Newest Literature Essays

Set in a dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, Blade Runner follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), an ex-policeman brought out of retirement to eliminate a group of renegade replicants who have illegally arrived on Earth. During this anti-hero’s quest, he...

Virginia Woolf’s revolutionary novel To the Lighthouse provides an incredibly in-depth psychological study of its many characters. Family and friends pass through the Ramsay’s summer home in the Hebrides, all of whom carry characteristics,...

Browning’s dramatic monologues Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess critique Victorian society’s restrictive patriarchal values which suppressed a female’s endeavors for individualism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House condemns the pretense...

In the novel Watership Down, Hazel, leader of the Sandleford Warren escaped rabbits, demonstrates many ways in which he is similar to the bunny-famous mythological hero “El-ahrairah”. To rabbit-kind, El-ahrairah is a rolemodel, a leader and an...

American culture has a notoriously rapid pace and obvious state of exhaustion which accompanies an overexertion of the mind, body, and spirit of a person. In this hustle and bustle it becomes easy to lose sight of the ideals set for happiness and...

The Lambert family, the protagonists of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, view the world through a lens which attaches monetary value to people, objects, and actions. Money is a constant presence in their lives, whether there’s plenty or not...

Charlotte Brontë’s novel, “Shirley” was written in 1849. Although this novel is secondary in both quality and popularity, it addresses many social issues and dilemmas of Bronte’s time period, such as business, religion, and most importantly the...

Often, the elements of the mind and past developments play a key role in understanding events and writings. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe crafts tales that reveal the inner cravings that...

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a groundbreaking piece of literature in which an audience is able to experience an autobiographical piece unlike any other. Through the illustrations in this graphic novel as well as the utterly human words and...

In Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, Christian Linden (or Linde) must give up her own life to provide for her mother and younger brothers, and finds herself a newfound freedom once widowed. However, Ms.Linden is unhappy having no family to work...

Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic weaves together history and fiction to create an extremely personalized account of actual events. Two of these stories, that of Frederick Douglass coupled with those of Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown, are particularly...

One of the major themes of The Merry Wives of Windsor is the change in gender roles that was happening in Shakespeare’s time. Gender roles were changing to allow women more freedom and power. In the play, men are depicted as fools, delusional,...

The turn of the 19th century was a morbid, dark time period: death was a common visitor, as plagues and diseases diminished the children, and the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars diminished the overall population. In response to such loss,...

Created in the Victorian epoch, Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield is one of his most famous masterpieces scrutinizing how a person transits from childhood to adulthood. On the example of the protagonist, the author explores different...

Ambiguity is present within every language as every word can be interpreted slightly differently. In literature, complex ideas are often indirectly depicted through the use of metaphors and symbols. Likewise, images also possess a sense of...

To the heedless reader, Dante’s Inferno and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are generally interpreted as mere works of fiction designed and created for the sole purpose of entertainment. To fully glean the authors’ intended message, though, one...

Gender and economics were no less intertwined during the eighteenth century than they are today. In the world of emerging paper currency and capitalism, many issues were coming to light for the first time, and so it comes as little surprise that...

Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy illustrates in beautiful and haunting prose the oppression black citizens of South Africa faced in the years preceding apartheid. The country’s white minority imposed its power over black South Africans in several ways,...

As a popular and widely loved novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and, Through the looking Glass and What Alice Found There has been translated to well over a hundred languages and is a household tale that most people have enjoyed in their...

Arthur Miller’s allegorical play, The Crucible, illustrates the parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and the HUAC communist crisis, highlighting the injustice of McCarthyism. Alternatively, Geraldine Brooks intertextually takes a cue from the...

T.S. Eliot once said that Titus Andronicus "is one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written, a play in which it is incredible that Shakespeare had any hand at all." This was an amusing choice of words on Eliot’s part, as one of the...

Composers represent the ultimate powerlessness of ordinary people through the ways in which they explore the complex and dynamic relationship between people and politics. Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” written in a communist fearing period...

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, humanity was beginning to discover and explore the connections and differences between the mind and the body, the body and the soul, the body and the surrounding world. It was during this period...

Scottish novelist James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner opens with a narrative by an unknown editor describing the Colwan family and the feud between the Colwan brothers, Robert, later known as Robert Wringhim, and...