Newest Literature Essays

Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero portrays a cruel, patriarchal society and focuses on a neglected, pain-stricken prostitute who escapes a childhood full of submission to discover power in prostitution. Throughout her entire life, Firdaus is...

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a 1920s novel about the romantic and tragic society of Long Island’s elite, set in an era when the morals are loosening as fast as the womens’ skirts are tightening. Tom and Daisy Buchanan are a couple...

The controlling and oppressive nature of authority can instigate acts of rebellion from the individual, creating underlying tension and generating an unstable and problematic relationship. Peter Weir explores notions unconformity through Dead...

In Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, we see how Calvino attempts to compare the reading of a novel to a man pursuing a woman. In this text, the reader takes on the role of a male protagonist attempting to read a book. Along the...

It is easy to love something that is beautiful. It is easy to see beauty in the things you love. What is difficult at times is seeing the distinction between these two ideas. In Sappho’s “Fragment 16,” she says that the most beautiful thing in the...

Not only in reality, but also in the fictional world of literature, women have been silenced from time immemorial. This is the case in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a novel that details the journey of a family as they travel to bury the...

The death of a man and the birth of a love affair are the subjects of two short stories by D. H. Lawrence and though their plots vary greatly, similar patterns of dark and light imagery, renewal and rebirth reinforce Lawrence’s theme of...

At first glance, the ending of Shakespeare’s The Tempest appears to be stable, to have reconciled Prospero with his estranged brother and to demonstrate virtuous behavior on the part of Prospero. Indeed, one critic noted that Prospero’s “capacity...

At first glance, Eugene O’Neill’s gut-wrenchingly poignant and heartbreakingly raw play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, appears to tell the story of Mary Tyrone’s morphine addiction and how her family responds to the situation. Often, however, we...

Though its many pages and complex themes and ideas may be frustrating to undergraduate students, it cannot be denied that Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment is anything less than a literary masterpiece. It explores a myriad of themes -...

Introductory acts are normally a very crucial part of plays in drama. They serve as a foundation, introducing main characters and the plot, and they also capture the audience’s attention making them anticipate what is to come in later acts. An...

Blanchot’s view of the status of the narrative voice is very pertinent to any discussion of Heart of Darkness. ‘Something indeterminate’ and ‘spectral’ implies a lack of stability and centrality which is rendered strongly in the novel by the use...

In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, Mother Culture is the embodiment of unquestioned influences man is accustomed to living by. Her story tells the Takers that they were intended to lead the world into paradise; however, quite the opposite happened....

A literary canon is a list of the most esteemed books in a country; books that have attained a high status and considered to be of high aesthetic quality. Canons are works that are approved by cultural and academic institutions. Overall, the books...

“Life is swift, and the value of life is the value of every moment.” -Waldo Frank

Out of all the readings for this class, this sentiment is expressed strongest in the works of Jean Toomer and Sherwood Anderson. Cane and Winesburg, Ohio are books...

Peter Pan (1911) by J.M. Barrie and The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1988) by Edith Nesbit are Victorian novels that follow the stories of two underprivileged families who entertain themselves and each other with their imagination. In both...

Chungking Express (Hong Kong, 1994) is a film directed by Wong Kar-Wai, with a narrative that is divided into two different stories. The first part of the film follows the life of “Officer 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro)” while the second one follows the...

When colonial settlers arrived in North America on the Mayflower in 1620, the primary concern of the newly established society was to ensure survival; however, nowadays, Western consumer society has placed a significant emphasis on shallow ideals,...

Sleep Rough Tonight, written by Australian author Ian Bone, addresses the idea of cultural violence and the effect it has among teens. The novel follows Alex, a young and troubled teenager who learns some tough lessons about life and growing up....

Change is inevitable; it grows with the next generation and time and time again sneaks up on those that are not looking for it. This is true for music, fashion, literature, religion, and even politics. The tide of any of these subjects may change...

“There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can…let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason” (Guterson 418). Reason, especially in the eyes and hands of human...

Humans are made of the tangible; flesh and blood, muscles and bones, cells and nerves. The survival of man can be dissected into the purely scientific, the emotionless, the artless. The value of the anatomical can clearly not be understated, as...

If the setting of a novel is 19th century Europe, there is a good chance that the women in the novel will be treated as a means to an end rather than as autonomous beings who have intrinsic value in and of themselves. This is the case in Wuthering...