Newest Literature Essays

“My Lord is the King of Heaven” (633; sc. 1). With these words, Joan of Arc, heroine in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, declares her allegiance to God. But with these words, she also implies their corrolary: Joan yields to no other authority....

In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare crafts a dynamic female character uncommon to his collection of plays. Portia, the lovely and wealthy heiress, exemplifies stereotypical feminine qualities but also exhibits independent and intelligent...

In the novel Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys, we eventually see the character of young Anna Morgan shift from a naive chorus girl to a hardened woman who endures an unending cycle of pain and suffering. At first glance it seems that Anna is...

At the heart of Absalom, Absalom is the violence of class division, national division, and racial division; particularly the violence between white Southerners and black slaves as a substitute for the violence poor whites would like to commit...

In Melville’s short story, “The Tartarus of Maids,” Melville creates a foil to the preceding short story, “The Paradise of Bachelors.” Melville juxtaposes these two stories as if in imitation of Blake’s contrasting poems with a theme of balance....

There are several examples of the way vision establishes elements of realism in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” There is a literal vision that pertains to the senses of readers, which is created through the use of...

Both John Fowles in The Collector and Ian McEwan in Enduring Love use complex symbols and metaphors to expose the theme of obsession. In Enduring Love, the opening events and metaphor of the balloon act as a foreshadowing device for obsession....

‘Lines’ opens with a celebration of natural life and its exuberance, ‘the red-breast sings from his tall larch’. Here the singing robin is portrayed through metonymy giving a sense that it is something accessible and familiar to the common people....

Wakefield and Chillingsworth: Hawthorne’s Subtle Abusers

In his short story “Wakefield”, author Nathaniel Hawthorne represents the perverse and abusive inclinations of man at their most random. As a man of no individual value, Wakefield lives a...

Through his novel Great Expectations, Charles Dickens emphasizes the perpetually domineering nature of 19th century England’s uncompromising class structure system. Dickens satirizes the socially vital and inflexible natures of this system through...

In her novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen channels many of her perceptions of 18th century English society through both her dominant and smaller characters. Austen uses unfailingly sarcastic Mr. Bennet as a vehicle for the deception and spite...

Patrick Chamoiseau, in his detailed narrative School Days, uses playful and colorful language to delineate the emotional struggles of a young schoolboy in colonized Martinique. Chamoiseau’s creative and careful choice of words opens his reader’s...

Camara Laye’s demonstrative narrative The Dark Child delineates the author’s childhood and adolescence in colonial Upper Guinea in the early twentieth century. Simple in construction, the story gives emotional value to the experiences common among...

In Act One of The Visit, the character of Claire Zachanassian makes her first appearance in Guellen, and it is also when we see the main reason why she has come to Guellen: to “buy” justice for the injustice that was done to her many years ago by...

In his powerful novel Weep Not, Child, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o paints a haunting portrait of the heated anti-colonial protestation and excruciating violence of British-occupied Kenya. The crippling dehumanization of Kenya’s citizens by British...

As Gertrude Stein asserts in her lecture entitled “Composition as Explanation,” “Beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.” This quotation, especially the portion referring to the element...

Even before Thomas De Quincey fully expounds upon the mental and physical effects of frequent substance abuse in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he states that “…if no definite boundary can be assigned to one’s power, the spirit of hope...

In their article entitled “Me,” Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royale assert that “Literature, like art more generally, has always been concerned with aspects of what can be called the… ‘not me’ or other,” (Bennett 129-130). Jean-Jacques Rousseau in...

Throughout Sylvia Plath’s depiction of depression in her novel The Bell Jar, even the minutest detail plays a significant role in the development of the main character Esther’s mental breakdown. The most obvious manifestation of Esther’s...

Although some Shakespearean plays carve out a more passive, male-defined role for women, such as that which is exemplified through Ophelia’s obedience to Polonius in Hamlet, the comedies of As You Like It and Twelfth Night explore women’s...

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat is a Kenyan novel written in English, a language traditionally associated with colonialism and oppression in Africa. Despite the fact that the novel is written in English, Ngugi still uses language to speak to...

Peter’s denial of Jesus is a story that occurs in all four gospels. Though the main events remain the same, each gospel writer endows the story with unique and often contrasting details that speak to each gospel’s focus and themes. Michael Coogan...

Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 both recount the story of the manna and quails. Though these two chapters concern the same story, they offer different details and variable facts. The two stories differ especially in their characterization of the Hebrew...

Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea rewrites Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre from a modern, postcolonial standpoint. Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Brontë’s “madwoman in the attic” from Bertha Mason’s own point of view. In Jane Eyre, Bertha...