Newest Literature Essays

During the late 19th century, the Meiji era in Japan paved the way for the Japanese to drift from their traditional values into modernizing western values. The influence of western powers, had a significant impact of the traditional ideals of...

The modern idea of consent usually refers to sexual consent, something that the average adult is ideally intellectually capable of providing or withholding. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Brontë weaves a feminist manifesto through a...

In Junot Diaz’s collection of short stories titled Drown, the male protagonists of the stories project their ideas about masculinity onto the women that they interact with. The resulting force is a toxic overcompensation that affects every daily...

Hannah Kent’s novel Burial Rites explores how the turbulent setting of 19th century Iceland in turn reflects the turmoil experienced by key characters in the narrative to a large extent. Kent’s juxtaposition of brutal, frosty winters with...

Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things features multiple urban spaces that have been altered by globalizing forces to engender a more invasive/invaded form of intimacy in the immigrant communities of London. This is best exemplified in the film when...

In her novel Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko subverts trends of the conventional Western narrative through her descriptions of time. Rather than telling the story of Tayo in a linear chronology, Silko instead creates a more authentic experience by...

In an essay entitled, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” African-American poet Langston Hughes discusses the importance of creating a black voice in a predominantly white America. Hughes strived to do this in his own work, as he used the...

Renowned as one of the creators of the American poetic voice, Emily Dickinson is famous for her unique poetic treatment of the dark subject matter of personal trauma. Although her poems are based on her own reactions to traumatic events, they are...

Throughout the text Cane by Jean Toomer, the author creates a paradoxical depiction of women because, although he at times criticizes the metonymization of women, he also participates in it. For example, the first half of the book relies almost...

Chekhov’s post-Sakhalin stories express the author’s view of death as a prismatic focal point for the human condition. Through dialogue, narratorial comment, and subtextual connections, Chekhov’s stories examine death from so many angles that it...

Merlin has existed as the quintessential imaginary magical figure for centuries. Recognizable by name before even the writing of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, the Merlin figure pervades art throughout time, featured in numerous books,...

Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven portrays the hardships faced by Native Americans at the hands of the overpowering force of mainstream American culture. Alexie uses multiple perspectives in his book to convey the...

Although Alison Bechdel tells an emotional story in her graphic memoir Fun Home, she also grounds various important plot points about identity construction in mythology. In this way, she is able to articulate the complex and often contradictory...

Ivan Ilych's funeral, like all funerals, is not his own. While it is held in his honor, and he provides the token corpse for the occasion, each person experiences his funeral in the same self-centered way that they experience his death. Pyotr...

It is not a surprise that Allen Ginsberg aligned himself with Walt Whitman in his poem “Howl,” as the title page to his book of the same name reads, “Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” (Ginsberg 1)....

With the second theater scene of Stephen Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the plot of the selected play is used ironically to provide insight to the hopes and concerns of its audience. Because the theater is a form of escape for...

Even before there were written words, people communicated through gestures and images in order to explain important things in their lives, attesting to the social importance of clear communication. Language helps us track human progress through...

Robert Hayden described the relationship between his father and younger self in his poem “Those Winter Sundays.” Robert Hayden grew up in a poor neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan. Since his parents left him with family friends, he grew up with...

Sacrifice in women’s writing often revolves around two different definitions of the word. The first definition is to voluntarily give something up of value, while the second definition is to offer or kill, often in a ceremonial fashion. Women’s...

However much of its text might be preoccupied with ‘realist’ visuals, Nikolai Gogol’s ‘poem of Russia,’ Dead Souls is still rife with extra-narrative commentary and digressions, in keeping with Gogol’s established style and his stated intentions...

Constantine Levin’s pair of pivotal experiences contribute significantly to Anna Karenina’s psychological tapestry because these moments of crisis draw out and highlight the subjectivity of the protagonist’s life experience. The novel’s...

Anton Chekhov might look like a hedgehog when he returns time and again to the theme of universal humanity and its future path. But Chekhov as ‘the humanist writer’ does not really work towards a unified concept of mankind’s ultimate fate. Rather,...

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers in history of the literature and his works inspired many authors, many books and many movies. Just to name a few, author of many successful psychological horror books, Stephen King,...

The speaker of T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" is one of the magi of the title, who delineates his arduous journey to witness the birth of Christ. What is interesting is that the tone of this poem is not of wonderment, but of powerlessness. The...