet monotonous, dinner party by the protagonist Gabriel Conroy, an intelligent, impersonal, “cold-air” introvert who is constantly found...

In the comedy The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare deconstructs common adages regarding the essentials of building a healthy relationship. He does so through the unconventional pairing of Katharina, an “ill-seeming” shrew whose disobedience and...

The universal themes of ambition, power, and greed make William Shakespeare’s Macbeth remarkably applicable to countless other times, places, and people. It is with this mindset that directors Akira Kurosawa and Billy Morrisette approached their...

When analyzing two film adaptations of William Shakespeare’s 1610 play The Tempest, it becomes clear that the word “adaptation” is merely a broad term that barely describes the translations and deviations evidenced by the films themselves. Fred M....

In lieu of an action-packed or scandalous plot line, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway takes a more subtle and psychological mode to ensnare its reader, one of course meant to depart from the strict Victorian and Edwardian novels that preceded it....

Henrik Ibsen was born in 1828 to a merchant family in the small Norwegian town of Skien. After his family fell into poverty, he was forced out of his education and, at 15, worked as an apprentice in a pharmacy. It was here that he began writing...

In The City of God, Augustine goes to great lengths to explain the distinction between living according to God and living according to man using an analogy of two cities. With this distinction, he shows that living according to God is superior...

Willa Cather’s 1913 novel O Pioneers! is very much a work of its time, providing social commentary regarding a number of significant issues of the nineteenth into early twentieth century. This commentary presents a variety of frameworks for...

Carol Ann Duffy wrote 'The World's Wife' in order to scrutinize the representation of both men and women, inspired by her strong feminist views -- reconstructing, for example, many of the 'voiceless women' from throughout history. As Duffy...

“Heaven—is what I cannot reach,” wrote Emily Dickinson in one of her many poems. Again and again, we see the same theme in her works. Her time period was one that emphasized the need for women to play a role as specified by the teachings of the...

The poem “Punishment” by Seamus Heaney was written in 1975 as a part of the anthology North. It is a part of Heaney’s bog series, in which he describes the Irish bogland, and the different artifacts and remains that have been found within the...

On July 11th, 1804 Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were rowed across the Hudson River in separate boats; they were going to duel. Burr was accompanied by his loyal protégé, William Van Ness; Hamilton brought with him Dr. David Hosack and his...

As the authors of The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are known as the initiators of communist and Marxist theories; many of their ideas are still at the heart of contemporary critiques of capitalism’s excesses. In their ...

Though rather simple in plot and structure, Gogol’s short stories carry deep moral messages, which are urgent beyond time and place. One of these is a theme of a little man, who is a poor person, is not respected by those with higher ranks, and is...

Almost all people do battle with the notion that, try as they may, the things they do remain overlooked by others. They feel unseen, as if belonging to a story where they’re just background characters. Or rather, some people care not about their...

Novelist Napoleon Hill once wrote, “Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in another.” His opinion compels people to reconsider and reflect on the consequences and effects...

Though Henry V can be read and appreciated as a stand alone piece, it is most valuable when considered as part of a tetralogy. The two parts of Henry IV depict the characters and present the initial stages of the conflict in a way that pushes one...

Though it is universally acknowledged that art is subjective, literary critic and philosopher Georg Lukacs offered his opinions on what form art ought to take. In his essay “The Ideology of Modernism,” Lukacs wrote negatively against the modernist...