Newest Literature Essays

Charles Dodgson was a logical and analytical thinker, a man who liked finding and applying patterns both in his career and in his writing under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. One example of this tendency is how Carroll wrote the poems in Alice in...

‘How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it…’

Virginia Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall suggests a number of ways of considering the mundane in...

‘Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer.’

The ‘dead’ are important to Ben Okri’s The Famished Road in a number of ways. His narrator Azuro is ‘Abiku’; the ‘spirit’ child of Yoruba mythology, predestined to an early death and...

The film Friday Night Lights by director Peter Berg depicts high school football players from Odessa, Texas on their journey to the state championship. Patriarchy is a major theme in this movie and there are several father-son relationships that...

The miscegenation and racism which Kate Chopin’s short story "Désirée’s Baby" centers upon resulted in a daring piece of work by a female writer in the 19th century. These central themes are also linked to the story’s setting, symbolism, and...

In "Wild with All Regrets," Wilfred Owen effectively conveys the emotions of a hopeless soldier through the development and progression of thoughts. The poet uses various parallel trains of thought simultaneously, such as the past, present and...

When exploring the challenges and toils of survival, we can easily make a series of comparisons between the design of Francis Lawrence’s and Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic worlds in I Am Legend and The Road, respectively. Both plots involve...

Jim Sheridan and Peter Carey, director of the film In the Name of the Father and author of the novel Amnesia, respectively, have both lived through many world events surrounding an abuse of power that have a major effect on the central characters...

In the film Lantana, Ray Lawrence builds both internal and external conflict between characters using various film techniques; in turn, such conflict acts as a catalyst for many characters in reaching a turning point for change. Major conflict is...

Published in 1904, Edith Wharton’s "The Other Two" explores the infancy of divorce within New York’s middle-class society by utilizing the concept of the futile struggle to escape social forces that are out of one’s control. In addition to that,...

Mary Rowlandson faced what would be many people’s worst nightmare, when she witnessed the slaughtering of her family and neighbors as described in her autobiography, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Rowlandson. As if that...

The connection between history and art is similar to the law of Causality in physics, otherwise known as the “cause and effect” law. As history progressed through multiple ages, fashions, and mentalities, so did artistic styles and tendencies. Art...

Cormac McCarthy’s ‘All the Pretty Horses’ exposes the futility of clinging to “phantom” dreams which are ultimately “falling away” as a result of the inevitable progression of society. McCarthy emphasises that protagonist John Grady Cole is unable...

In his novel ‘The White Tiger’, Avarind Adiga explores the corruption and extreme poverty that plague modern India. Through an allegorical depiction of the enormous divide between rich and poor, Adiga condemns the oppression and hopelessness...

Turning 21 defines a threshold into adulthood where an individual’s actions define them further in life. By allowing leniency and the assurance to make mistakes and learn, 21 year old’s live free of obligation and constraint. Both “To Sir John...

F. Scott Fitzgerald writes The Great Gatsby as a manifestation of the literary Inferno, a metaphorical world filled with a lack of grace and love. For example, the relationships throughout the book are marred with romantic affairs and the...

Much as his name suggests, Owen Warland wages a battle on society in The Artist of the Beautiful by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Throughout the story, he strives to create the Beautiful, a lifelike butterfly, and overcomes many setbacks to succeed...

William Faulkner uses his short stories to tell a tale of corruption, especially through the acceptance of white culture, and “A Justice” is no different. He writes his protagonist, Doom, as growing increasingly evil at the same time as his...

‘Her reality is magical. She has a heightened awareness of the natural world, of smells and sounds, of colour and light. And she renders palpable this world, at once strange and familiar, in prose of sinuous beauty… A small wonder of style and...

In today’s society, mental illnesses are slowly being recognized as serious health problems that require some sort of treatment, whether the treatment is therapy, medication, or both. In the 1700s, however, mental illnesses were not acknowledged...

Remembrance of historical events shifts over time, as details are purposefully excluded, occurrences go undocumented, and oral tales change with each retelling. Some historical institutions, such as slavery, are so traumatic and affected so many...

Shakespeare’s works revel as masterpieces centuries after their debut, influencing generations of writers including 20th century author Aldous Huxley. Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World, stands as a distinct reincarnation of Shakespeare’s The...

In his Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus outlines his philosophy of attaining happiness and details the proper attitude that Epicureans should have toward the gods and toward death. In reference to the latter, following his Sense-Experience Argument...

In Hughes’s poetry, “racial memory, animal instinct and poetic imagination all flow into one another with an exact sensuousness” - Seamus Heaney

“The Horses” and “The Thought-Fox” are two of Hughes’s most powerfully symbolic poems, introducing the...