Newest Literature Essays

Ovid made a strange decision when he wrote his story about Arachne in Book VI, “Of Praise and Punishment.” After all, her story literally describes her spinning and weaving her art, so one would assume that Ovid would place his story about her in...

Discoveries that lead to self-reflection and future enlightenment often hold the most significance in our lives. The capacity for discoveries to take a metamorphic effect on an individual and alleviate former times is conducive to their...

In her poem “I Heard a Fly Buzz -- When I Died --”, Emily Dickinson retells the story of the moments leading up to, and the moment of, her own imagined death as an unsuspecting fly interrupts her anticipated escort to the afterlife by God himself....

During the early 1900s, women were still considered inferior to men. They were struggling to show men that they had value, and that they were more than mere possessions. Mina Loy was an active feminist author who wanted nothing more than to crush...

More than a few critics, academics, scholars and just plain average book readers have declared a winner in the title of funniest novel ever written by an American author: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. This remarkable novel would...

As depicted in D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded, Catharine Le Loup is a Salish woman who resists and struggles within the European invasion on her life and her Salish culture. Salish people are from the Pacific Northwest and in the book the Salish...

The main character of Alberto Alvaro Rios’ The Secret Lion is not a huge fan of change, however inevitable it is. He and his best friend, Sergio, are quite content having one teacher who cares for them and the same friends year after year....

In Equus, by Peter Shaffer, authenticity is a main topic throughout the play and production in all setting, character and between dialogues. In existentialism; for one to live an authentic life, the individual has to choose the distinction between...

In our current age of nuance coupled with increasingly rampant social media use, the scape of poetry is swiftly changing with deviation from traditional forms and the emergence of new mediums. One recent think-piece has addressed the consumption...

Waiting for Godot is a play characterized under the genre of The Theatre of the Absurd, where communication is said to collapse and thus the dialogue consists of meaningless phrases only. The silence produced as a consequence serves as a...

Sherlock Holmes can be defined as a special character in all the aspect; he is loved by the readers due to the outstanding personal features and intelligence. The plots of the short stories about him can be defined as the extremely attractive due...

Terry W. Thompson’s article “‘Lively but Complicated:’ English Hegemony in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’” was published in Midwest Quarterly in 2013. In this article, Thompson explores the political climate in Washington Irving’s famed short story...

The coming-of-age story holds a significant place in the literary canon. In these works, characters explore the world around them, seeking answers to questions about life and trying to find their places in society. In German, this type of story is...

Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ is a comedy focusing on the taming of the aggressive and verbose Katherine by Petruchio, and through this taming process, as well other elements of the play, the theme of love resonates. We see romantic...

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler reflects the life of the eponymous protagonist against the backdrop of a wealthy upper middle class Norwegian city in the nineteenth century. During this time, there were clear social structures and traditions shown...

“No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man” (Achebe 45). Throughout Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, gender and cultural norms of the Igbo tribe...

“Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones” -- Keith Richards From the beginning of time music has been a staple for mankind. Suzanne Boothby in her article “Does...

Directed by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window is a striking portrayal of the social and political issues facing citizens of the time. Set in Greenwich Village of 1954, Rear Window displays a dense apartment block, a microcosm...

In her 1773 poem, Thoughts on the Works of Providence Phillis Wheatley considers God’s power through the solar system of the Sun and Earth’s rotational relationship. Almost a hundred years prior to Wheatley’s neoclassical poetic style, Anne...

James’s Moloney’s Kill the Possum is an intriguing and detailed story set in Australia about a girl "desperate to live a normal life" although her family is "tormented by a monster’s cruelty." (Penguin Australia) During the story, we see how the...

The rise of the novel in mainstream 18th century English society, and the potential for complex identity formation through its narrative structure, provided a new medium for pornographic writing and consumption. Intersecting this rise, the word “...