Newest Literature Essays

Regardless of what role Sylvia Plath was playing at any given time--student, poet, teacher, wife--her feverish perfectionism was a constant factor. During her tumultuous years at Smith College, her concern over the defects she perceived in her...

I am, I am, I am. Sylvia Plath's heart beat, and she translated it the best way she knew how. To a woman who was self-aware to an uncommon degree, what else could the sound be but a relentless reminder of her own existence? Many have pointed to...

The characters in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights treat class hierarchy as if it is something natural and immutable, but the author shows that the way characters treat each other is largely based off the class they come to identify with. This...

Samuel Johnson’s tale, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, tells the story of a young man, Rasselas, who is dissatisfied with his current life in a utopic society. He strives to venture outside the only existence that he has ever known...

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple holds immense historical and societal relevance among a thirty year spectrum of time periods and movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, the gradual development of both civil and women’s rights, the destruction...

When a transcript of Cardenio emerged and was soon labeled one of Shakespeare’s “lost plays,” several critics and scholars nodded their heads in a unified disagreement while others became instantly interested in analyzing its contents. Throughout...

Echoing Homer’s Illiad, Shakespeare cites in the prologue to Troilus and Cressida that the Trojan war erupted because of the kidnap of Helen: ‘Menelaus’ queen,/With wanton Paris sleeps – and that’s the quarrel’ [prologue, 9-10]. We therefore...

To Emily Dickinson, a keen botanist, nature was a beautiful mystery, and throughout her life spent vast amount of time among plants, yet never felt connected to the natural world. Her writing reflects this lack of connection, and the inability to...

Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw and his literary essay The Art of Fiction are entirely unalike in form, but contain thoroughly alike themes. Overall, a fascination with the acts of reading and writing is presented; these things are...

In Raymond Carver's short story "A Small, Good Thing," the Baker’s helplessness is caused by his apparent class status and by an unknown financial stability, which results in a sense of isolation and loneliness. The baker resolves his sense of...

Many of Shakespeare’s plays contain the structural and symbolic elements of mythology. The inheritance of mythological conventions, which shall be explored in this essay, create an effect that is ritualistic and leads to Nietzsche’s observation of...

Throughout Wycherley’s play The Country Wife, characters reverse the time period’s normal power dynamics of reputation and gender to create power from a state of powerlessness. While certain characters appear to be powerful due to their status,...

From the moment his master forbade him to learn to read, Frederick Douglass, a writer and former slave, realized that literacy was the “pathway from slavery to freedom” (Douglass 77). He seemed to be talking about his own escape from slavery, but...

While there is still confusion over the exact causes of the Thirty Years' War, everyone can acknowledge how horrific and devastating it was. Enormous amounts of civilians in besieged cities such as Magdeburg lost their lives, and those who...

Written almost two hundred years apart, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Toni Morrison’s Beloved convey stories in which the characters attempt to find freedom by fleeing from unfair oppression and the haunting remnants of oppression. Caleb...

Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare wrote plays in England during a time when Jews were banned from the country, making it unlikely that Jewish characters in their plays would amount to more than anti-Semitic stereotypes. Both Marlowe’s ...

Near the end of Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 novel The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist Oedipa finds herself at a crossroads after trying to unravel the mystery of W.A.S.T.E., a conspiratorial underground postal system, without finding many tangible...

In Death and the Maiden, Gerardo constantly opposes Paulina’s ideas and plans, providing a more rational and less emotionally-charged solution. Gerardo acts as the voice of reason to emphasize Paulina’s irrational and crazed tendencies in the...

The notion of the “New Woman” arose in the late nineteenth century mainly defining middle class women who reproached the then current societal expectations for women. As stated by Susan Cruea, a professor of English and Women’s Studies at Bowling...

Dorothy Wordsworth, poetess, diarist, and sister of William Wordsworth, a well-known Romantic author, was not recognized as a notable literary figure until well after her death in 1855. Despite her close connection with her brother, her strong...

In September 1792, French revolutionaries murdered over one thousand political prisoners to prevent them from being freed and joining enemy forces. After the September Massacres, many, including the English poet Charlotte Turner Smith, had to...

The seventy-year-old Moll Flanders who narrates her own life story considers herself a reformed criminal. But to what degree should her perceived transgressions cause her to actually be understood as such? After all, Defoe’s novel makes it clear...

The Grimm fairy tales have been interpreted in endless ways since they were first written, and probably for good reason—the blood and gore of the original fairy tales do not necessarily make for ideal bedtime stories. However, Anne Sexton’s...

“The View From Mrs. Thompson’s” is an account of the author’s experiences in Bloomington, Illinois directly following the 9/11 attacks. Largely based around his thoughts while watching events unfold on TV at a neighbour’s house, the essay contains...