Newest Literature Essays

Significant dialogue from Act 2 of Death and the Maiden reveals how Paulina’s torture in the Chile’s past totalitarian regime has affected her life in the democratic present day. The ambiguity in the meaning of justice is a key theme that is...

United States Olympic medalist Dara Torres once said, “Setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams.” Like Dara, many people believe that while losing hurts, it also does more for people than cause pain and sadness. Losing strengthens one’s sense...

In the novel A Study in Scarlet, we observe the relationship between Dr. John Watson, a retired Anglo-Afghan war veteran, and Sherlock Holmes, whom we first learn of as a man that works at a chemical laboratory in the hospital. Within the first...

According to Simon Estok, ecofeminism is defined as the paternalistic society driving a wedge between society and culture. In addition, it consists of the connection between the dominating of nature and the exploitation of women. Estok, as well as...

Throughout Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, social injustice is a powerful and prevalent theme. This essay will focus especially on Chapter Six, where John Barton seeks medicine for his equally impoverished friend, Ben Davenport. This Chapter...

Society serves as a window into the beliefs and attitudes of American life, revealing the true values of particular communities and humanity at large. At the high school level, sports can be used as a vehicle to teach children the value of hard...

Since its publication in 1927, Ernest Hemingway’s seemingly simple short story “Hills Like White Elephants” has readers arguing over the ever-present issue of a woman’s rights. At first glance, “Hills Like White Elephants” appears to be about a...

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process, he does not become a monster, and if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” These immortal words spoken by Nineteenth-Century philosopher Friedrich...

“Long live the new flesh” are the final words of the protagonist in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Max Renn (Cronenberg 1983). The idea of “the new flesh,” is that through consumption of the next evolution of television, Videodrome, the viewer...

The book of Job in the Holy Bible is the story of a righteous man, living in the land of Uz, whose faith is tested by God and Satan. The author of the text is unknown, though due to the changing voice within the narrative it is most likely that...

"My mother is a fish" is perhaps the most famous quote from William Faulkner's Southern Gothic novel, As I Lay Dying (Faulkner, 1957, p. 84). William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in Oxford, Mississippi. The setting of As I Lay Dying, as well...

What happens when pride takes control of a human? In the plays Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Sophocles paints a dismal picture of what happens, where pride is depicted as both an obstruction to sight and an obstruction to hearing. According to...

Throughout Voltaire’s Candide the reader was introduced to a wide variety of unique characters, each seemingly with their own philosophies and beliefs on how life should be viewed. Voltaire seems to stress through the development of the...

In his mind’s eye, Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita lives in a world of eternal nymphets and time unchanging, of frozen crystals and glass. But reality is mobile and unfrozen, and try as he may to reject it H.H. is forced to recognize...

In the two texts, the notion of family is greatly influenced by an external factor, which is the political party in control of the population. In Persepolis, this would be the Iranian government in power during the post Cultural Revolution, while...

In recent years, the age of maturity in Western cultures has been pushed higher and higher as more education becomes necessary to pursue job opportunities. Crashing economies increasingly force children to rely on their parents after graduation....

When faced with injustices, it is far easier to say one would act against them than actually physically or verbally doing so. In Franz Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony,” when invited, an explorer is subjected to observe an inhumane execution where...

Writing on nineteenth-century London poetry, William Sharpe comments that ‘Regardless of shared reference to sublimity, fog, of Babylonian blindness, each poet’s London is different. Each time we read ‘London’ we have to begin again.’ For poets in...

In his writing on the physiology of reading in Restoration England, Adrian Johns recalls a story concerning the natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Finding himself with a ‘tertian ague’ whilst at school, Boyle was encouraged to divert his melancholy...

Since its first publication in 1667, Milton’s Paradise Lost has continued to exert its influence over literature, having particular resonance with the romantics, Wordsworth citing it as among ‘the grand store-houses of enthusiastic and meditative...

Although Hannah Webster Foster names her book The Coquette, there is ambiguity in who the true coquette of the story is. Eliza Wharton, named the coquette by Foster and the other characters of the story, does not follow the rules of coquetry....

In Louise Glück’s poem, “Mock Orange” (Glück 1995) the female flesh interferes with the speaker’s search for a desired full presence or wholeness. Through her representation of the mock orange flower as the female genitalia, Glück attempts to...

The novel The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer is an introspective work in that it urges the readers to look amongst their own lives and determine what makes them who they are. Throughout the course of the novel the protagonist, Jacob experiences a...

Renowned psychotherapist Alfred Adler once said, “Man knows much more than he understands.” This means that although we might be rich in education, we do not understand much of what we know. The Silence of the Lambs brings insight to this quote on...