Newest Literature Essays

In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, there is a conceptualized ideal of beauty that, throughout the novel, is utilized to illustrate the impact this concept has on the protagonists. With each of her characters, Morrison takes innocent elements of...

In the stichic passage from William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, the speaker, who represents Wordsworth himself, encounters unfamiliar aspects of the natural world. The passage is a bildungsroman in verse, a coming-of-age poem...

In the novel Under the Feet of Jesus, author Helena María Viramontes introduces the protagonist Estrella as a poor and uneducated girl. Estrella is a migrant, and therefore her teachers do not treat her well. Her inability to speak or write...

In Lois Lowry’s award winning novel “The Giver,” the main character, Jonas, wonders incredulously, “How could someone not fit in? The community was so meticulously ordered, the choices so carefully made” (Lowry 48). Jonas is referring to the...

In the novel Obasan, by Joy Kogawa, the narrator recounts her experience of being relocated to the internment camps during the Second World War. During this time period the Japanese Canadians were considered enemies to all. Consequently, they were...

Patria, of Julia Álvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, contrasts devastating acts of courage with moments of uncertain fragility. She lives in a time period when her country is ruled by the harshest of leaders, Raphael Trujillo. After gaining...

Throughout The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Cartwright presents the character of Mari Hoff as irresponsible and vulgar, especially through his use of colloquial language. Scene Seven certainly supports this view, but also introduces her...

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is in many ways a ‘la piéce bien faite’ (translated as ‘well-made play’), which consists of a four point structure: an exposition; a complication and a climax followed by a denouement. Certainly, the exposition...

In the aftermath of Old Hamlet’s demise, Hamlet cannot think of anything other than death, and over the course of the play he considers it from various points of view. The inquiry of his own death plagues Hamlet as he constantly considers whether...

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen leads the reader through the lives of multiple characters who are all part of the upper-class, Victorian life (a major component of the late 18th and early 19th century). Austen uses a style of writing known as...

William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” spins the tale of a persona (most likely the poet himself) who contemplates his time spent at Tintern Abbey in the past, present, and future. Wordsworth uses many of his own...

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited” and other works gave him a famous name in American literature. Fitzgerald was a prominent figure during the “Roaring Twenties” because of both his published works and his marriage to an Alabama...

Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ is a domestic tragedy that centres around the dysfunctional Loman family, most notably Willy Loman, a failed salesman so captivated by the American Dream and his desire to be a good father that it ultimately...

In Steven Pressfield's book Gates of Fire, a mortally wounded soldier named Xeones tells his life story to a Persian scribe under the order of King Xerxes of Persia. The story is told through a series of flashbacks, broken up by the scribe, who...

In William Shakespeare's Sonnet 147, the speaker addresses his beloved using a metaphor, stating that his love is like an illness. However, he longs for the thing that keeps him ill, or in love. The fact that he compares his love to an illness...

In Song of Rowland, the author tells the story of Charlemagne's attempted takeover of Saragossa, a land controlled by the Muslim king, Marsilla. The poem covers the feud between Rowland and his stepfather Ganelon, as well as the disastrous...

In four of Shakespeare's plays, he introduces a character who is illegitimate. Philip Faulconbridge, Don John, Thersites, and Edmund are all children who were born out of wedlock. Also, all four characters were antagonists, if not the main...

Two of Seamus Heaney's poems that rely on the shifts in language to create meaning are “The Strand at Lough Beg” and “Casualty”, both from his Field Work (1979) Anthology. Both poems revolve around the effects of sectarian violence in Ireland...

‘Art is unimaginable without a matrix of culture… it is inconceivable without a history’ .

Stephen Cox’s comment articulates the poststructuralist view that the meanings of a text always derive from its context. Certainly, much of Mary Shelley’s...

Brecht’s development of epic theatre challenged many aspects of the popular conventions of naturalism and expressionism that were prevalent during his rise to prominence in the 1920s. In The Life of Galileo, elements of epic theatre such as the...

Joseph Harris outlines an analytical approach to rhetoric through the identification and classification of discourse communities. The application of Harris’ model to The Laramie Project reveals two individual communities’ desires to be perceived...

Throughout Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever,” Mrs. Alida Slade experiences the consequences of an inflated ego as she fails to fully understand her companion, Mrs. Grace Ansley. She is consumed with egocentric priorities, like superiority, deception,...

The protagonist and titular character in Jane Eyre faces an interesting decision in the final chapters of the novel. Jane's cousin, the missionary St. John Rivers, presents her with the proposal that she marry him and accompany him on a mission to...

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville is the story of a scrivener (a copyist) who has an unusually bleak disposition. Eventually, he takes it upon himself to refuse his boss' (the narrator's) requests for completing the very work for which...