Newest Literature Essays

“The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” is a confessional poem by Anne Sexton, in which she explores her intimate feelings about masturbation during a post-break-up era in her life. The poem is noteworthy because of its ability to bring forth the...

Many critics would define Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper as being aligned with feminist politics. Her decision to satirize the patriarchal, domestic-centred expectations of 1930s women, and the media that propagated said expectations, arguably...

While Beowulf is structured around its three key confrontations between man and monster - Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the Dragon respectively - the plot is punctuated by a series of digressions that recount other heroic, or culturally...

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was the best fulfiller of his own call for an ‘immenser’ poet who would write ‘great poems of death’ (Democratic Vistas). His poetry, as much as it celebrates and endorses sexual liberation, consciously ‘beat[s] and...

Butterworth, through his use of dramatic method, makes Scene One significant, particularly the extract where Ginger recounts Johnny’s antics at the fair ‘twenty years’ ago, by his characterisation of Johnny and his implicit comment on society....

There is an incomprehensible secret embodied in the highly intimate affair of someone else’s emotions. Even when the thoughts of others come fully into the orbit of one’s concern, they are often difficult to dissect and subsequently understand....

When contemplating Sappho’s illumination of the role of the woman in Ancient Greek society in her poetry, it is equitable to concede that there is an underlying tone of patriarchal oppression woven throughout; in which femininity is reduced to...

Susan Glaspell’s one-act play called Trifles can best be described as a feminist drama. Having first been performed in 1916, and having been written by a woman, the play itself is one of a kind, which is why it is still taught to this day. There...

Scientific investigation as a motif in Victorian literature served as both a source of inquisitiveness and terror in its youth as an ideological school of thought. Both Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells take time to scientifically dissect these facets...

Kings Abbot is described at the beginning of the novel as being “just like any other village”. However, as the plot develops and the reader learns more about the secrets and pasts of the characters who reside in Kings Abbot and, more importantly,...

Amanda Ngoho Reavey’s Marilyn chronicles her survival and transformation following transnational adoption and the shifting of her identity. She asserts that “survival is not about hunger. Not nourishment. Not hope. Nor anger. Nor love. It is about...

In his essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), Henry James writes ‘the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting’. Here, and elsewhere in his writing, James eschews the constraints of textual...

In ‘The Thought-Fox’, Ted Hughes explores the transformative power of the imagination through the extended image of an imagined ‘fox’’ roaming through foliage post-midnight. Indeed, the poem might be read as an ode to beasts through putting a...

In Fernando Meirelles’ film City of God (2002) the audience is introduced to and follows the life of Rocket, and his affiliation with Li’l Zé (formerly Li’l Dice), a gang leader in the City of God. In one of the final scenes of the film, a...

Beckett is fundamentally anti-logocentric. Throughout his work, he rejects the view that there is an essential order that can be discovered through reason. This is nowhere more clear than in Three Dialogues (1949), in which he deplores centuries...

Lovelace is clearly representing in the poem ‘The Scrutiny’, that the speaker is convincing women to sleep with him, when he has no intentions of being in a relationship with them. Selfishness is really conveyed as he’s speaking throughout the...

A defining characteristic of William Blake’s poetry is that his poems are intended to be in conversation with one another. Blake allows his poetry to speak by using dialectically opposite images. Blake prominently uses Christian images in his...

Though it is a book of children’s literature, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit still deals with issues of great moral complexity. In the novel, Bilbo Baggins debates whether or not he should kill the creature Gollum, who stands in his way of escaping...

Typical of his work, Henrik Ibsen's ‘Hedda Gabler' challenges social convention through deeply flawed and simultaneously, progressive characters. Eilert Loevborg is one of the more unconventional characters in the play, and as a man who has solely...

‘My genius’, Henry James wrote to William Dean Howells in 1900, ‘I may…say, absolutely thrives [in ‘The Ambassadors’] - it is ‘exquisitely ‘pure’, exquisitely everything’. ‘The Ambassadors’ (1903) was considered by Henry James to be his crowning...

Like many gothic stories, the link between the exterior and the interior in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ becomes an exploration of into the human psyche. Critic Sara Wasson recently claimed that gothic fiction anticipated psychoanalysis – the...

‘Our experience of the world is through the transitory experience of embodiment’.[1] This statement by Marie Mulvey-Roberts exemplifies as to why the body is so prevalent when horror is depicted in the gothic; we exist only within our bodies and...

What makes up a positive and functional mindset? How should an individual behave, think, talk, or feel? Even more, what should they believe? The novel Brave New World bombards us with these unavoidable questions as we delve deeper into its...

Dwight McBride’s critical essay, Straight Black Studies: On African American Studies, James Baldwin, and Black Queer Studies, is a key contribution to the study of gender and sexuality in literature. In his essay, McBride identifies the absence of...