Newest Literature Essays

“Requiem for the Croppies”, written by Seamus Heaney in 1962, describes the Irish Rebellion of 1798 as seen through the eyes and narrative voice of one random, deceased Irish soldier. The term “croppies” refers to the rebels, attributable to their...

Judith Fetterly coined the term “immasculation” in her 1978 book “The Resisting Reader,” using it to define the process by which “women are taught […] to identify with a male point of view and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of...

In Plato’s Symposium and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the two protagonists are overcome by their love and dedicate an eulogy in the form of a speech or a series of letters to their beloved. The multitude of letters...

The genre of revenge tragedy has been both popular and unique in its ability to simultaneously arouse feelings that appear to be unrelated in its audience: vengeance and sympathy. What makes this genre vary from play to play, however, is the...

Placing Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion and William Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra side by side, one observes an interesting parallelism in the manner in which the protagonists are portrayed. Though the views and opinions of Austen’s Anne...

Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” offers a major piece of literary analysis with an eye towards the ever evolving role of the female author. During Woolf’s discussion of past and present writers, she repeatedly refers to the work of William...

John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” though written nearly a century apart, share many poetic elements that allow readers to effectively draw a surface parallel between the two poems. Though both of these...

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage follows the enlistment of the protagonist Henry and his struggle to mature from a youthful vanity that drives most of his actions through the novel to a final acceptance of the uncaring reality of war and...

Walt Whitman’s poetry contains many basic elements that come together to characterize his own stance in 19th century social and political thought. An analysis of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric” specifically highlight...

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Aphra Behn’s The Rover are two vastly different works of literature that focus on different matters: More’s work is a political document, while Behn’s can be categorized as more of a social one. While the two works in...

In his play Antigone, Sophocles portrays the character of Creon in a multitude of ways but particularly as proud and uncompromising. Because he is ruler of Thebes, many of his actions drive and shape the course of the drama. Significantly, it is...

The Russian Revolution of 1917 greatly influenced the lives of Russian citizens as socialism became a driving political force. Ayn Rand, who grew up during this time of political change and uncertainty, experienced firsthand the effects of...

Jennifer Geer’s article “`All sorts of pitfalls and surprises’: Competing Views of Idealized Girlhood in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books,” discusses at length the implications of Lewis Carroll’s novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, on the...

What is it about Tatiana Larina? How is it that a young country girl, whose semblance is hardly remarkable and whose intelligence and judgment are suspect, has captivated literary culture and come to be regarded as “the Russians’ Mona Lisa”...

In the popular fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, the road to grandmother’s house is no walk in the park – it is dark, ominous, dangerous. It also offers choices, but Little Red Cap tends to make those that lead to trouble. The innocent heroine’s...

The trouble with an unreliable narrator often lies in choosing what to believe. In the case of Vladimir Nabokov’s incestuously illicit novel Lolita, it proves to be an intriguing predicament, as the unreliability of narrator Humbert Humbert is...

Although Margaret Hale and John Thornton do not fall in love ‘at first sight,’ sight, or gazing, plays an important role in the asymmetrical power relations implicit in the courtship of the protagonists in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South....

By the time Olaudah Equiano died in 1797 he had amassed a sizable fortune, visited four continents, and written a detailed account of his enslavement in the British colonies (Carey). It was this latter act that reserved him a place in history as...

While presenting a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe expressed his alienation from the imperialist and patriarchal themes of Heart of Darkness, famously decrying Joseph Conrad’s novel as the work of “a...

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a work about transience, and perhaps no two things in the natural world are more fleeting than life and beauty. Artists aim to preserve these two qualities in their work by simultaneously imitating the natural world to give...

In his recent study of the relationship between poetry and warfare, The Poetry of War, James Anderson Winn writes of the war poet’s ability to “convey, often in the same line or stanza, both the intensity of love between men of arms and the powers...

In her essay, “Origins of the Novel”, Marthe Robert characterises the novel as knowing “neither rule nor restraint. Open to every possibility, its boundaries fluctuate in all directions”. Indeed, both Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess de Cleves...

As Daniel R. White writes in Nietzsche at the Altar: Situating the Devotee, “To laugh at the literal behavior of other characters in the social drama, is to change the truth value of what those characters do so as to undermine its seriousness, its...

In his novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz examines Latino identities and sexuality, and the ways in which both are affected and informed by violence. This violence is enacted through institutions like the state, through...