Newest Literature Essays

The nature of God has been a controversial subject for writers throughout the centuries. In the poem “Caliban upon Setebos,” Robert Browning explores the relationship between deities and their subjects through the voice of Caliban, a brutish...

Both the poems ‘Attack’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (AFDY) portray Word War 1 from a negative perspective. Although they are written in slightly different ways, the two create a clear image about the indignity of death in battle. In ‘Attack’,...

“The beauty of the world lies in the diversity of its people.” (Unknown). Attempting to really connect with people who are a part of an entirely different culture than your own is a very difficult thing to do. Whether they belong to a different...

David is consumed by his inner conflict and confusion over personal sexual identity. This ambivalence causes him to neglect heteronormative family, relationship, and masculine norms, leaving him stuck in liminal spaces within society and...

In Persepolis, a graphic novel memoir, Marjane Satrapi depicts a chilling picture of what life was like growing up in Iran during times of upheaval. She describes many disturbing things, such as bombings in her neighborhood and rallies against the...

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, author Michelle Alexander delves into the troublesome topic of social control mechanisms through the lens of race. Alexander, a professor of law at Ohio State University and...

In 1971, John Gardner changed the way people think about the English epic Beowulf when he published his novel Grendel. In his retelling of the story from the monster Grendel’s perspective, he repeatedly makes references to the philosophy of...

As we encounter obstacles over the course of our lives, we often turn to external sources to justify internal conflict. This tendency to assign responsibility is evident in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793, in which refugees fleeing Santo...

Jhumpa Lahiri is a Pulitzer Prize-winning short story author, one who has been lauded as one of the first authors to establish a literature for Indian/Bengali-Americans. These diasporic writings address many issues that involve adapting to new...

In his play Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Brian Friel utilizes the entirety of the storyline to develop and present the dramatic relationship between Madge Mulheren and Gareth O’Donnell. Quite quickly, Friel makes it evident to the audience that...

In the novel The Sea-Wolf by Jack London, Wolf Larsen’s spirit lives in Humphrey. Even though Wolf’s philosophy about life differs from both Humphrey’s and Maud’s, Humphrey’s interaction with Wolf impacts him to the extent that he takes on some of...

To illustrate the universal themes of his medieval tale, the Gawain Poet uses elements outside of dialogue. In particular, the subtle use of colors expresses the values that impact Sir Gawain throughout the poem. In Sir Gawain and the Green...

In The House of Mirth, Percy Gryce is a rich young eligible bachelor upon whom Lily, one of Wharton's central characters, sets eyes on. Gryce is used by Wharton as a vehicle to convey the shallowness and brutality of the New York high society,...

Malouf highlights the need for new concepts and deeds to challenge the traditional expectations that limit protagonists of the text, suggesting that it is the assertion of these previously unheard of notions that inspire their positive...

David Malouf’s Ransom explores the power dynamic between men and women, and despite the obvious role of men in the text, women, too, are significant as they have influence over man’s presence on earth. Traditional gender roles, as defined by the...

The love of a father for a son is the strongest human bond in Ransom. Do you agree?

In Ransom, David Malouf explores the nature of relationships, suggesting that it is the bond between humans that underpins quintessential events and...

On the surface, the play Lysistrata could appear to be a light-hearted comedy about a group of women who decide to refuse sex to the Greek men in order to end the Peloponnesian war. However, inside of this humor there exists a dangerous, hidden...

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre features the eponymous woman reflecting on her childhood and adolescence through the mature view of a young adult. Adding another dimension to her character, however, is the fact that Jane’s own thoughts and feelings...

After conducting extensive research studying cultures around the world, theorist and social anthropologist Peter Van Der Veer remarked that "the critical elements, like those to be found in the spiritual ideas at the beginning of the 20th century,...

The most crucial moment in the text of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, The Remains of the Day, does not occur until almost the very end of the book. The tragic implications of everything that has taken place before can only be put into the proper context...

Ransom explores the fundamental nature of death and how, as an inexorable fate, it can define man. Set in the context of war, Malouf's novel highlights that death is not only physical, but is also spiritual and further, how the death of one can...

Tension between a protagonist and the society in which he lives is an element of storytelling which can be found in many texts across many millennia. The story of Jesus Christ's crucifixion is a particularly notable example, though the great...

Independence and personal freedom are fundamental values of both entire societies and individual life stories. However, within Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, contrasting physical...

Donne's Holy Sonnets have long been considered classic examples of Renaissance poetry. They were not printed until after his death in 1631, with the first printing being in 1633, and three additional sonnets being added some time later when...