Newest Literature Essays

Cavafy is a poet who reinscribes Hellenistic history with his peculiar point of view and a sharp sense of irony in his historical poems. Among these, there are meta-poetic moments or whole poems that are about the writing process and the function...

The movie Lone Star addresses multiple issues that people from troubled border towns have, including racial tensions, dirty cops, and illegal gambling. "Ours is a story about borders. Towns on either side of a given border generally have more in...

Set in the 1970s, against a backdrop of social and cultural revolution in terms of the feminist and anti-Vietnam movements in Australia, Louis Nowra’s play ‘Cosi’, focuses on the lives of a few individuals. By exploring the situation and...

“‘God is love,’ says St John.” (Four Loves 1)

Love is arguably the most important concept for humanity to grasp and understand. It’s what unites families and friendships. It’s what gives meaning to the everyday activities. Without love, a mother...

Yasunari Kawabata is a Japanese author who ties his culture in with his novel, though not necessarily to add to the story. In Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata uses the tea ceremony as an undertone for the theme of going against tradition when it...

“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...