Newest Literature Essays

Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting uses the combination of grotesque imagery within a narrative lacking clear progression to portray the nihilistic lifestyle of a heroin addict. Welsh creates distinct voices through the main characters in his...

The em-dash, often formed in print by two hyphens lacking separation, is a piece of punctuation “stronger than a comma, less formal than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses” (Strunk and White 9). Traditionally a dash indicates an abrupt...

In typical modernist fashion, William Faulkner experiments in his work with a number of nontraditional stylistic and thematic characteristics, including brokenness, fragmentation, despair, pessimism, perception distortion, and the rejection of...

Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging,” an eight-stanza poem written in free verse, is the first in his collection of poems entitled Death of a Naturalist, which was published in 1966. Written in first-person narrative, this circularly structured poem...

Jack Burden is far more than a narrator describing the rise and fall of Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Intertwined in his description of The Boss’s political machinations and personal dilemmas is an account of his own...

The Hemingway code hero is almost always a man, but in The Sun Also Rises, the real code hero is lead female Brett Ashley. From her cropped hair to her penchant for partying, Lady Brett Ashley is more code hero-like than any of her fellow...

The concept of the novum is a central theme to science fiction as a whole. It represents something new and different from the world as we know it. The novum usually functions as the impetus to the science fiction story, guiding the motivations of...

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment lets the reader into the mind of a murderer as he commits his crime and copes with the consequences. The novel grapples with many philosophical questions and challenges accepted ideas of right versus wrong....

Sometimes, we pay even when there’s been no mistake, just for being who we are. I don’t mind paying for my mistakes. But it seems like we’re paying for everyone else’s mistakes too.

--Luis Rodriguez

Although injustices like racial oppression are...

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and...

In reading A Room of One’s Own, it is difficult to tell whether Virginia Woolf cares more passionately for her gender or for her craft. Guiding the future of the art of fiction, rather than scorning men or even fighting for justice, seems to be...

How far can an ancient ideal stretch? From Euclidean geometry to Plato’s Republic, ancient ideas are still being analyzed and furthered. One example, the fourth book in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, is directly related to Plato’s ideal state,...

I desire / the learned and charitable critic to have so much faith in me / to think it was done of industry.

--Ben Jonson, lines 110-112 of the prefatory epistle to Volpone

Ben Jonson’s play Volpone, or “Sly Fox,” was performed for the first time on...

Set in post-WWI-era Europe among a seemingly rich and careless group of English and American expatriates, The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway’s debut full-length novel. It is interesting that he chose to narrate the novel in the first person...

It seems almost clichéd to note the distracted, disparate plurality of a certain contemporary consciousness that has developed alongside personal computers and the blogosphere, with its roots in television and cable. But it is just such an...

<BLOCKQUOTE>As for disappointing them, I should not mind much; but I can’t abide to disappoint myself!</BLOCKQUOTE>

Thus speaks Tony Lumpkin in the first scene of Oliver Goldsmith’s eighteenth-century comedy of errors <i>She...

Flannery O’Connor once said: “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” In the brilliant novella <i>The Ponder Heart</i>,...

Vikas Swarup’s <i>Q & A</i> tells the story of a young orphan who miraculously transforms from being penniless to possessing more money than he could ever imagine. It seems Ram’s ability to answer all of the questions on a quiz...

Philip K. Dick’s <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep</i> (a novel) and Ridley Scott’s <i>Blade Runner</i> (a film) insist comparison: Ridley Scott’s film is based on the story told by Philip K. Dick’s novel. These works...

“In Memoriam” is a lyric elegy written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in remembrance of his dear friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Hallam’s death’s effect on Tennyson becomes clear throughout this elegy as the reader is exposed to not only Tennyson’s...

Edmund Spenser’s revolting description of Duessa being stripped in <i>The Faerie Queen</i> (Book I, Canto VIII, Stanzas 45-49) emotionally contrasts with John Donne’s glorifying description of his lover’s body in the poem “Elegy XIX:...

Chaucer’s “General Prologue” to <i>The Canterbury Tales</i> explores the portraits of twenty-eight of the thirty pilgrims, all of whom are taking part in a trip to the shrine of the martyr Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The...

Encountering a dead deer on the road is not an unusual occurrence; oncoming drivers see the road block and handle the situation accordingly. Some drivers will swerve to miss the animal -- it is safe to say that most drivers will swerve -- but a...

The originality of Milton’s <i>Paradise Lost</i> lies in its ability to transform the predominantly secular spirit of Homer, Virgil, Boiardo, and other masters of literary epic into a theological subject outside of the tradition....