Newest Literature Essays

The Holocaust was devastating to the Jewish community and millions died, yet some managed to survive. Among those which survived was Vladek, father of author Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman wrote Maus, a graphic novel about Vladek’s survival of the...

In the third Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry and his friends mature into teenagers, and the series itself also matures noticeably in both depth and tone. The series continues to mature in multiple ways in book...

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea aroused a lot of controversy in the world's literary society. As a classic example of Yukio Mishima's later works, it combined themes and motifs that were borderline acceptable and unusual for the...

The International Sanatorium Berghof is the setting where the entire story in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain takes place. Here, high in the Swiss Alps, the sanatorium houses a broad representation of medically ill Europeans from different countries....

Two years before Fathers and Sons was published, Turgenev gave a speech titled “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” in which he cross-analyzed Hamlet and Don Quixote as two antitheses of basic human tendencies. For Turgenev, Don Quixote represented the...

Known for his gritty and unvarnished portrayals of life in the American Midwest, author Richard Ford uses fiction to explore the ways that people react to loneliness, turmoil, and desperation as they struggle to move forward. These themes become...

Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah is a personal account (or memoir) of Palestinian displacement do to Israeli aggression and occupation. Barghouti recalls his experiences in different phases of displacement, and presents a testimony of his...

Nadine Gordimer’s novel The Pickup tells the story of one couple: Julie, a well-to-do white woman from a wealthy family living in South Africa, and her lover, Abdu, an illegal immigrant from an unnamed Arab country, also living in South Africa and...

The past is anything but mere history; it sheathes, surrounds, and encompasses us, as humans, as we forge on through life. Similarly, in two eminent American works of fiction - The Underground Railroad, The Cafeteria, and Sonny’s Blues - the past...

Suicide is a persistent enemy that affects thousands of young people across the country every year. Bullying is one of the main reasons young people decide to commit suicide. Many young adult authors are writing books that address these hard...

High culture bears a great significance in Eliot’s poetry and in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock he expresses its significance in life and the valuable lessons it can provide. He also manifests his concerns about culture’s influence on his...

Communist ex-Prime Minister of Cuba, Fidel Castro, resolutely declared, “I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating…because it causes war, hypocrisy, and competition” (brainyquote.com). Nonetheless, the vast majority...

Mad Scientists in Literary History

The figure of the ‘mad scientist’ is present in many literary works, and its influence as an irresponsible character with an uncontrollable intelligence can be found in many others. But before explaining its...

Of central importance to he short story “Gloria” by Suchen Christine Lim is the theme of inequality. It is a theme prevalent in the story ‘Gloria’, where a domestic helper experiences inequality while working in Singapore. As Gloria, who is the...

In the play Pygmalion, we get to know Mister Higgins as a man who knows what he wants, he is not afraid to say what he thinks and he acts like nobody can tell him what to do. But even though he looks a bit arrogant, self-assured and bossy, he is...

“Evening Hawk” by Robert Penn Warren is, despite its name, not about a hawk. It is about time, the ineffable qualities of that which is past, and the ways in which light and darkness relate with time. And skirting above all of this flies the hawk,...

Both The Hate Race and Othello explore identity as a core facet of human nature by considering the consequences of a strong versus weak sense of identity. The idea of a society’s perception of an individual’s identity as opposed to the individual’...

Throughout “The Prose of the World,” Michel Foucault establishes himself as a conceptual archaeologist, one who seeks to uncover the history and theories behind what he calls “the human sciences.” It is a method in which Foucault reexamines...

Racial identity resides at an unfortunate intersection between social construction and real-life consequences. That is, while the concept of race—Black, White, Asian, Latino, etc.—may be nothing more than labels assigned to groups of varying...

Penned against the backdrop of the 1608 corn riots, William Shakespeare’s highly political Jacobean tragedy, Coriolanus, explores and oscillates between three inter-woven domains of the civil, political and military – in order to exploit a complex...

William Blake, a 19th century romantic poet, wrote poetic arguments in Songs of Innocence and Experience filled with rich imagery and symbolism to convey his, at the time, idiosyncratic views surrounding the church and its negative impact on...

The play Tartuffe has many aspects of reason and foolishness. It was written during the Age of Reason, so Moliere writes this play to teach us about morality and the importance of developing a good character. Throughout the play we see that reason...

“The whisky on your breath could make a small boy dizzy;”. This is how renowned poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) opened up his poem “My Papa’s Waltz”. A exuberant child, a mother whom is unamused, and a powerfully intoxicated father are just the...

In Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi, the protagonist, Trudi Montag, takes the form of a dwarf, or zwerg. Trudi's dwarfism makes her an outsider and she is ridiculed by the people in her community as they view her as less than human and look...