Newest Literature Essays

Monica Ali published her debut novel ‘Brick Lane’ in 2003 to much critical acclaim. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the novel tells the hardships faced by Nazneen, a young Bengali woman who is sent from her quiet rural village home to...

Shintoism is an ancient Japanese religion that initially focused on praying for good harvest with the start of Japan coinciding with the start of rice growing. Shinto followers believe in spirits that live in living things such as animals and...

Bernard Maclaverty’s Cal and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother both present the larger conflicts of a country through the voice of a single protagonist. The violence plaguing the lands of both Northern Ireland and South Africa in the late 1900’s...

Throughout crime fiction such as ‘Atonement’ and ‘Brighton Rock’, unwitting characters fall to the machinations that antagonists - even immature antagonists - set for them. While some might argue that the characters in Graham Greene’s novel ‘...

Nature is a vital and powerful component of life. It has the power to provide, as well as the power to take away. Human life depends upon it, but can also be destroyed by it. We are forced to interact with it in numerous ways, but at the same time...

Evgeny Zamyatin was born and raised in Lebedyan, a small village located in the Russian countryside, before moving to St. Petersburg, the then Russian capital, in order to study engineering (Charnaya, date unknown). Therefore, Zamyatin had...

There is no glory in war; it only tears relationships apart and nobody returns home unscathed. In Joseph Boyden’s novel Three Day Road, the true horrors and realities of war are revealed. Through the characters of Xavier and Elijah, the historical...

Feminine deviance, or the failure to adhere to societal standards set for women of the time, is a concept displayed by characters across many genres and eras, from William Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth to Ernest Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley, but...

Throughout the life of each and every human, waves of cascading happiness, sorrow, confusion, anger, and relief will be evoked; a person can be triggered to undergo an endless number of these emotions, and each person reacts to such feelings in...

Inasmuch as the human psyche has a prospect for advancement and evolution, the human mind must contrive a plane of imagination upon which certain concepts and taboos can be explored and grappled with, for most of life comes from fiction, not fact....

Densely populated with similes, allusions, and speeches, John Milton’s Paradise Lost takes Satan’s fall from Heaven and expands it into a meditation on hierarchy, knowledge, and power. Though Satan’s main vendetta against God is established in his...

Most Canadians when asked what the traditional family looks like will tell you that there is a mother, and a father, and their children, living together, and providing for each other. This is the standard, and simple, image of a family. Joan...

While we often cast aside shock value as a cheap method of producing a volatile reaction from readers and filmgoers, the fact remains that decay, disfigurement, and other elements of the grotesque are capable of establishing a theme and perhaps...

Are you aware that the idea of courage or bravery does not have an exact definition? In fact, it can be depicted in many different ways. For example, one of the many definitions of bravery could be having a strong moral sense of duty and the need...

Nonsense poetry appeals to readers of all ages because it entertains the mind as well as the mouth. Drawing heavily on humorous imagery, creative word plays, and fantasy, nonsense poetry typically uses strong rhyme and rhythm to build and break...

A common trope found in most Shakespeare plays is that of using a character from a racial or ethnic minority as a villainous scapegoat. In his time, Shakespeare’s audiences would have been primarily white Christians, and thus any character in his...

Tennessee Williams’s paradoxical nature as an individual can be seen at many different points throughout his life. Described as “enigmatic” by both his contemporaries and biographers, the prolific playwright seems to have translated this quality...

The gorgeous and charming protagonist Belinda of “Rape of the Lock” by Alexander Pope goes to great lengths to beautify her outer appearance. Pope’s description of her elaborate beauty ritual is a clear sign of this- her primping process is...

People distinguish themselves through their individuality, their uniqueness, the ways in which they are their own self and no one else. However, a remarkable woman of the late 1600s did not herself fit the typical construct of an individual; in A...

Courtier Sir Philip Sidney was a prominent and highly influential literary figure in the Elizabethan age. Critics agree that Sidney was ahead of his time as a writer, and Alexander Gavin refers to the 1590’s as a decade in which he ‘dominated...

Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy examines the use and exchange values of commodified material relative to social relations between people. Marx suggests that social relations are continually mediated and expressed with objects,...

Sexual desire is a word that brings confusion to the mind of Sumire in Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart. This sexual desire takes a while for Sumire to comprehend but as the novel continues it is seen that she comprehends it when it comes to...

Many feminists deem sex-positive sex education necessary in order to promote safe, consensual, and healthy sex habits in adolescents that will leave an effect that lasts a lifetime. In the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, however,...