Newest Literature Essays

The story of Lanval is an uncommon one for its time. A helpless, outcast knight meets a beautiful, magical woman. The one term of their love, set down by the unnamed woman, is that Lanval can tell nobody about her. When he breaks that rule and...

In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, readers may find it easy to view Sophie Mol and Velutha as the Gods of Colonial circumstances. However, by viewing the characters solely as the embodiments of colonial circumstances, readers fail to see...

Throughout the course of history, marriage as an institution has changed drastically, weaving in and out of various phases and forms. What began as a purely reproductive relationship evolved into an emotional companionship. Or has it? Does...

In both "Before You Were Mine" and "Brothers," Carol Ann Duffy uses descriptions of memory as a means of re-living past family life. Throughout "Before You Were Mine," Duffy writes about her mother, and imagines her life before motherhood. This...

Theodore Roosevelt once stated that “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” Often, illusions of comfort blockade the mind and sway an individual’s ability to clearly see the...

Because essentially all faiths propose a set of moral and behavioral laws upon which one is expected to base one’s life decisions, religion and criminality are inexorably linked. While today in our society we aim to separate the two controversial...

Refreshing yet practical, Jim Wallis’ timely book Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street provides a taut argument and solution for the current state of the nation. Both readable and challenging to the inner psyche of...

Human life is complicated. With all of the activities we pack into one day, it’s a wonder how we get any time to just breathe and take in the beauty of life. For dogs, it is just the opposite. A dream come true is to get few scraps of leftovers...

“He choked -- choked badly. His face contorted, turned purple. He gasped for breath -- then slid down off his chair, the glass falling from his hand” (Christie 74). So begins Justice Wargrave’s murderous machinations on Soldier Island. In the...

One of the most distinctive and immediately impressive things about Ernest Gaines’ novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, is the way the author opens his story with an introduction of a collective of speakers, his cast of...

The Turn of the Screw has been read by some analysts as a straightforward ghost story and by others as a psychologically accurate – whether pre-or post-Freudian -- portrait of mental illness or repression breaking out. However enjoyable it is...

In The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a young girl discovers the importance of the relationship between humans and the natural world. At the start of the novel the orphaned and contrary Mary Lennox is brought from her home in India to...

The novel Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh, explores the meaning of love and the many incarnations it can take; love of family and friends, romantic love, and love of God. The novel follows Charles Ryder through his youth and into adulthood...

After having been awakened from a gentle slumber in a brothel expecting to meet the bishop later that day, Santiago Nasar is met with his untimely demise; His death being the product of a pre-existing indifference ingrained within their Caribbean...

Othello is a tragedy by William Shakespeare set in Venice. Othello is a highly respected general and Iago is his ambitious comrade. Othello promotes Michael Cassio to the position of lieutenant and Iago becomes extremely jealous. Iago begins...

The Byronic Hero is a variant of the Romantic Hero who possesses an “expression which indicates a mixture of contempt and gloom”[1] and whose behaviour is unpredictable, “moodily taciturn and violently explosive.”[2] However, the Byronic Hero has...

Modernism was a movement that formed at the beginning of the twentieth century and lasted roughly 65 years. Cultural shocks, such as World War I, instigated the era of Modernism. While this war was meant to end all wars, people could not fathom...

In Life of Pi, Yann Martel juxtaposes issues of morality alongside the primitive necessity of survival. Pi’s life-threatening experiences while stranded on the Pacific Ocean threaten the integrity of his morals and beliefs. His pluralistic faith...

Twelve Angry Men is an allegorical play written by Reginald Rose in 1955. It depicts the way in which economic, social and cultural factors can have a significant impact on the process of justice. Rose encapsulates 1950s America through each of...

Marilyn French asserts that Shakespeare only constructs two types of women, the “virtuous subhuman or deceiving subhuman.”[1] In conjugation with the Elizabethan expectation of an “acceptable version of the feminine” woman, a woman who is passive,...

The Canterbury Tales is an estates satire, that not only points out the shortcomings and inequalities, but also the inauthenticity, that exist under feudalism’s code of social stratification. Examples of these characterizations of the estates are...

The war had been an enormous bomb blast. Everything thrown up, tumbling, turning and scattering high in the air. Now it was over; the whole lot was coming back down to land. But it was all settling in different places.

– Andrea Levy, Small Island...

Richard Foster states that The Importance of Being Earnest has a “multivalent nature”[1] and thus implies that a farce or comedy of manners are not particularly urbane genres and are therefore ‘unsuitable’ for The Importance of Being Earnest....