Category: Book Review

“Each day mankind and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire, and to plunge into the forest…” (London 33). With statements such as this,…

In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, a variety of allusions to other works of literature arise, suggesting to the adept reader their significance to the plot and in our understanding of many characters and themes. Two books of special importance, Ivanhoe and The Gray Ghost – as these two are of particular importance…

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique ignited the onset of the second wave of feminism in the United States. This book is a sociological study about the roots of the feminine mystique and how it turned “into a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity.” Although Friedan does raise…

It is difficult to justify irrational acts—after all, they are irrational. Thus, perhaps it may seem bizarre to most people that the narrator in “Senior Picture Day” feels the need to regularly squeeze her nose, purely to change its appearance. Of course, teenagers have always been known to do unusual things by nature. However, irrational…

In Luce Irigaray’s “Women on the Market,” she argues that, in patriarchal societies, women are essentially reduced from human beings to commodities whose exchange is controlled by men. According to Irigaray, this exploitation of women is so ingrained in our culture that it is in fact what “establishes the operations of [patriarchal] society;” in other…

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia both make excellent examples of the roles of women in the eighteenth century, including what those roles were supposed to be and what they actually were. Both texts treat women as generally fearful or timid with some acts of…

According to Laila Lalami, the whole process of emigration is engulfed with social invisibility. The fiction novel elaborates how migrants encounter social invisibility. Migrants lack social link. They face isolation from the society and stand alone as islands or invisible beings. Emigrants lack social acceptance. This is evident through Faten, who cannot get any assistance…

Alexander Pushkin’s novel, Eugene Onegin, gives the reader an excellent insight into his thoughts and beliefs regarding different types of human behavior. Throughout the novel Pushkin illustrates many of his own characteristics via the two main male figures, Eugene Onegin and Vladimir Lensky, despite them being quite different from one another. However, an interesting distinction…

James Merrill boasts an immaculate portfolio of plays, essays, and his specialty, poems. Formulaic, strict works of his earlier career evolved into deep explorations of personal psyche carved from his subjective interaction with the world. In sampling Merrill’s poems, I have observed his particular enrapturement with particularities of living. Throughout his works, Merrill demonstrates an…

The very nature of travel literature is to inform the population that has not traveled abroad to so-called ‘wild’ places of the cultures and people that lie beyond their own nation, specifically, the untraveled English population. Given the rise of imperialism and great desire for global power, it is no surprise that such a movement…