Newest Literature Essays

Sympathy arises from an instinctive desire to identify with the emotions of others. It can lead people to strive to maintain good relations with their fellow human beings and provide the basis both for specific benevolent acts and for the general...

In the beginnings of American commercial culture, individualism and innovation were seen as the cruxes of the American dream. However, societal pressures and institutional barriers exist today to prevent any such growth foreign to the already...

Mordechai Anielewicz once asserted, “The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil: he becomes a slave...

John Steinbeck’s novels The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men enable readers to capture a glimpse of the time of the Great Depression in the United States. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family of Oklahoma, accompanied by thousands of other...

In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston leaves part of the title ambiguous and therefore open to interpretation. Throughout the novel, the characters mention or allude to God, or a “god.” The multiple meanings of the word “...

Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is considered by some to be one of the best examples of confessional poetry ever published. In the poem, Plath compares the horrors of Nazism to the horrors of her own life, all of which are centered on the death of her...

The concept of monstrosity, at an explicit representational level, has followed a set pattern in literature, but it has been politically deployed and modified differently in different contexts. Etymologically, the word “monster” is derived from...

One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the...

In “Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama,” June Schlueter contrasts the metafictional character with the dramatic character. According to Schlueter, “drama presents a fixed identity, which in real life is a misnomer” (9). Metatheater differs...

In “Space and Reference in Drama,” Michael Issacharoff argues that diegetic space is offstage space and mimetic space is onstage space. Issacharoff argues that “dramatic tension is often contingent on the antinomy between visible space represented...

In the ancient Germanic world, heroes are strong men who exude defining personality characteristics that pose them as a threat to others. These traits are what make them formidable, but they are also what drive these heroes to their death. For...

“The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.”

Don Williams’s words of wisdom paint a vivid picture of the progress of life and the changes that occur in...

On the topic of war, revered American statesmen Benjamin Franklin exclaimed, “There never was a good war or a bad peace.” Nonetheless, war (and its legal backdrop) has been the subject of countless plays, historical narratives, and fictional...

Though his poetry was largely ignored and dismissed during his time, John Donne is known today for being one of the best poets of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He gained this reputation by creating poetry that was different, that made...

The relationship between society and the individual is presented in powerfully differing ways in the novels Oryx and Crake, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Woman in the Dunes. While Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake shows how the...

Wallace Stevens, it seems, never spoke a great deal about his poem “Sunday Morning.” Because Stevens gives us very little insight into his own thoughts, it is important to examine the thoughts of other critics before analyzing a poem such as “...

Modernism as a literary genre began sometime before the First World War. It was, however, in the fires of this great conflict that the genre was forged and adopted its characteristics of disorientation and disconnection. The development of...

Serene landscapes and seductive relationships are key themes throughout Edmund Spenser’s work and are major assets to the plot and character development in “The Faerie Queene” and “Epithalamion.” Spenser’s early works are all in the pastoral...

Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is an elegiac poem in memory of Abraham Lincoln. The poem tracks the narrator waiting to lay a sprig of lilac on the president’s coffin, the physical journey that Lincoln’s coffin takes...

In a discussion of Australian writers of the late nineteenth century, Gerry Turcotte writes: “Their exploration of the anxieties of the convict system, the terrors of isolated stations at the mercy of vagrants and nature, the fear of starvation or...

Although the characters’ distinctive individual stories are told in Act I of Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls, the overall effect is a cumulative chorus of women’s issues. The dinner scene in Act I establishes thematic foundations upon which...

The controversy surrounding Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange relates primarily to the central themes that are explored in both books. Nevertheless, the brutality and explicit expression that drench...

Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud offer bold critiques of human morality that greatly differ from the commonly accepted views of virtue and ethics. Both reject the idea of morality as an instinctive or natural element of human life. Rather,...

In his book On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche explores the relationship between suffering and guilt. Nietzsche argues that humans react to suffering by thinking that “someone or other must be guilty” (Nietzsche 94) for their...