Muscles tensed, nostrils flared, the beautiful feline creature eyes its soon-to-be prey, a harmless antelope drinking from the watering hole. Without a moment of hesitation, the black and orange striped tiger breaks out into a full stride and pounces on its victim, tearing the defenseless...
Love is a complex concept, one that even ingenious writers have struggled to understand. While scientists confine their understanding of love to ‘chemical reactions’ involving dopamine and serotonin, one cannot deny the qualitative nature that love has. Clegg expresses signs of love throughout the The...
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. This is shown by...
In A.M. Homes’ novel Music for Torching, married couple Paul and Elaine find their relationship to be as static and boring as the Westchester County suburb in which they live. Unsatisfied with their marriage and fearful of a lifeless future, they take out their frustration...
The Children of Men by PD James depicts the life of Theodore “Theo” Faron alongside his five acquaintances Julian, Miriam, Rolf, Gascoigne, and Luke as they embark on a harrowing mission to privately birth the child that will likely become the future of all mankind....
Byatt’s character Tom Wellwood in her novel The Children’s Book resents fairytales, especially Peter Pan. Tom’s resentment is the result of a troubled inner self and belonging to a mother who uses her own children to create characters—characters that Tom, specifically, will never live up...
In the poems Awlad al-Kahba (Sons of a Bitch) by Mudhafar Al-Nawab and Face Lost in the Wilderness by Fadwa Tuqan, there is great commonality in each poet’s personification of Jerusalem as a raped girl. Through the perspective of each poet, both works reflect upon...
If a novel is indeed grounded in a vision of the world, how do authors who find themselves essentially “groundless”, caught in a web of shifting homes, cultural allegiances, and ethnic identities find their unique vision? Paule Marshall and Caryl Phillips, both authors of Caribbean...
Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet explores the world as seen through the lens of the title character, a world of isolation and disinterestedness. All of the characters in the novel have disengaged from society and humanity on some level or another, either voluntarily like Mr....
Berthold Brecht’s deliberate strategy to create an emotional distance between the actors and the audience stands in stark contrast to traditional theatrical techniques aimed at eliciting sympathy and aligns poorly with the principles of theatrical realism. Brecht’s distancing effect is achieved through a range of...
“When something seems the most obvious thing in the world, it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.” How does Brecht attempt to ensure that the obvious is absent from this play? Made-to-order essay as fast as you need it...
While there is still confusion over the exact causes of the Thirty Years’ War, everyone can acknowledge how horrific and devastating it was. Enormous amounts of civilians in besieged cities such as Magdeburg lost their lives, and those who survived lost everything else. The soldiers...
In ancient Eastern society, written novels eventually rose to a prominent place in culture, following upon a long tradition of oral accounts and short works such as poetry. In addition, with strict government policy on content, many authors and poets feared punishment and so avoided...
An old Chinese proverb states that, “A family in harmony will prosper in everything.” In the 21st century, harmony looks different in every household––especially queer households, which are not always conducive to the harmony of heteronormative family structures. In her essay “With friends like these:...
Much of the critical debate surrounding Daniel Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders centers around whether the author makes good on the promise he makes in the preface that the story will be morally instructive. For instance, Ira Konigsberg writes that “One of the book’s contradictions that...
The seventy-year-old Moll Flanders who narrates her own life story considers herself a reformed criminal. But to what degree should her perceived transgressions cause her to actually be understood as such? After all, Defoe’s novel makes it clear that a number of different factors ultimately...
The traditional human condition plagues every individual; each suffers, and consequently, thirsts for personal freedom and utter fulfillment in whatever way possible. While Western culture recognizes this tendency as rooted in religiousness or spirituality, most Eastern philosophy understands this human characteristic as ultimate, drawing no...
In Mississippi Trial, 1955 by Chris Crowe, the author tells a story about a boy named Hiram who comes back to Greenwood, Mississippi to visit his Grandfather. When he revisits and goes down memory lane, he discovers that a lot of things have changed since...
Ransom Riggs, an American filmmaker and writer, first got his idea for a novel with pictures when he randomly ran across some sinister-looking vintage photos. Ransom recalls, “the photos suggest stories even though you don’t know who the people are or exactly when they were...