Newest Literature Essays

Within his fiction, German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse investigates a surprising, Eastern view on people’s perception of themselves. While traditionally Westerners describe each person with such definite characteristics as their names, appearances,...

Through the discovery of new values and places, individuals may reject socially construed ideas as they come to new perceptions of their broader society. However, some individuals may remain indifferent. It is these individuals that pose the...

Hope in the face of death seems to be an impossible concept to adequately convey to a reader. After all, death itself seems to be the epitome of hopelessness and despair. However, Anne Bradstreet conveys in her poetry this very idea. Bradstreet...

In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer portrays multiple unique personalities including a conniving, rebellious Monk who selfishly dismisses the church’s rule and lives greedily in his own world. Throughout the Monk’s tale, proof of his...

Though regarded by many as a harmless children's tale, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was crafted by L. Frank Baum to convey an allegory of the Populist Party during the 1890s and to illustrate his concerns about the American government. Baum...

God, Glory, and Gold. These are the three G’s of European colonization, and the same three G’s that would lead to the destruction of entire civilizations of native people and their forced submission to European ethnic and socioeconomic forces for...

The 16th – 20th centuries represented an era marked by European colonialism. This included the forcible occupation of foreign lands and the control of these lands through various mechanisms of power. In Australia, this expansion involved the...

Brooklyn by Colm Toiblin tells the story of Irish immigrant Eilis Lacey’s journey to America during the 1950’s. The novel explores Eilis’s relationship with home as it shifts in correlation with her loyalties to those around her. The conventions...

In the novel Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers, the story of young Frankie Addams is told as she begins to navigate the world, documenting from her perspective, her exposure to harsh reality of the world as she begins to develop into a...

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now sustains a derogative perspective on the state of war and its corruptive influence. Set in Saigon during the Vietnam War, the action and narrative present the post-World War II era as a morally...

In Sir William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the symbolic use of color conveys the innocence and the evil on the island, as well as each of the boys' personalities. The contrasting light and dark colors in the book symbolize the goodness and evil,...

A Midnight Summer’s Dream is exceptional in that it features more than just one story unfolding at once. Although the quartet of lovers and the fairy world is often the focus of the play, the rude mechanicals and their attempts to produce a play...

After the chaos of the atomic bomb and the carnage of World War II, precedence was placed on government constructs to supply order to a tense climate, particularly in finding direction in a new ‘East versus West’ conflict. In John Le Carre’s...

Throughout the extensive criticism written on Shakespeare plays, the definition of these problematic plays has been a constant topic for debate. Kiernan Ryan suggests critics focus either on these plays all having in inherently ‘political...

Without myth, who would we be; what would we believe? Myths shape culture and history; they manipulate our beliefs, surround, and transform our lives. Governments, leaders, businesses and advertisers use myths to allow individuals, to live day to...

Dorothy Allison’s autobiographical narrative Two or Three Things I Know for Sure examines how a lower-class upbringing has affected the identities of the women in her family. Beauty, inadvertently, becomes one of the most valued things among her...

Through all the speeches of the Symposium, Eryximachus’ speech may be the most difficult to understand. Looking at Eryximachus’ initial, more scientific approach to love, under which he views love as something that can be quantitatively measured,...

Robert Olen Butler’s story “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed” is narrated by the ghost of a victim who died on the Titanic, whose spirit continues to haunt the waters in which he dwelled. Making his way from the ocean, to a cup of tea, and...

The narration in Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” is delivered in third person omniscient and is a key element in the story. The role of the narrator is more than simply communicating the story to the readers; in this case, the narrator provides an...

When you picture Islamic women, the image that immediately comes to mind is a woman cloaked in black, with not one part of her body visible. Even more so, it is hard to imagine this specter as possessing any sort of sexuality. Yet, in Tariq Ali’s...

People have been telling stories since the dawn of mankind. They are ways to communicate about the past to younger generations and most importantly, a way to teach. In both Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian and Holocaust by Bullets by Father...

John Locke’s theory of the social contract seems, at first glance, to envision the growth of freedom and the concomitant recession of authority. Considered this way, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government presents a clear contrast, manifesting...

Over the course of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes suspends belief in all material and metaphysical substance before rebuilding from the foundational element of the thinker’s existence, eventually concluding that God exists...

‘Jacob Marley was as dead as a doornail.’ The celebrated author Charles Dickens accentuates this inert nature of a door nail to the society to 1843 England through his classic novella ‘A Christmas Carol.’ The novella’s titular character, Ebenezer...