Newest Literature Essays

There are a handful of logical approaches and techniques that human beings use to rationalize and understand situations we are not completely sure of. When placed in a situation in which we feel trauma or fear, our immediate reaction is to concoct...

It is said that “Children suffer the sins of their parents.” In a more literal sense, many people believe that it is the parents fault for any flaw possessed by the child, not literal “sin”. People blame the child’s development whether bad or good...

Equality in “The Wound-Dresser” and “Song of Myself”

The theme of equality permeates both “The Wound-Dresser” and “Song of Myself”. Whitman remarks upon judgments that others make and refutes them with his own ideas of impartiality. These...

The power of education and the power of the literary form within slave narratives has been a consistent and resounding theme. From Frederick Douglass’ Narratives In The Life Of A Slave to Harriet Beecher Stowe saying in 1879 that “[Freedmen]...

The birthplace of Walt Whitman, New York is where the poet spent much of his life and became the inspiration for much of Whitman’s poetry. Living in an era where mass industrialization and modernization began to change and shape the New York,...

Oroonoko was a ground-breaking and revolutionary novella that depicted its African hero in a dignified, even regal, light and is considered to be one of the first works during this time era that showed a compassionate side towards Africans. It is...

In Wycherley’s The Country Wife and Aphra Behn’s The Rover, both authors explore masculine ideals through the legendary character of Don Juan, as respectively exemplified by Harry Horner and Willmore. By casting their heroes as embodiments of this...

The Squandering of Wit

Women living in the long eighteenth century in England found themselves snagged in a male-spun web of expectations and exclusions. Despite wit being considered a desirable quality in a woman, the expression of wit was only...

Victim of Greed

Flaubert, a novelist with a seething disdain for the Bourgeois lifestyle, uses his works to illustrate the flaws he sees in society, and more specifically the flaws he sees in this new, materialistic middle class. In his novel, ...

Throughout Karen Desai’s novel, The Inheritance of Loss, the Judge’s westernization and Indian resentment amplify during his studies in England despite confronting both internal and external facets of racism. In postcolonial India, the English...

Throughout Jane Austen’s Persuasion, observations arise concerning the differences between the two genders. There is an ongoing dispute between what is and is not intrinsic to one gender as opposed to the other. Anne’s observations on the matter...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” depicts the journey of a young man going into the woods and losing his faith in humanity. Hawthorne uses the stories of the communion of Goodman Brown and Faith in order to portray that a loss of...

The emotional heart of Helena Maria Viramontes' novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, revolves around the mental, physical, and spiritual coming-of-age of Estrella, a 13-year-old Latina girl living with her family on a migrant labor farm. As a foil to...

In Western literature, sacrifice is often regarded as a noble act because it invokes the powerful image of Christ's death. Many writers throughout history have used this familiar association to reprimand the prevalence of selfishness in the human...

Eating is not only fundamental for survival; it also offers a setting for social gatherings, where eating habits and rituals create a noticeable distinction between social classes. In literature, food often symbolizes more than pure nourishment....

In 1362, Renaissance scholar Giovanni Boccaccio wrote Famous Women, in which he analyzed female characters from Classical texts. Other Italian scholars at the time devoted their efforts to studying male heroes and gods, but Boccaccio brought...

Writer Oscar Wilde once said: “A mask tells us more than a face.” Throughout history, lies and masks have been a means to an end in achieving the goals of women who are limited in their current situations – social, political, or economical. Women...

Archetypes are an important foundation for building literary work. As “reoccurring patterns, images, or descriptive details” (Crisp 2), they not only define the identity of an author’s characters, but the course of the plot, the journeys and the...

Despite the trajectories and implications Jim Burden may have imposed upon the female characters of My Antonia, each of the “hired girls” winds up successful by their own means, simultaneously demonstrating and defying the stereotypical roles of...

The Greek rationalists’ search for the meaning of life through rational thought instead of the traditional legends marked the first radical shift from mythos to logos. While there was no clean break with either traditional religion or belief in...

In the poem “a song in the front yard,” Gwendolyn Brooks uses denotation and connotation to depict underlying meanings of specific words and phrases that add to the significance of the poem as a whole. Brooks uses denotation to refer to the...

Aphra Behn, as the first woman to earn her living by being a writer in English, known for her daring and controversial treatment of the subjects of sexuality and desire in her works, plays an important female narrative voice in the literary...

The Whitening of Souls: A Note on Shame, Internal Monologues, and White Hegemony

In James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the unnamed protagonist lives his life walking the line between white and black. He is a man who can...