Newest Literature Essays

John Glenday’s For Lucie reads as an ode to a newborn baby girl who is fated to mature into a world governed by moral and spiritual darkness: the narrator urges the child to quell such gloom with the lightness and optimism that infancy brings....

Individually both racism and sexism pose challenges for minority groups and women in general. Racism: the idea that one’s race is superior to another’s based on mass stereotypes and assumptions of other races. Feminism, the advocacy of women’s...

Thomas Hardy describes the unfortunate fate of ‘drummer hodge’, who was left to ‘rest’, ‘uncoffined - just as found’ on the battle field. Drummer hodge, who died fighting the Boer’s in South Africa, is used to reflect the alienation of lost...

In his seminal paper, Richard Dyer states that, ‘white people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to...

“I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed for lack of a better word is good. Greed is right. Greed works, clarifies and cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary...

Conformism is a concept that is lusted upon or embraced for the sense of security or safety that it offers. However it is beyond just a choice to be made, it is a force of nature that is quite inevitable considering the demands and expectations...

Whether it be the Joker in the infamous Batman series, or Norman Bates in the cinematic classic, Psycho, some of the most prolific pieces of literature and film contain an antihero. As stated by Alfred Hitchcock, “The more successful the villain,...

There no doubt that Paul Haggis’ 2004 film Crash is the most disparaged best picture winner at the Oscars leading to the coining of the term ‘Worst Best Picture’. It is definitely not out of no good reason that it faces so much scrutiny for its...

In this essay, I will be following the idea of spectacle as considered by Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), which has clearly influenced Jonathon Crary’s notion of the spectacle. That is, the postmodern idea that in the age of late...

Dependency on agricultural livestock, the number of cattle declining by 10%, low wages and increasing levels of emigration: this is rural Ireland in 1936. Set in the small fictional town Ballybeg, the rural-pastoral trope constantly underlies the...

Many horror novels, vampire-infested stories or zombie apocalypse books are successful because their detailed description of blood, gore and destruction instill fear and shock and the pleasures of the Gothic sublime. Warm Bodies, by Isaac Marion...

Cinema changed everything: This is an accepted statement, but it is also a cliché. At the same time, it cannot be overstated enough. When it comes to an experimental innovator such as Bertolt Brecht, however, the form of cinema transformed the...

Homogenous identity bears its attraction in its promise of unity. By defining identity in terms of ethnicity and nationality, one feels that they are part of a community. A shared race, culture and geographical space often creates the sense of...

There is a thematic overlap between Richard Eberhart’s poetry about the Second World War, and George Orwell’s testimony from the Spanish Civil War, and this intersection of ideas is relevant to timeless issues of religion, specifically the...

Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 is one of the greatest examples of the use of emblematic staging in the early-modern period. The more iconographic style which preceded in the theatres, gave way to a much more fluid visual...

Both Russell Baker and Ernesto Galarza rely on a form of story-telling as classic as any other: the coming-of-age tale. This is a universal theme or subject in literature because it usually demands honesty from an author looking back on a troubled...

Beckett once stated in regard to his plays that “any production which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me”[1]; a famous rule cautioning the director from straying far from the playwright’s vision. Crucially, Beckett’s...

“The looking-glass is not to blame if your own face is plain” - Saying, from Nikolai Gogol’s Government Inspector Orwell, Gogol, Chavchavadze - criticizing society primarily or in a hidden way became popular among classical writers. Highlighting...

In the Roman Imperial World — precisely around 202 CE and 356 CE — early Christian martyrs and ascetics documented their experiences dealing with overcoming their adversaries and, more largely, Satan. Their personal victories hinged on their...

Georges Perec’s novella Les Choses[1]debuted in the mid-1960s, across a cultural landscape of change, disillusionment, and frustration. The lives of the main characters in this novella show us that postwar life in Western Europe is empty and...

The body is represented in the novel as a physical entity, an organism, as a cultural construction. As a natural organisation, the body controls, limits and determines life. It grows and develops from the moment of existence till it reaches its...

Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society and Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence both display individuals ripped away from society by its judgment due to personal disagreements with social norms. The condemnation commences a battle between holding on to one’s...