Newest Literature Essays

The graphic portrayal of sex and explicit references to its most immediately related organs need hardly be pointed out to even the most careless reader of the fabliaux. Representative episodes are vivid, strange, and even raunchy: man confuses his...

Literature often presents itself in different themes and messages for audience members. These themes may be reoccurring or even opposing at times between different texts. The play The Good Person of Szchecwan by Bertolt Brecht and Autobiography of...

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh follows the narratives of a multitude of characters in pre-Opium War India. Following the ship named Ibis, an old slave ship transformed for use in opium trade and transporting coolies, the reader invests in the...

Nawal el Saadawi, an Egyptian feminist writer, has worked throughout her life to highlight the need for improvement in the lives of the modern Arab woman. Her book, “Memoirs of a Woman Doctor”, written in 1958, takes her own experiences from...

Les Liaisons dangereuses reveals the complex and disturbing world of aristocratic society in pre-revolutionary France. The reader is left with unanswered questions at the end of the novel, whilst also pondering the meaning of its rapid and tragic...

Adah Price has been surviving from the moment she was born. Surviving, not living. In The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver shows how Adah leads a very cynical existence, outcast to mostly everyone she knows (including her family), and hindered by a...

“Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men,” writes Charlie Gordon, the narrator of Daniel Keyes’ novel Flowers for Algernon. (Keyes, 184) This novel is known for its apparent respect and understanding of mentally handicapped people....

One reason why Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, is a huge success is because of the intriguing narrator-reader dynamic. The narrator – Jane herself – develops a certain kind of intimacy with the readers throughout the autobiography. Although...

“Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God I don't,” (Salinger, 63). It might take Holden Caulfield nine chapters to admit to this, but his sexual confusion is present from the first pages of J.D. Salinger’s famous novel The Catcher...

In Sir Thomas Mallory’s, Le Morte d'Arthur, the majority of the characters face serious conflicts with chivalry and romance. This essay however will analyze female characters and their roles in Mallory’s rendition of Le Morte d'Arthur and how...

Transitions are made in moments of realisation that are taken up by characters in texts. These moments of realisation allows said characters to undergo transitions that affect their actions, thoughts and feelings. In Michael Gow’s “Away” the...

When hard times hit, families must often take desperate actions in order to ensure financial stability in their household, and the Samsas in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis are no different. After Gregor, the main breadwinner of the family, wakes...

In Lady Audley’s Secret, Braddon portrays the character of Lady Audley as a truly complex one. She is shown to be intelligent and manipulative when she supposedly kills her husband George while also manipulating her new one, Michael, for his...

After World War II, United States was growing in prosperity as a seeming winner of the war; yet, growing alongside of it, was an omnipresent fear and tension about technology and ideology---the summation of the oncoming Cold War. As a young writer...

Post-World War II, scientists were considered the heroes of modern society. The nation’s science labs were heavily mobilized and federal spending on research development was over twenty times what it had been prior to the start of the war...

The Wanderer is a poem that laments both the temporality of human life and the material world, posing existential questions that only appear to be answered in the comparatively short conclusion though appeal to the Christian God. In part because...

In the essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker presents a moving portrait of matrilineal art and creativity extending throughout black history. Following this line, Walker illustrates generations upon generations of lost artists,...

The film Wadjda directed and written by Haifaa Al Mansour explores the cultural orders that perpetuate gender segregation in Saudi Arabia. The film achieves this by following the experiences of an ambitious young Saudi girl, Wadjda, who questions...

While Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is, for the most part, a heroic poem about a heroic knight who resists temptation, the story also has an interesting dialogue on sexuality interwoven in its lines. From King Arthur’s “ebullience” (line 86) all...

‘Some religious texts seem to find it relatively easy to disengage from the material world. Many more, however, derive their dynamism from the difficulty of doing so.’

‘Behold not the earth, but lift your eye up’, [30] Mercy sermonizes in the...

A dream, as we conceive of it in modern thought, is considerably different to the dreams which featured in Middle English dream vision poetry. Where today we might generally think of one’s dreams as an abstract, introspective reflection of...

Gina Berriault’s “The Stone Boy” follows the story of a young boy facing the aftermath of a terrible accident and trying to understand his responsibility in the matter. When Arnold does not respond emotionally, the adults’ false assumptions...

Shakespearian comedies often address the widely-accepted notion in Elizabethan England that suggested that order and balance should prevail both in the world and in performed representations of the world, even if the form of the plays often...

The feminist reader would enjoy Lucrezia Marinella’s The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, written in 1600. In her work, Marinella ridicules men’s arguments for the defects and vices of women by making equally...