Newest Literature Essays

“The Peasant Marey”, although written fifteen years after the publication of The House of the Dead, is a short story developed by Fyodor Dostoevsky from the same autobiographical experience: his imprisonment in Siberia. The story has an unnamed...

“Under the Radar” by Richard Ford is a story about a couple on the last day of their marriage. On the way to a dinner party, Marjorie tells her husband Steven that she has had sex with the host. Steven is taken aback by the news of the affair, but...

Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat is a collection of short stories about Haitians in various circumstances, from being miserable due to extreme poverty to being forced into exile by a dictatorship. The fictional town of Ville Rose is the location of...

The tumultuous journey towards the search for identity is a trajectory that many characters deal with in novels. Likewise, this struggle forms a big part of Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee and Rukhsana Ahmad’s The Hope Chest, as both...

In Yasunari Kawabata’s novella Snow Country, a husband and father named Shimamura vacations at a hot spring to search for an affair. He meets Komako, a geisha at the hot spring, and they begin a romance together. Shimamura visits all of three...

Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Beauty and Sadness focuses mainly around Oki, a man in his fifties, attempting to rekindle his love with thirty-year-old Otoko, his lover fifteen years prior. Otoko is now a painter, and she herself has a sixteen-year-old...

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was written in 1953 in conjunction with the anti-communist hysteria that had swept not only American society, but also the American justice system during the second Red Scare. Not contemporaneous to the time it was...

Oppressive norms of conformity that individuals are expected to adhere through political confinement from tyrannical legislators serve as a catalyst for societal conflict between the powerful and powerless. This political interference in...

In his article Paradox and Dream, John Steinbeck insinuates that the American culture has ways of showing progression, as well as the inevitable drawbacks that come with such an advancement in society. Steinbeck develops this insinuation by...

Barbara Kingsolver’s, The Poisonwood Bible is a multi-voice novel about how a family’s life is transformed during their missionary work in the Congo. Each character shows a unique perspective throughout the story, providing deeper insights on the...

Larkin's idealised image of nostalgia of 1914 is reiterated through the use of the roman numerals, 'MCMXIV' to represent the Roman Empire. The title gives the overriding impression that although Larkin was not born until 1922 – subsequent to the...

Delia Jones is a weak protagonist who goes through unfortunate events with her husband to emerge as a strong protagonist in the end of the story “Sweat”. Delia starts off emotionally weak at the beginning of the story because she cannot stand up...

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” consists of two stories working simultaneously. The first story is a gothic story about a woman who kills her husband and spends decades sleeping with the corpse. The second story is about the collapse of the...

The following essay will explore how recollections of childhood are presented in “Half-past Two”, by U.A. Fanthorpe, a poem through which a child talks about their experience of getting a detention and not knowing why, and not quite being able to...

World War I was a watershed event in world history. Besides being a war on such a massive scale with many casualties involving three major empires, it brought up many questions concerning the role of the nation state and the meaning of war. The...

As a naturalist, Emile Zola’s use of symbolism is often eschewed in favor of his overall themes and plots. Zola believed in the strictly observational approach to novels and his novels set out to depict the industrialization of sex, violence,...

One of the contradictions of radical movements is the way in which the movements both extol and denigrate the virtues of the working class. Orwell made this trope explicit in both Animal Farm with the fate of the horse brought to the glue factory...

The opening passages of Black Spring seem very endemic to the New York attitude. Henry Miller says that he is a patriot of the Fourteenth Ward of Brooklyn and he discusses how all great heroes and literary figures were merely fantasy compared to...

Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban is an important book in the series due to its transitional nature, both in the maturity of the overall plot of the series, and in Harry Potter’s emotional state. While both Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s...

Give Toni Morrison a stake in the creation of user experience writing because she made every single word she wrote count. She opens Beloved in the simplest three words, “124 was spiteful.” Right off the bat, she personifies a number and leaves a...

In 1986, Sam Raimi released Evil Dead 2, which became the quintessential shock and gore movie. News shows like 20/20 would use the movie to scare parents with visions of their teenage children renting it from the local video store. Even though...

It seems strange that of all the characters in Beloved, that Nicole Coonradt would focus on the white woman. Amy Denver is not a woman that is terribly prominent in the narrative and in fact, it’s extremely easy to forget her in the interaction...

The portrayal of heretics in Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks suggests that those who do not subscribe to the orthodox Christian system of beliefs and practices are akin to being a plague upon the entire world. It is Gregory’s belief that...

Jimmy Chi’s 1990 musical Bran Nue Dae is widely credited with and lauded for being the first truly aboriginal musical. It was a cultural breakthrough in Australia that achieved great success by bringing the aboriginal experience into the spotlight...