All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the most influential novels ever published, depicts the horrific events of World War I. Written around 1929, the author Erich Maria Remarque himself participated in the war therefore enabling him to provide the realistic details to accomplishing his successful...

The world of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is a world ruled by chance. From the very opening chapters, where a watchman is accidentally run over by a train at Moscow's Petersburg station, to the final, climactic scenes of arbitrary destruction when Levin searches for Kitty in a forest beset by lightning,...

In the times of slavery, there were two popular stereotypes of a black female – the loyal mammy and the promiscuous temptress. The former represented an "adamantine, kind, unattractive, and sexless woman" and it justified "abusive treatment of black women on the grounds that th...