Newest Literature Essays

The 1987 film Dirty Dancing has often been dismissed as a trivial coming-of-age story, one which simply centres around a teenage girl’s fantasy – arguably the most denigrated yet necessary narrative in popular culture. The political implications...

John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is an ambiguous play regarding its position on gender, which makes it particularly fascinating. It certainly utilises the inherited categories and assumptions about female behaviour which were prevalent in the...

Billy Elliot is a British film, released in 2000, by director Stephen Daldry, which tells the story of a miner’s son who suddenly discovers that he enjoys ballet more than boxing. Set in Northern England, in 1984, with the political context of the...

Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation conceives of early twenty-first-century America as an anxious nation, raising a generation of young people simultaneously overstimulated and underwhelmed by the world in which they find...

Paul Thompson’s The Farm Show shares several similarities with Theatre Passe Muraille’s production of Jinch Malrex. The Drawer Boy is based on Theatre Passe Muraille’s production of The Farm Show and follows a young actor as he shadows the daily...

Exposure to certain aspects of modernization results in varied effects on the culture of a people. Ole Kulet examines the concept of alienation in Blossoms of the Savannah through characters who embody specific values and traits that are alien to...

Russian Formalism refers to form of literary criticism founded during the 20th century and it shapes the work and ideas of a number of eastern-European scholars such as Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky. A primary distinction between Russian...

Issues of wealth are addressed as central concerns of the texts The Duchess of Malfi (Webster, 2012) and Oroonoko; Or, The Royal Slave (Behn, 2012). The exploration of character portrayal within different social standings and how the...

The Quilt or ‘Lihaf ’ as popularly known is a short story by Ismat Chughtai which was published in the year 1941 in a leading urdu magazine of the time and was received amdist a lot of controversy and chaos. And rightly so, given how much the...

Life's greatest tragedies will scorch madness and vengeance into the hearts of those willing to toss aside their humanity. Hamlet, consumed by calamity, names himself an Archangel of Death in the Shakespearean tragedy. A striking historical play...

The 2014 science fiction independent film, Ex Machina, explored the world of artificial intelligence, while challenging the understanding of human consciousness. The story follows Caleb, a young programmer at an internet-search giant, who wins a...

Although shocking, violence in the plays and films of Martin McDonagh is not out of place. Instead, McDonagh creates violent relationships, delicate balances of trauma, and vicarious enjoyment of the violence to construct a primitive and...

The Love Suicides at Amijima is a play that was meant to serve as a social commentary rather than portray an epic romance. However, the 1969 film adaptation appears to take a different approach to the story. Based on the two opening scenes that...

Described by Fredric Jameson as a loss of historicity and by Brian McHale as a fascination with the ontological, the term postmodernism seems to have taken many different variations. At its very essence, this movement encompasses a questioning of...

Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) is perhaps his most famous work, and has justified claim to be categorised as a text of ‘transatlantic identity’. For the purpose of this essay, the definition of ‘transatlantic identity’ will be as follows:...

Metaphorical Titles in Reference to Mental Conflict Metaphors create enticing writing that allows readers to understand text beyond a surface level. In many pieces of literature, metaphors are used within the text or the title to capture the...

Life asked Death, “Why do people love me but hate you?” Death replied, “Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.” - Anonymous

Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” takes place in 15th century medieval times where disease...

Due to the obligatory nature of motherhood, Plath exposes the co-dependent relationship between mother and child, unveiling the nuances of love, dependency and fear endured by women. Sylvia Plath's poetry collection "Ariel" uncovers the subtle yet...

William Carlos Williams’ work “The Use of Force” is told from the narrative perspective of a doctor reminiscing on a home visit he made to a sick child. The visit starts off normal as the doctor takes stock of his patient’s symptoms and...

“May the odds be ever in your favor,” are the notorious words of Effie Trinket in the first installment of “The Hunger Games” movies. The dystopian story takes place in the post-apocalyptic society of Panem in North America, 74 years after a...

'The Dressmaker’, directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse in 2015 and ‘Muriel’s Wedding’, directed by P.J. Hogan in 1994, are both Australian comedy-drama films that explore the theme of escaping a country town. In ‘The Dressmaker’, Myrtle Dunnage returns...

Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" explores the difficulties of moral progressiveness due to character's inherent desires to fulfil the ludicrous demands of contemporary society which are rooted in traditional values. The unattainable...

“The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Formulated by James Truslow Adams, this is the first official definition...

In the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition, the feast is the epitome of order in society. Feast scenes such as those scene in heroic poems like Beowulf give leaders the opportunity to solidify their retainers’ bonds through generosity and gift-giving,...