Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge does an excellent job of displaying Casterbridge's realistic Western England setting through the architectural buildings, the behavior of the townspeople, and the speech used throughout the novel. All of these aspects combined provide a particular environment Ha...

The subtitle of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles' is "A Pure Woman." By choosing this title, the author suggests that the ideas society has about purity are fundamentally misguided. Society says that Tess is not pure because she is not a virgin. However, Hardy suggests that...

Political scientists often like to be prophets of doom, predicting the end of history or foreseeing an endless series of clashes of civilization and culture in the coming decades. However Thomas Friedman's thesis, advanced in the Lexus and the Olive Tree, about the interconnected nature of the ...