Newest Literature Essays

By the thirteenth scene of Act III in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the character Hieronimo has finally emerged as a major character and transformed significantly. He has gone from a commendable subordinate of the King, to a grieving father,...

Charles Baudelaire is often considered a late Romantic poet. Even Baudelaire sought to equate himself with archetypal Romantic figures like Byron, Hugo, and Gautier; the latter once claimed that Baudelaire had "found a way to inject new life into...

The title of Wallace Stevens’ poem “Nuances of a Theme by Williams” implies that he intends to comment on, possibly celebrate, and almost certainly explore the potential distinctions and variations available in the poem by William Carlos Williams...

In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera depicts a society almost devoid of human connection. Kundera utilizes the characters Tomas, Sabina, Franz, and Tereza to explore the inability for human beings to allow themselves to...

With technological innovations rising as quickly as the population, the Industrial Revolution not only symbolizes a period of expansion and advancement, but it also reflects the dramatic changes on the economic and social structure of England....

Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is a poem that not only exposes the differences within the people and the geography of the nation, but also shows the theme of equality that unites these differences. Incorporating his experience with the...

Nathanial Hawthorne, in the two different, yet morally similar stories, “Young Goodman Brown” and “Artist of the Beautiful,” displays his opinions on dominant doctrines of society. Hawthorne expresses that the protagonists in each of the stories...

In his novel The White Boy Shuffle, Paul Beatty conveys what it is like for a young African American male to grow up in Santa Monica, a coastal town heavily populated by chauvinistic Caucasians with social dominance – at least in the eyes of...

Jose Saramago’s Blindness depicts a world suddenly stricken by a blindness epidemic. As an inexplicable wave of blindness spreads, society fragments and people freely express an “animalistic” form of human nature in face of the increased pressure...

George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch provides the reader with a valuable insight into the lives of different women in the first half of nineteenth century provincial England. The novel gives its readers a good idea of how people interact with and are...

Why has Hamlet captivated actors, critics and audiences for centuries? What makes Hamlet himself so mysterious? Unlike most characters, who are defined by what can be seen on stage, Hamlet appears to be “constructed around an unseen or secret...

It is presumable that the main character of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther is a man from whose thoughts we can glean wise and important statements about life. Throughout many of the passages, Werther offers us his unique perspective on...

The primary source of feeling comes from within the Self. At least, this is what Lord Byron's Manfred and "Lara: Canto the First" and Keats' "Four Seasons Fill the Measure of the Year", tell us. The implications of this are that once the internal...

In the film Y Tu Mama Tambien, the characters Tenoch, Julio and Luisa represent Mexican economic classes and social stratification in distinct ways. A Marxist would argue that Tenoch, the more affluent male lead of the trio, represents a bourgeois...

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly draws links between sexism, racism and imperialism. Hwang’s play, which is loosely based on a scandal involving a French diplomat and his lover, a male Chinese opera singer, utilizes postcolonial ideas in order to...

An element of tension runs through both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The two narratives running parallel to each other throughout Maus, namely those of Art and his father Vladek, converge at the end of volume two in a shaky synthesis. The two...

Gregor Samsa’s unconscious can be explained through three important symbols prevalent in The Metamorphosis. According to the Freudian theoretical framework, these three symbols are personified in Samsa’s mother, father and sister. For Samsa, his...

Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz and released in 1942, exhibits qualities of both the Classical Hollywood Narrative and Art Cinema. These two film structures are the equivalent to formalism in literature, but also point to other frameworks...

In her novel, Push, Sapphire challenges the conventions of patriarchal literature through use of language, characterization and archetype, as well as deviations in the traditional, patriarchal novel structure. One of the major elements in Sapphire...

Throughout the book Flight by Sherman Alexie, the main character Zits is in search of where he belongs and why people have mistreated him throughout his life. In the midst of the action in the novel, Zits begins to experience character jumps,...

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass follows the format of a traditional slave narrative, characterizing the plight faced by a slave and his or her quest for freedom. Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada on the other hand, parodies...

Nabokov's Lolita is a unique book in that its narrator, under the 'pseudonym' of Humbert Humbert, often breaks the fourth wall to retroactively embellish his story. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," he addresses the reader on multiple occasions,...

Emily Dickinson's poem, “My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun,” explores grim themes found behind the romanticized perception of love. In the beginning of the work, Dickinson shows the headstrong and volatile nature of the speaker. A man chooses this...

In Raymond Carver's short story, “Cathedral,” the close-minded speaker is forced to spend a civil evening with a blind man. Initially, the narrator despises the blind community. However, after interacting and connecting with the blind man in the...