Newest Literature Essays

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche advocates skepticism and rejection of many traditional beliefs and values. This dismissal of commonly accepted societal norms is evident in his attack on morality and virtue in section 21 of the book. In...

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche critiques the shortcomings and possibilities of modern science. In this critique, Nietzsche analyzes the limits of science, the ways in which science falsifies life, and the motivation for a scientific...

The Maltese Falcon at its core is a novel about people making up stories. Characters in the novel display a remarkable ability and willingness to lie. As each new character is introduced to the plot, a new host of lies is introduced as well. The...

Frankenstein is a novel characterized by an unusually layered narrative structure. Narrators exist within narrators, narratives are passed from one character to another, and a distinct gap exists between the telling of the story and the historical...

Shakespeare’s Othello is indeed a powerful and impressive figure who is tragically brought down by Iago, a villain who goes undetected through his great drive and intellect until the very end of the play. Despite his shortcomings -- of which a...

The subject of both Dennis Scott’s poem “Uncle Time” and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 19 is time and its erosive quality. Both refer to the concept as a capitalized entity, emphasizing its powerful and often destructive nature primarily by way of vivid...

The novel Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes the life of a teenage girl, Kambili, who is raised in Nigeria. In the novel, Adichie uses two main settings to effectively describe the themes of freedom, silence, and repression. The...

Geoffrey Chaucer's poem “The Book of the Duchess” was written between the years 1369-1372. The poem is a product of Chaucer’s French period. This work was written for Chaucer's principal patron, John of Gaunt, after the death of his first wife,...

Langston Hughes was one of the most prolific writers of Harlem Renaissance era. Hughes's works are best known for the sense of black pride they convey and Hughes's implantation of jazz into his poetry. In 1926, Hughes wrote the critically...

In the novel Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, the title character faces the reality that she must grow up, detach from her parents, and establish an identity independent from that of her mother’s -- that the beautiful childhood she once had cannot...

One thing that Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis have in common is the aftertaste they leave in the reader’s intellectual palate. Unlike most authors, Endo and Kafka refuse to oblige the readers with a satisfying happy...

In the book The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, the lexical words of the author are in perfect harmony with the visual pictures he presents to the reader; the illustrations are often matched concretely with the words, and they both simultaneously...

Earle Birney’s poem “Anglosaxon Street” and Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan both present a powerful critique of modern life, though the former is delivered through sarcastic humor while the latter is portrayed through poignant emotions. Modernity in “...

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer portrays the actual practice of alchemy to be a ruse. In the Canon Yeoman’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, transformation is merely an illusion when one attempts to go against the forces of nature. In the...

Featuring a wide assortment of colorful personalities, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice contains both emotionally deep, interesting characters as well as hilarious caricatures of the bumpkins who make up the rural social scene of 18th-century...

As evidenced by its continued appearance throughout the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, the language of finance served as a particularly useful wellspring for examples and terminology to help those authors convey the important...

Written as an allegory for slavery and the way it affects the people who employ it, Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” questions just how much of an impact living in a society has on one’s willingness to act in ways different...

At its core, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is the story of two girls and the differing ideologies by which they live and view the world. Elinor, the oldest of the Dashwood girls, is a calm and rational thinker who always tries her best to be...

The story of a dysfunctional family and its epic journey across the South, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is famous for its use of multiple narrators who interpret and recount the journey of the Bundren clan from their own unique perspectives....

Out of all the competing plots and themes in Paradise Lost, arguably the central and most important story is that of humanity’s first members, Adam and Eve, and their self-induced fall from grace into sin. The nature of their relationship is a...

Throughout Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, the theme of love is visited often. Between the two works, it becomes clear that Dante’s notion of love is divided into two parts: Natural and Elective Love. Natural Love does not err -- that is to say,...

The primary concern of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” is how the female speaker views her relationship with men; the emotions associated with her views of sex are equated to death, and the desire for her to die. This metaphor of death, used...

Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series presents a society that regulates touch not through laws and mandates that can easily be broken, but through actually rewiring the brain chemistry of its citizens so that they will not desire touch with the wrong...

James Joyce’s Ulysses is unlike any other novel. With a variety of characters, a stream-of-consciousness narrative, parodies, allusions, and obscenities, Joyce’s eighteen-episode novel illustrates only a single Dublin day. While the first thirteen...