Newest Literature Essays

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go highlights the human tendency to create hope when forced to confront a harsh reality. In the novel, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy gradually learn of their predetermined fates as clones to donate their organs, yet they...

Temptation lures people to succumb to suppressed human instincts, yet together with surveillance, the opposing forces create a precarious balance between resurgence and restraint. This conflict influences the characters in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We,...

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton uses weather in a variety of ways that provide symbolic significance along with a vivid setting. Wharton uses weather, climate, and the change of seasons to foreshadow events in the immediate future and to...

The Mexican Revolution was fought to bring about reform for the peasants in society; on the contrary, no agrarian reform occurred, and the people were left worse off than before the fighting began. Juan Rulfo wrote a collections of short stories...

In Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, allusions to other texts emphasize the importance of human connection and relationships. Mr. Ramsay values his ability to influence others with his philosophical works over his relationships with his wife and...

Early in The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence introduces the farm laborers and an intellectual vicar through the eyes of Mrs. Brangwen, describing the characters’ distinct lifestyles. Lawrence establishes a contrast between the two types of men to...

In “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” the speaker asks the Rose to come near him while he sings of old Irish tales, such as Cuchulain’s fighting the sea, the Druid and Fergus, and the Rose’s own sadness. He again invites the Rose close to him...

In his film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, director Jack Clayton develops F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comments on the society presented in the novel. Clayton’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby successfully articulates to a large extent the novel’s theme...

In the contemporary novel When The Killing’s Done by T.C. Boyle, the secondary character Anise is an animal-loving singer who is dating the leader of an unethical organization called FPA, Dave LaJoy, she often helps his organization and...

Men of influence throughout history have endeavored to shape their own identities and public personas, to many effects. America, and its great experiment of democracy, was to foster an equal, equitable, and responsible government and society, one...

A literary tour de force, Alicia Partnoy’s memoir The Little School is more than a memoir. It is an act of public and permanent revenge against not just the individuals who imprisoned, tortured, and humiliated her but against all the perpetrators...

In Nadine Gordimer’s story “Town and Country Lovers,” the oppressive force of racism in apartheid South Africa is expressed in the details of the relationship between Dr. Franz-Josef von Leinsdorf and the girl. At a surface view of their...

Time and time again, humans make a habit of imagining their lives as more glorious than they are. Author Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories about misconception. She exploits the universal yearning for...

Percy Shelley uses defamiliarization in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” as a tool to dismantle religious belief systems. Defamiliarization is a literary technique used to make that which is known and familiar appear different and new. Viktor...

Throughout several of his poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley celebrates mutability and takes comfort in the fact that change is inevitable. In “Mutability,” Shelley suggests that constant change is positive because it means that no ill feeling can ever...

In both Yonec and Laustic, Marie de France describes tombs that house the unfulfilled love of her characters. The tombs function to preserve the physical bodies of a love that could not be fulfilled during the characters’ lives. In both lais, the...

Krishan Kumar claims that HG Wells “never wrote a proper utopia, in the strict sense”. This may seem a paradoxical statement in regards to the author famed for being the leading apostle of science utopias, and lends itself to the question: “what ...

In an 1817 letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, John Keats describes a manner of thought that he calls “negative capability.” According to Keats, this is “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable...

In the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, directed by Danny Boyle, Jamal Malik features on the Mumbai version of the game show ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ where he is one question away from winning twenty million rupees by using past experiences to...

Individuals who have experienced an unconventional or life-altering event will inevitably face the judgments of broader society, hence dictating whether such individuals feel a truly valid sense of belonging. This concept of the significance of...

The conflict between Papua New Guinea and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army between 1988 and 1998 has been described as the largest conflict in Oceania since the end of World War II. The novel Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones examines the impacts of...

“We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours.” Karen...

In Emma, author Jane Austen uses third person narration and free indirect discourse to show the same objects from different perspectives. The detached narration provides an ironic perspective that criticizes the characters’ misreadings of...

Darwin’s theory of natural selection was influenced by the works of Thomas Malthus, an English political economist. In his “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, Thomas Malthus asserts that there are two fixed laws in nature: “food is...