Newest Literature Essays

We Will Be Citizens:

Religion and Homosexuality as National Themes in Angels in America

Tony Kushner’s two-part play, Angels in America, claims to be “a gay fantasia on national themes” (Kushner). The intertwining stories center around the...

The Bhagavad Gita presents a unique system of moral teachings that characterized the “…sociopolitical and religious reality of South Asia…” in early first century AD (Flood, Martin, pg. xiii). It involves an interaction between two characters:...

In Steven Kaplan’s essay “The Things They Carried” published in Columbia: University of South Carolina Press he says, “Almost all Vietnam War writing--fiction and nonfiction--makes clear that the only certain thing during the Vietnam War was that...

In a very meta fashion, Atonement repeatedly places emphasis and raises questions about the significance and the role of the writer in literature. By eventually revealing that Briony has been the one penning the story all along, readers are left...

Persian Letters seems like a hopeless account lobbying against female empowerment. Starting from each of the wives’ opening letters to Usbek and continuing to Roxana’s death by suicide at the end of the novel, at first glance, these letters reek...

The Oxford Advanced Learner’s dictionary defines existentialism, in part, as “a philosophical theory that…emphasizes the existence of the individual person… determining their own development through acts of the will.” Existentialist work stresses...

In her fascinating 1973 novel, Sula, Toni Morrison deconstructs traditional understandings of the oppositions between self and other, rationality and emotion, and good and evil to reveal the similarities and differences among all people, adding up...

In Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For, each of the central characters attempts to define and redefine what it means to belong through their own experiences and interactions. For Tuyen, belonging is not defined by identifying with specific...

In Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For, each of the central characters attempts to define and redefine what it means to belong through their own experiences and interactions. For Tuyen, belonging is not defined by identifying with specific...

Texts are, by nature, cultural artefacts, intrinsically influenced by the societys from which they emerge. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) offers a “twist of today’s society” – the phallocentric Gileadean dictatorship, as seen through...

Identity is fluid. Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (first performed 1895), affirms this concept. The play asserts the notion that we, as humans, carve our own identity through conscious decision. In doing so, Wilde interrogates the idea of identity...

“Nothing in excess” is inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi. As the cornerstone of Greek philosophy, this creed was embraced through a lifestyle of moderation and self-restraint. In spite of this ideal, in his tragic masterpiece Medea,...

The usurpation of Macbeth is said to have been foretold by the three witches; and the tyranny of Richard by omens. John Black’s study of the Elizabethan era reiterates that ‘in spite of its learning, culture and realism the elizabethans were...

“Men,” said he “must, in some things, have deviated from their original innocence; for they were not born wolves, and yet they worry one another like those beasts of prey. God never gave them twenty– four pounders nor bayonets, and yet they have...

From corrupt politicians to Real Housewives of Orange County, symbols of hypocrisy in modern day society exude personas that are ripe for criticism. These symbols also exist in Geoffrey Chaucer’s prominent anthropological work The Canterbury...

In the Argonauts of the Western Pacific, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski refutes the notion of “Primitive Economic Man” through his early 20th century studies at the Trobriand Islands. The Trobrianders were considered primitive because of...

In Atonement, Ian McEwan suggests the dangers of confusing our fantasies with reality; that we have become so accustomed to choosing to see what we wish to see rather than reality and this leads to destruction in our lives. Our refusal to accept...

Antigone, the title character of Sophocles’ Antigone, faces the moral dilemma of whether to honor divine or mortal laws. While King Creon has decreed “no one shall bury [Polyneices],” the laws of the Gods dictate that all corpses must be buried...

Controversial issues such as incest and murder are tough to discuss and even more difficult to resolve. Literature often employs such realities to leave the reader in a state of thought, rarely offering answers or even stances on the issues. In...

In the realistically dismal novella Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck sympathizes with poverty-stricken characters that are stuck working towards the hopeless American Dream. He portrays the men and women as human beasts, stranded in a world of...

Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethical theory, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, can be viewed from many different perspectives. As it is based on duty operating as a final good, the theory of utilitarianism (a moral theory concerned...

Around the time period of the Civil War, women in the U.S. had few rights but many expectations placed upon them. Women could not own land, vote, or sell property. Instead, society expected them to care for their families by cooking and cleaning,...