Newest Literature Essays

“The dominant mode of ethical thinking in the Renaissance argued that the passions should be governed by reason to ensure good order in society.”

A paradox exists in Renaissance ethics: passions – by definition, ‘barely controllable’ – should be...

John Osborne’s technique in Look Back in Anger reveals his indebtedness to Henrik Ibsen and his contemporary Samuel Beckett in naturalistic plays. He uses images and symbols, both verbal and non verbal for the sake of objectification. These...

Giovanni Boccaccio’s medieval work of art The Decameron highlights both the righteous and sinful ways of humans, through the telling of short stories. Boccaccio’s tales cover a wide array of topics, including adultery, love, devotion, trickery,...

The earliest fairy tales were published in a patriarchal society where women had little rights and played a subordinate role, raised to bow to male authority. As a result, most traditional fairy tales tend to reflect the norms of such a society....

Looking over the course of time, women in every society have been expected to maintain the household living up to the old adage that they, like children, should be seen and not heard. In the play “Trifles” written by Susan Glaspell, this is...

In Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, protagonists Estraven and Genly Ai embark on a bleak journey across the Gobrin Glacier only to discover that they will fail without the balance of light and shadows. In response to Estraven falling...

In The Slave Mother and Room, respective authors Frances Harper and Emma Donoghue use the raw human emotions of hope, fear, and maternal love to convey how people cope with traumatic events. These qualities deepen the enduring human conditions...

Australian Culture and Jasper Jones – Essay‘Jasper Jones’ by Craig Silvey is a semi-realistic representation of the social commentary and culture of Australian society in the 1960s. The distinct novel demonstrates the harsh climate of xenophobia,...

A Bildungsroman story is that of formation, education, or coming of age. It is characterized by the development of the young protagonist to become a more complete person. The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel features the opposite, an...

An Ideology is a system of ideas beliefs and attitudes. They can lead to motivated reasoning, the subconscious desire not to find the truth, but to defend the version of reality that makes us feel most validated. In truth, an ideology is an...

In his story “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars”, Junot Diaz presents to the reader a couple going through a tumultuous time in their relationship. News of Yunior’s infidelity had just come to light via a letter that his mistress sent to his girlfriend...

As a civilization grows and develops its own distinct culture, a religion is often formed to best understand how the world around the tribe works. While some cultures have a very distinct set of beliefs, customs, and practices, most can be linked...

“Bearded Barley” is a poem written by Tacoma Community College professor Allen Braden. The speaker of this poem is an observer, and the audience is commoners or those who under-appreciate the barley plant. The poem goes into detail about the plant...

According to the Dalai Lama, “all religions try to benefit people, with the same basic message of the need for love and compassion, for justice and honesty, for contentment.” The need for love, compassion, justice, honesty, and most of all...

Throughout Blood River, the Congo is presented as a place of immense wild natural beauty, but to a point that it is intimidating, and dangerous. Butcher describes it as a place that corrupts men, and a place in which there is always a battle...

The corruption of innocence and the gaining of experience are common aspects of Carter’s stories in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, which are applied to many themes such as sexuality in The Tiger’s Bride and The Bloody Chamber, self-awareness in Wolf-Alice...

Even from the humble beginnings of modern Western society, the wilderness has gripped the collective imagination of Americans. Through Manifest Destiny and, more recently, expansion into the American Northwest, modern minds have been captured by...

In Carmen Laforet’s Nada, the orphan Andrea arrives in Barcelona full of optimism about her new life in the city. Many critics claim that the novel is a ‘bildungsroman’, a coming-of-age story where the protagonist, an adolescent, matures into...

The deliberate manipulation of textual form definitively reveals the significance of people’s experiences of landscape in shaping individual identity and the values of social groups. Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn, a unique blend of historical...

Faith has always played a role in human society. Some put their faith in a divine being, while others put their faith in more physical things. In the historical fiction novel A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines, a reader can see the...

In Medieval times, women were usually forced to be dependent on a man for her safety, prosperity, and guidance. Yet, in Marie de France’s fictional tales of courtly love, men are in fact victims to women’s charm. Men are unable to live without...

In a society where the purity of fact is venerated largely by the vilification of bias, and subsequently defended by the equation of bias with fiction and fiction with falsehood, the attention of an audience is held only through a taxing balance...

Survival in Auschwitz is a memoir written by Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who was sent to and worked in the Auschwitz-Monowitz labor camp during the later years of World War II. Levi’s memoir is significant for its...