Newest Literature Essays

Throughout Batter My Heart, the speaker is expressing his desire to be made new again and live a life without sin. The sense of unworthiness conveyed in this poem is mirrored in Love, as Herbert creates a speaker who believes himself unworthy of...

Jordan Baker is perhaps the most forgettable of The Great Gatsby’s core cast of characters. Even the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway himself, admits to having “lost sight of Jordan Baker” altogether for at least a few weeks of the narrative,...

Critics have long puzzled over what Emily Heady terms an “uneasy fusion” of genres in Charlotte Brontë’s final novel, Villette (341). Toeing the line between two dominant—and, in many regards, opposing—literary modes of the era, realism and Gothic...

When conducting a close reading of Dana Gioia’s “Pity the Beautiful,” the odd number of stanzas stands out; this observation is accentuated by the fact the third (and middle) stanza acts as a turning point in the poem. Sometimes, poets do this...

Masculine identity in The Song of Roland is grounded in emotional experience. From knights on the battlefield to King Charlemagne, men throughout the poem frequently weep or faint because of the intensity of their emotions. Contrary to...

Timothy Findley’s, The Wars, is an intriguing novel that outlines the physical and internal battles of individuals during World War I. This novel focuses on the troubled life, the main character, Robert Ross, leads as he tries to escape his guilt...

Quentin Blake and Neil Gaiman both utilize desire as a driving force in the plots of their works. Blake’s Mrs. Armitage on Wheels sees its protagonist desiring more out of her bicycle and using her creativity and mechanical prowess to enhance the...

According to Auden's essay "The Guilty Vicarage," the typical formula for a detective story is the "occurrence of a murder; then, many are suspected, all but one suspect, who happens to be the murderer, are eliminated; finally the murderer is...

The tensions between John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy and Henry Odera Oruka’s Mythologies as African Philosophy speak to the greater divide between ethnophilosophy and sagacious reasoning. The former is the practice of discussing the...

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water both respond to the presence of white influence within native cultures. Although the King and Dangarembga focus on different ethnic groups—First Nations people in...

Toni Morrison’s Sula and August Wilson’s Fences have countless similarities. The two stories, which at their cores revolve around African American struggles, showcase the complexities of being a person of color in a rapidly changing society....

Novels with a cast of primarily male characters can include varying amounts of feminist ideas. Although Giovanni’s Room mainly focuses on the lives of gay men, James Baldwin includes various feminist themes. Through the men in Giovanni’s Room, ...

“David Copperfield” is an autobiographical novel, a family chronicle, which is written from a child's viewpoint rather than an adult’s. As all things seem to be larger in the eyes of a kid, children tend to be more sensitive to what is happening...

If one looks back on human history, millions of lives have been lost for various fights and disagreements between powers. Although one has the resources and knowledge to learn from past mistakes, humanity still chooses violence to end...

The question of freedom in the character Louisa Ellis in Mary E. Wilkins’ “A New England Nun” is one of ambiguity and argument. On one side, she manages to find her own small freedom in life within this society that restricts women to standards...

The Breton lai Sir Orfeo is an English reworking of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. In contrast to the classical tale, this anonymously authored text replaces tragedy with comedy while also including a didactic function for a medieval Christian...

In the novel The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux, characters Christine and Raoul both suffer from identity issues due to their connection with their childhood. Both characters go through many complicated obstacles trying to figure out who...

In nations around the world, colonialism instilled a racial hierarchy that made whiteness synonymous with prosperity. In places like 1950s Rhodesia, colonialism created a system of mass assimilation, where giving up a part of their culture was a...

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas explores the depths of one sixteen year-old’s life and the struggles she faces daily as a black female who has grown up in an underprivileged neighborhood and developed her emotions, thoughts and feelings through...

In the short stories “Hands,” “Paper Pills,” and “Drink” by Sherwood Anderson in the collection Winesburg, Ohio, Andersen shows that American emotions and sexuality are so repressed that people often choose isolation over human connection by...

The Victorian Age was a time of great changes in English society, economically, industriously, and intellectually. This era brought about prosperity and growth for some citizens, while bringing severe desolation to others. In the midst of these...

Storytelling has become an important literary device found in American Literature. Stories like “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain and “Daisy Miller: A Study” by Henry James use storytelling as the simplest way promote...

In Alfred Hitchcock’s enthralling film, Rear Window, set in Manhattan, New York in the 1950s, Hitchcock draws attention to the way physical immobility is simply an echo of emotional immobility as represented by the protagonist, L.B. Jefferies....

Rasmussen Tinsley of Annie Proulx’s “People in Hell just want a Drink of Water” and Oscar de León of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao represent male characters who interact with a constructed form of manhood, which this paper...