Newest Literature Essays

In Reginald Rose’s play entitled “12 Angry Men”, a story is developed around the actions of a jury on a murder trial, which deals with many concepts important to one’s self and one’s decisions. The most important of these concepts is a personal...

Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek is rife with elements of postcolonial ideologies that insert themselves into the story and create tension for the protagonist by “othering” her and her family through a form of orientalism that stereotypes...

Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks while she was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, researching the country’s major voodoo gods and studying as an initiate under the tutelage of Haiti’s most well-known Voodoo hougans...

At their deepest level, both The Rule of St. Benedict and Beowulf deal with the question of how one can go about using his short time on earth to achieve a form of eternity in the face of a dangerous, threatening, unpredictable world. The Rule of...

Anton Chekhov’s play “The Cherry Orchard” is labeled a comedy, however, it has a handful of meaningful lessons that can be learned from the characters featured in the play. These character’s debacles and actions act almost as a social commentary...

Intrigue, murder, and suicide -- by all accounts, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure was a complete and terrible shock to the religiously conservative readers of the late nineteenth century, and this is exactly what he intended. These were, after...

The philosophy of transcendentalism has played a major role in shaping American literature for the last 150 years. At its core, transcendentalism is a set of principles designed to guide a person to happiness through their relationships with God,...

The Panopticon theory. Imagine there is a prison with no bars, no chains, no guards patrolling around, but there is a watchtower which can see into every cell. It has one-way glass so no one can see in, and only zigzag pathways to walk through....

Most literary critics agree that Margaret Hale is the central figure in Gaskell’s North and South. Margaret’s emotional, social, and psychological contexts are often analyzed with excruciating detail, as many view her story to be of principal...

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches… they had to be together,...

The idea of piety in Ancient Rome is not the same idea of piety that we have today. To the Romans, piety, or “pietas” in Latin, describes a set of social constructs that governs what makes a respectable person. Piety encompasses one’s devotion to...

In the novel Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe introduces the ideas of maturity/reputation, respect, and communication as Umuofian cultural values. The success of its citizens when it comes to their social standing is dependent on their abilities...

He’ll want to know what you done with the money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bare to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of...

As Ernest Hemingway once wisely proclaimed, “All things truly wicked start from innocence” (Hemingway 73). The truth in Hemingway’s words is that most everything does begin as pure and true, and only through a series of components does it turn...

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity” (Eisenhower 1). These are words written by Dwight Eisenhower, a Five Star General in the United States Army, and a veteran soldier from...

In Ann Petry’s novel The Street, even the most simple, everyday objects take on fiendish personalities and shifting, threatening aspects. From the cruel wind in the story’s opening chapter to the hard, bitter street itself, glaring situational...

The first few books of Daniel Deronda focused on Gwendolen Harleth, who shines as a self-centered, domineering young woman. In becoming trapped by marriage to Grandcourt, she develops growing fascination with Daniel, an attraction that began...

Throughout The Bloody Chamber, Carter uses traditional fairytales as a template for discussion on gender and sexual politics. Therefore, although her short stories contain conventional forms of transformation - men turn into wolves in The Company...

In Oroonoko, Aphra Behn presents two very distinct civilizations: Coramantien, an African country ruled by royalty, and Surinam, an English colony in South America that is home to colonists and natives alike. However, Behn’s depictions of these...

Jane Austen's books are too often reduced to simple two-sided issues, and are often seen in a narrow and restrictive light. Instead of being a novel primarily concerned with romantic attachments or the close sisterly bond between Elinor and...

Rhetoric in The Illiterate

Gregerson’s article “Rhetorical Contract in the Lyric Poem” expounds upon the purpose of lyric poetry. She posits that there is a relationship between the reader and the speaker that extends beyond utilitarian or surface...

In American culture, the West is represented as a sprawling wilderness to be dominated by mankind. The idea of the frontier began with the Puritans in the 1600s as a dwelling of evil, a godless land that needed to be claimed by a higher power, but...

The people in one's life are often more important in shaping one's future than the choices of that individual themselves. In Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, the protagonist, Toru Watanabe, encounters various women who influence him and alter his...