Literary Criticism Essay Examples and Topics

Both Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre are stories that tackle the dilemma of Victorian society’s power struggles, the issues with discrimination and the hardships of class mobility. Many parallels can be drawn between the two eponymous characters. They are both born orphans and spend the…

Source criticism is a foundational practice in evaluating information’s reliability, credibility, and authenticity. This essay delves into the significance of source criticism, its essential principles, and the role it plays in enabling individuals to navigate an increasingly complex and interconnected information landscape. The Importance of…

The fictional memoir of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle narrates the life of Diedrich Knickerbocker, a man residing in a small village in the Catskill mountains, who finds particular interest in recounting the histories and rich anecdotes from Dutch descendants of New York. Although Knickerbocker…

The Literary Canon has evolved and changed over the years. It has differed with time, changing from one era to another. It’s mainly influenced by society, cultural events, and history. Whatever is going on in the world, the canon relates to it. For centuries it…

Set in 1800s Britain, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park at first glace seems to conform to the gender stereotypes of the day. Fanny Price is at first glance “timid and shy, and shrinking from notice”, she seems to conform to much of the negative gender stereotypes,…

This essay aims to take a look into the play ‘King Lear’ written by William Shakespeare, using both the feminist and psychoanalytical critical approach. Like most of Shakespeare’s tragedies, King Lear can be identified on various levels and from a diversity of critical perspectives, due…

Greek playwright Euripides is known to have very complex female lead roles in many of his tragedies. Medea is one of Euripides’s best-known works that demonstrates the thematic idea of the feminist viewpoint. The story follows a wife named Medea who ends up murdering her…

Identify the message for a change in this text- theme The message for a change in this text revolves around the idea of confinement and restrictions, specifically on women. The main character in this story is facing postpartum depression. Her husband would constantly tell her…

Feminist theories appeared in 1792. Sojourner’s Ain’t I a Woman (1851) addresses the way that women’s rights are limited by flawed representational factors. Women of color are often represented by historically rooted subjective social constructions that marginalize them. This is better explained through the concept…

When we finished the book the Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, most of us will wonder that can the Mohicans tribe still thriving when Chingachgook was the last one? That pushed me to do research about Mohicans and I found that they…

The Survival Lottery is a proposal by John Harris outlining an idealisation of organ transplantation. It supposes that organ transplant procedures have been perfected, allowing a ‘lottery’ system to exist whereby every person is assigned a number, and, where there are two or more people…

Although Gimpel did not die a fool he lived his life primarily as a fool. Singers use of “Gimpel the Fool” demonstrated two lower levels of the human scale. The first is the cowards ability to justify to himself the reasoning behind his behavior. The…

Introduction In this essay I will give a brief introduction of two significant schools of literary theory: structuralism and feminism, explore the influence structuralism has on feminism, then evaluate the importance of two schools from literary criticism aspect. Structuralism Before Structuralism came into being in…

Comparative literature studies seem to have reached a noticeable place in the realm of literary criticism. It is mainly concerned with analyzing shared points and aspects between two or more literary works beyond national and local borders. Actually, the primary purpose of Comparative Literature is…

The Distortion of the Fairytale One of the longest thriving gatherings in the world has been storytelling. Originally storytelling was just what it sounds like: telling a story. Sitting with a group of people in a community and telling a fable about anything from a…