Newest Literature Essays

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck follows Akunna, a young Nigerian immigrant, as she adjusts to life in America. While there she begins a relationship with a white man who is eerily fascinated by African culture, and encounters...

“No matter your social status or how powerful you feel you are, we are equal, we came by birth and will leave by death” (Love Quotes).

As the quote eloquently states, social justice cannot define individuals of the same intellectual species. This...

Though eventually peaking during Apartheid, the concept of racial prejudice was long deep rooted in nineteenth century South African society. Due to this, it was only natural for these issues to be reflected in Fiela’s Child, especially evident in...

The world in which we live is one of immense complexity, and its navigation often proves difficult for the ill-fated individuals who occupy it. Society and the pressure it puts on individuals has become increasingly worrying to many intellectuals;...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream revealed a lot of society during its time. It embodied societal pressures and demands among the characters. The characters played as an example of the different types of people that were present during that time. The...

Beowulf is the tale of an isolated hero and his quest for power and fame. Beowulf fights those horrific beings that no other warrior dares to face, and in return receives great praise and acclaim for his bravery. This literary work can be...

Renaissance revenge tragedies, like all works of arts, are profoundly influenced by the state of the world around them. Thousands of years later, those state of affairs – wars, love triangles, and power struggles – have evolved, but not truly...

The dominant human sense is vision; an entire lobe of the brain, the occipital lobe, is dedicated to processing and interpreting visual information. Despite its importance, a loss of vision is not life-threatening due to the brain’s...

“Cousin Kate” follows the story of a former “cottage maiden” who was jilted by her lover, “a great lord” for her cousin, “Kate”. The poem presents the protagonist’s feelings and thoughts throughout the poem, congruently conveying her motives, and...

Station Eleven includes a vast number of key characters and storylines, focusing on both the internal and external battles these characters face. Some characters, such as Kirsten, Jeevan, and Clark, long for community after a life of disarray,...

Many prayers consist of asking God for peace, protection, or forgiveness. John Donne, however, in his Holy Sonnet XIV, has created a strikingly different kind of prayer. In the very first line, the speaker says to God, “Batter my heart.” The poem...

In a traditional Victorian society which was patriarchal, it was expected that women remained subservient and complaint at all times, obediently yielding to the inclinations of both men and the community around them. The women in Christina Rosetti...

Tarr is a novel that describes reality as deplete of an inherent moral code, and Lewis articulates the world as hostile, set in direct opposition to the romantic, Rousseauvian vision of “wild nature and unspoilt man”. Within this world Lewis...

Although still a global issue today, misogyny in the time period of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady stemmed from the quantification of a woman’s value from what she can contribute to males rather than her character. The author explores this...

To enhance the cultural significance and direct their characters’ journeys, Gene Luen Yang and Leslie Marmon Silko include the presence of legends traditional to each culture in their works American Born Chinese and Ceremony, respectively. With...

In the play Top Girls, Churchill presents women with power as cynical as it is portrayed that they have abandoned their feminine attributes and womanhood to reach success through the use of male qualities. This idea is particularly evident in the...

Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon is easily one of her best-selling novels and is often credited as contributing to her winning the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. However, despite its popularity Song of Solomon is in many ways radically...

William Shakespeare’s 1600 comedy A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream tells the story of lovers who become woefully confused and actors who were woefully confused to begin with. Magic and fairies play a large role in the play, as they both move the plot...

William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is widely regarded as one of the English language’s greatest plays. It captures the attention of audiences like few other plays can, and it has held their attention for over...

Both Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun and Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved are works that deal predominately with race, but feature vastly different subject matter. Beloved features a group of people haunted by the memory of...

Contemporary reviewers who referred to Charles Lamb as imitating or affiliated with the ‘Lake School’ mocked what they perceived to be a taste for simplicity or childishness; his 1802 play John Woodvil, for example, was mockingly called ‘the first...

The introduction of the Italianate sonnet form into Spanish poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries brought with it both the versification and elements of one of the most influential collections of poetry of all time - Francisco de Petrarca’s II...

One difference between the slave and neo-slave narrative is the relationship of the audience to the text’s protagonist. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs cannot address her audience from equal grounds; because of her...

Point Omega by Don DeLillo is a short novel that consists of three narrative parts delivered by two different narrators. Although the general emphasis is on the middle part where we hear the story from Jim, it is also important to give due...