Essays on Literature

This is the first time Jim is faced with a conflict in the novel. He must leave his life and in way start over with his grandparents on a farm halfway across the country. But this is a good time for him to start over…

Short stories have a way of teaching readers the intricacies of the society, its populace, and history in general. Two such short stories include Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin and Recitatif by Toni Morrison goes on to explain the themes of racial bias, suffering, and…

Firstly, the loss of innocence gives the authors’ personal perspectives on tradition. In “The Lottery”, Jackson uses the loss of innocence to criticize society’s blind following of old traditions. In the story, the village carries out their annual lottery tradition, where the unlucky winner is…

There are so many primary documents at our fingertips when thinking of which to use for this assignment, but An Outsider’s View of the Inca Empire which begins on page 596 truly stands out. This document follows Pedro de Cieza de León and the expeditions…

In Chapter Six, “Diagnosis: Freedom: The Civil War, Emancipation, and Fin de Siècle Medical Research” from her book Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington analyzes how medical research and statistical data were manipulated back in the mid-1800s to the early 1900s to prove African American inferiority….

Jonathan Edwards wrote “Sinners in the Hands of the Angry Gods,” and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “The Minister’s Black Veil”. Edwards and Hawthorne appeal to different emotions to better portray their beliefs. Edwards uses strong word choices, similes, metaphors, and analogies, for example, “your destruction would…

Bias is something that every writer fears of and constantly threads the needle with it. Often times writers unbeknownst to them become biased in their written pieces. There are a couple of ways biases can occur in writing, the first way is that the writer…

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, published in 1963, is a Roman a Clef written in the first-person perspective of Esther Greenwood, a young woman who is in a downward spiral that ends in an attempted suicide and her challenge to regain sanity. The writing of…

Finding oneself, discovering your own individuality, is simply a discovery that is found through the journey of life. In “Brother Dear”, Bernice Friesen’s use of foil exposes the importance of discovering your identity within an environment that promotes traditional social conventions. Greg influences Sharlene to…

Kim Addonizio demonstrates the strong connection between two people in her poem “First Poem for You”. The title “First Poem for You” immediately establishes that there is some type of connection in the poem. Whether the connection in the poem was going to be a…