Newest Literature Essays

In Great Expectations, the word “taint” describes Pip's soiled conscience and shame for his identity, which he confuses with low class status and physical filth (Dickens 249). Pip's usage of it in the passage about his feeling of 'taint' shows the...

As simplistic and politically impartial as Victorian novels and their common familial themes of love and companionship may seem, there is customarily a greater sociopolitical concern inserted within the narrative for the reader of the time to have...

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a common psychological condition that is triggered by terrifying events. This disorder compels the inhibitor to have severe anxiety, flashbacks and negative fluctuations in mood. Likewise, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth...

In Beloved, characters experience egregious violations of their human rights that create situations that the English language cannot truly capture. The author, Toni Morrison attempts to communicate the meaning of some indescribable emotions and...

"Hell yes, we have a quota...We do keep women out, when we can. We don't want them here — and they don't want them elsewhere, either, whether or not they'll admit it." This statement, issued by an unnamed dean of a medical school in 1960,...

William Blake’s collection of poems, Songs of Innocence, highlights both the positive and negative aspects of the trait of innocence. Many of the poems within the collection feature speakers who find comfort in religious teachings and experiences...

The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley described man as one who obscures facts and evidence with "aimless rhetoric," in order to"distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to...

A Room of One’s Own explores the relationship between women and literature, and offers advice to aspiring female authors. According to Virginia Woolf “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). Woolf’s opinion...

The literary genre of fiction is immense and staggeringly diverse, yet it is unified by six basic elements. The deconstruction and analysis of each of these components yields a richer appreciation for the work being explored. The basic elements of...

Every American is familiar with the concept of the American Dream. It is the social myth at the very core of the nation’s identity. Unlike other countries, the United States is not rooted in a shared ancestry, history, or language. Instead,...

In Donne’s metaphysical love poem, ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’, the central notion is that of spheres and cycles. This corroborates with Parfitt’s assertion that ‘in Donne’s lyric world stasis is rare’[1], which is expressed in ‘A Valediction’...

In “Master Harold”… and the Boys, black Africans are treated as though they are not as important as the white Africans. Fugard represents black Africans as people who have been disenfranchised, segregated, and less privileged in an attempt to show...

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is as much of a philosophical work as it is a fictional story, not following a typical plotline. The novel includes multiple interwoven plotlines surrounding different characters with the same events being...

Arthur Miller’sDeath of a Salesmancan be measured against Aristotle’s notions of tragedy expressed in hisPoetics, involving a fall caused byhamartiaandhubris, and an eventual recognition and reversal of fortune, culminating in the audience...

Central toThe Turn of the Screwis the question of the governess’ reliability. Analyses of the text from both ‘apparitionist’ and ‘non-apparitionist’ perspectives hinge upon a verdict passed by the critic on the trustworthiness, or conversely the ‘...

In the words of Professor Fred Botting, within the Gothic, “transgression is important not only as an interrogation of received rules and values, but in the identification, reconstitution or transformation of limits.” Emily Bronte’s Wuthering...

Emily Bronte’s classic novel, Wuthering Heights, is not simply the tragic love story it may appear to be on the surface, but is an example of class differences and the role of capital in eighteenth century Victorian England. Using Karl Marx’s...

"The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins and the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson both illustrate the dangers of blindly following ritualized practices and traditions. The stories involve the use of an institutionalized drawing system,...

Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress” offer powerful examples of sensual, carpe diem Renaissance poetry. In both poems, the poet-speakers attempt to spur their beloveds into action...

From Genesis, the true nature of humanity has been closely associated with sin. While the Puritans vehemently believed that sin degraded both God and human beings, in the Scarlet Letter, it is the very nature of transgression and the resulting...

In A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, one can argue the character of the Hunger Artist is an absurdist anti-hero parallel to the heroic figure of Jesus Christ in the Holy Bible. The Hunger Artist is a narration of a "starving, dying art", and one of...