Category: Book Review

Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is written using very casual language and follows the stream of conciseness narrative of a young boy named Oskar. Oskar’s extreme curiosity and childlike innocence lead him to observe, question, and comment on everything he sees, prompting him to make many allusions to figures and ideologies…

Destruction. It’s a powerful word, encapsulating a Pandora’s box of emotions. It implies damage beyond a state of repair, or even, at times, beyond a state of existence. Destruction plays an important role in Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. What is destroyed and who is the destroyer is dependent on viewpoint. One particular moment at the…

The genesis of the Russian radical movement is portrayed in Ivan Turgenev’s classic novel Fathers and Sons as a shock which resonated throughout the Russian public sphere, effecting change within both families and society. Indeed, historian Daniel Brower argues in {em Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia} that the radical movement changed…

In the novel Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev explores the inevitability of man’s by implementing effectiv structural devices. The parallel trips of the central characters highlight their emotional and intellectual paths and culminate in their seemingly inevitable fusion with society. Similarly, Turgenev’s deft control of Arkady’s and Bazarov’s cyclical journeys to their paternal homes enhances…

Most literary representations of the sexes include implicit and binary differences between women and men. Women are typically written as pure archetypes who strive to find constancy in their relationships. In contrast, men as seen as libertines who seek multiplicity, novelty, and otherwise rakish desires. In Fantomina, a venture of sex, love, and disguise, Eliza…

The turn of the eighteenth century is at the cusp of radical shifts in ideology, booming industry and scientific advancement for the Western World. The rapid changes, and growing middle class widens the audience for conduct books. As more people were economically secure and had access to education, more women were required to look to…

The characters of Pechorin and Bazarov, the protagonists of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, are both men who are, in a sense, doomed. One voluntarily wanders the globe, waiting and finally meeting an unnoticed end, and one finds himself fatally and irrevocably infected. The two are similar not only…

Farewell My Concubine takes place during the Chinese cultural revolution, and throughout the novel the political and social aspects of China are constantly changing. As the novel is based around the Peking Opera, the role of beauty is greatly significant within both the themes and characters, and the author demonstrates how the cultural revolution transforms…

Both Mrs. Turpin in Flannery O’Conner’s Revelation and the narrator in Raymond Craver’s Cathedral hold prejudiced worldviews. However, Mrs. Turpin is religious and expresses her self-satisfied thoughts openly, while the narrator dismisses others because he does not believe in anything. Both characters need to be saved by epiphanies, yet their distinct natures shape how each…

In literary history, authors often mirrored the social situation of its time through their works. For this reason, many of the greatest works were seen as representations of some social affairs, wars, political movements and other occurrences of the period of time during which the literary work was written. When it comes to more contemporary…