Newest Literature Essays

Community is as life sustaining as food and water. It provides human connection, a sense of identity, and support. However, human nature leads individuals to seek experiences separate from their communities. In Alice Walker’s story “Strong Horse...

In A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid forces the reader to take on the role of a tourist as she brings them through the town of Antigua, criticising the moral ugliness of tourism and the negative consequences of European Imperialism as she does so....

In today's society, almost anything is possible to achieve, a fact that makes it so that nothing is ever as it appears. Things change constantly, whether we agree with such changes or not. This idea is especially notable in the people of the...

Equivalent exchange, an absolute law in nature, dictates that one must give up something so that one may gain something that is equal in value. By this logic, sacrifice is, at its very core, a necessity in life; however, it is also a gray area...

John Bunyan’s work The Pilgrim’s Progress, is one of the most renowned Christian books to read, but it is not in fact within Christian rules, according to the Bible, thus unveiling a logical fallacy. With careful analysis of The Pilgrim’s Progress...

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. However, that can only go so far before it is criticized as lacking originality; some might even claim it only creates a worse version of something that may have been praised as being the best....

What attributes qualify someone, or something, as a monster? Despite the fact that the answer to this subjective query fluctuates immensely among individual persons, for centuries we have attempted to construct a universal definition of the word ‘...

A poet who energetically contemplated the world around him, Dawe wasn't just a devoted Australian wordsmith with a dream that his work would one day be analysed. He was a book full of ideas, complex ideas, often about the essence of life and...

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North was first published in 1969, and has come to be regarded as outstanding in its genre. Originally written in Arabic, the book features notable parallels to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which it...

Thanks largely, if not entirely, to Shakespeare, audiences today can immediately recognize the promise of a romance in any title featuring the names of two characters. “Before Romeo and Juliet, there was Tristan and Isolde,” croons the leading...

David Mamet’s short, two-character play Oleanna deals with the shifting linguistic power dynamics between professor John and student Carol over the series of three separate meetings. Both characters continually trail off, interrupt one another,...

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Johannes de Silencio-- despite being quite the opposite of the meaning his Latin name gives), shares his rather lengthy take on the story of Abraham. Kierkegaard ultimately decides that...

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is a representation of the India that is not often displayed among the media. It is an India that, in its core, incorporates all aspects of political, social and economic injustice. Balram Halwai, the protagonist,...

In “Part One” of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s famous 19th century novel Crime and Punishment, the beleaguered former-student Raskolnikov feverishly contemplates committing a “vile” crime, which is eventually revealed as the murder of local pawnbroker...

Identity is not something that can simply be explained in a few words. There is a variety of factors that can make up someone’s identity - family, friends, culture, environment, hobbies, interests, and gender are just a few. Many people use these...

In Victor Pelevin’s novel, The Yellow Arrow, there is an evident string of symbols and metaphors which represent the harsh conditions of the Russian people during the early 1990’s. One of the literally largest symbols in the novel was the train...

As Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein delves deeper into his search for the causes of life, he becomes consumed by his quest for the answer to his question as he toils over his creation – a decrepit but mortal form compiled of...

The question of what it means to be a woman has been floating through society for ages with any sort of permanent or universally accepted answer remaining elusive. It is a constantly changing definition in which traits appropriate to the time are...

The 1910’s and early 1920’s were littered with sob-stories about men who gave their lives for their country in the first world war. Poetry, songs, radio plays and indeed, many novels are dedicated to this subject. These stories nearly all centered...

Death is an inevitable factor of life, one which all of humanity must eventually face. What varies among people is how they handle this ‘coming of the end’. Some accept it with grace and tranquility, while others fight it until their dying breath....

Louise Erdrich’s novels Love Medicine and Plague of Doves are filled with a multitude of characters. These characters are different from one another with their own struggles and problems but are connected, not just by blood but by their shared...

Shakespeare’s “Richard III” mainly concerns itself with the royal court under the rule of the Yorks; however, occasionally, Shakespeare takes a break from portraying the lives of noblemen. These window scenes provide the audience with insight as...

A revenge tragedy is a genre of play, popularized in the seventeenth century, in which the protagonist pursues revenge for real or perceived abuses. Thee tragedies typically employ a number of the same conventions, such as escalating causes for...

The mind-body divide, or mind-body dualism, was a philosophical theory that gained popularity in the seventeenth century and flourished thereafter. In this theory, the mind and body are separate entities, and in literature, this meant that men...