Newest Literature Essays

In French, la petite mortis an expression that literally means "the brief loss or weakening of consciousness" but usually refers to "the sensation of orgasm as likened to death." This phenomenon is probably not a revelation, given that every...

For over 27,000 years, ever since the first cave paintings were uncovered, telling tales has been one of our most underlying methods of communication. Various compelling legends and tales originate from culturally diverse regions from all around...

Franz Kafka subverts the idea of the romanticized past with “In the Penal Colony” particular in the character of The Officer. The Officer is the kind of character that one encounters at trade shows. This is a man who knows everything about a...

At the time that Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron became popular there were numerous similar works in circulation. Readers mainly enjoyed the tales as facile entertainment rather than literature, and most...

Theatre reflects the society from which it springs, and in the case of The Removalists by David Williamson (1971), this reflection is an exploration of cultural and social issues of Australian society. Set in Melbourne in 1970’s Australian...

Theatre reflects the society from which it springs, and in the case of No Sugar by Jack Davis (1986) this reflection is an exploration of cultural and social issues of Australian society. Although written later, Jack Davis’ commissioned play is...

Alana Valentine’s massaged verbatim play Parramatta Girls (2007) explores the experiences of women who were incarcerated into the Parramatta Girls Home. Through her eight distinct characters that she created, she gives a voice to over five hundred...

Texts written in the After the Bomb period represent the personal and political consequences of an era. George Clooney’s Good Night And Good Luck, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, and Oliver Stone’s film,...

The institution of marriage has changed over the last century from a patriarchal control construct to a more open organization. The books Their Eyes were Watching God and Stranger in a Strange Land both attack the institution of traditional...

Both Maurice by E.M Forster and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen are the stories of revolutionary love, capable of inspiring moral improvement and moral compromise within relationships. Specifically, it is the stories of Maurice and Alec and...

Utilizing multidisciplinary knowledge gained from analysis of both George Orwell’s novel 1984 and Fritz Langs’ Metropolis grants the individual the ability to better understand the ways in which both texts portray that a major concern is the...

One of the most significant themes explored within Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet is spirituality, and the novel reflects a wide range of differing spiritualities, including the belief in luck and chance, religion, as well as exploring Australian...

It is through the concept symbiosis and harmony with the landscape that Judith Wright effectively presents a positive experiences between individuals and their environment. These notions are most transparent through her poems, South of My Days and...

In both The Bell Jar and Fight Club use the most literal symbols of cleansing and renewal – a bath and soap respectively. Once these books use these literal symbols, the irony sets in. The cleansing remains but the symbolic meaning of the...

As seen in the Death and the King’s Horseman, by Wole Soyinka, the Yoruba culture and tradition have very strong, unusual customs and values. This play is centered around one particular custom: when a king dies, his servants and horsemen must die...

The unique language features of the Cloudstreet (1991), as well as Tim Winton’s characterization and inclusion of contextual elements of Australian history, ultimately create a novel that is embedded within Australian society and is of everlasting...

Slumdog Millionaire is a movie that invokes various cultures at work within India including Muslim/Hindu tensions, British colonialism and American pop culture in the form of the framing device of an American game show. Based on an Indian novel,...

Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations is a story of growth and change throughout the life of young Philip "Pip" Pirrip. Although the novel is based in realism, there are numerous instances where Pip's reality collides with fantasy—he is in...

The Indian woman in Broken Arrow (1950) represents a key example of dominant culture failing to show the Other with agency. When talking about race and women in Hollywood movies, one must always ask whose side is being advanced and who has the...

Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill serves as a critique of British social standards—racism, colonialism, and especially sexism, gender roles, and sexual politics. The play takes place in two acts, with Act One set in Victorian Africa and Act Two in London...

The use of Biblical names in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon signals the growth of the protagonist from an isolated child-like man into a fully realized human being who has taken a place in the history of his family and by extension his people. In...

Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, said that the “most enduring Vietnam stories are those that are between the absolutely unbelievable and the mundane” (O’Brien 151). Such is the story of Mark Fossie - retold in the “Sweetheart of the...

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf follows one day in the life of her protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, though Clarissa is not the only important character. The novel also follows Septimus Smith, a traumatized soldier attempting to navigate his life...

The main characters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple begin their stories as lonely and confined individuals battling between their own thought versus the pressures and expectations of society. They strive to be...