Newest Literature Essays

“I Grieve, and Dare Not Show My Discontent” is a three-stanza poem written by Queen Elizabeth I that allegedly features Francis, the French Duke of Anjou as her beloved. Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth I entertained many suitors to get what...

Watching friends die, being shot at, and dealing with the fact that death is looming around every is a reality for soldiers regardless of what side they are fighting on. Vietnam was an extremally controversial war, and much of the nation was...

Several of the most famous stories told to young children were Aesop’s fables, creative stories designed to teach valuable life lessons. One of the most memorable to me was the fable about the lion that spared a mouse’s life and was later rescued...

Throughout both Shakespeare's Hamlet and Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, the disparity between how things seem and how they really are is a constant underlying motif; the depth in which both plays examine the concept of appearance and reality...

Nonfiction novels are a genre of book that employ all devices of a fictional piece, however all of the information is completely factual. Though legitimate, the integrity of the writer still can be called into question, depending on the portrayal...

Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor, once said that "Monsters exist, but they are far too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act...

In the novel Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong,the shifts in the government, cultural, and social factors in Vietnam under the implementation of communism are illustrated through the use of symbols, such as sticky rice.In the beginning of...

The disregard for all ethical expectations of humanity can be a result of the pressure to execute one’s job regardless of the consequences for those in one’s vicinity. This was often the case in Europe during the 1900s when the death sentence was...

In the grace period of Australia’s colonial development, many cultural assumptions and ideas were created in response to the increase of British immigration. Australia was a home away from home, a land of opportunity and adventure that allowed the...

In the poem ‘The Map Woman’, Carol Ann Duffy uses the extended metaphor of a map being printed on a woman’s body to explore ideas surrounding hometowns, childhood and nostalgia. This is immediately introduced in the first line where the reader...

When Laila is introduced at the beginning of part two, the reader recognises that she represents the new, modern ideals that stem from the communist revolution in 1979. From being called ‘Revolutionary girl’ by her teacher, due to her being born...

The American Avant-Garde poet Gertrude Stein once commented that “You are all a lost generation!” in reference to post-World War One society. Immortalized in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the phrase has come to symbolize a unique generation in...

The novelist of Brighton Rock, Graham Greene, is said to always have been interested in the metaphysical questions involved in Catholicism and its doctrine: what is the essence of survival and existence; what is the real purpose of God and the...

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain satirizes the disagreeable actions of the people encountered by Huck on his adventures in order to accentuate the hypocrisy exhibited in these actions. Such actions, unfortunately, are commonplace...

To battle against your own family members to the death over a political dispute seems unfathomable, but has been a reality of history. The Irish Civil War began when the Irish had to decide if they wanted to accept partial freedom from Great...

The concept of war is both gruesomely tragic, and deeply absurd. Through their respective texts, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, authors Joseph Heller and George Roy Hill capture the very essence of war, and it’s tragic absurdity, though...

Throughout their poems, authors Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Bronte convey their ideas regarding the despair they have felt throughout their lives, and in particular the concept that ‘thing fall apart’. Through a range of engaging...

Lantana, directed by Ray Lawrence, is an Australian film that follows the lives of a group of people living in Suburban Sydney, as they attempt to navigate their relationships with the ones they love. The film explores intense themes of betrayal,...

Fly Away Peter, by David Malouf, details not only the horrors of war, but the beauty of innocence found in Australian wildlife. In essence, Malouf expresses the concept of binaries, in particular the contrast between innocence and experience, and...

When viewers deconstruct the exaggeration, grandeur, and boldness of Baroque art they usually focus on overly exaggerated and unrestrained representations of lighting, motion, and surrounding decoration. By contrast, the themes of literature seem...

To consider the social function of art is to endeavor to contemplate a question that has haunted great literary critics since the Greek philosophers Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. Two minds that both considered and offered explanations to this...

Algernon is a comic to a contemporary audience because of his dandyism, his enjoyment of self-gratification, his inverted morals and his double life. Wilde presents Algernon as a dandy figure who is more concerned with style over substance;...

In American culture today the pressure to fit into the societal norms is more prevalent than ever. By establishing very clear standards for “fitting in”, the dominant culture makes the idea of approval seem easily achievable. However, unknown to...