For the list of literature essay topics below we have decided to classify writers by nationality. This list of literature essay topics is divided into the following categories: American Literature, British Literature, English Literature, French Literature, Japanese Literature, Russian Literature, and Spanish Literature.
American Literature Essay Topics
Isaac Asimov |
W. E. B. Du Bois |
Stephen King |
Ambrose Bierce |
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
Ursula K. Le Guin |
Ray Bradbury |
William Faulkner |
Herman Melville |
Dan Brown |
F. Scott Fitzgerald |
Arthur Miller |
Edgar Rice Burroughs |
Robert Frost |
Margaret Mitchell |
Raymond Carver |
John Grisham |
Toni Morrison |
Tom Clancy |
Nathaniel Hawthorne |
Edgar Allan Poe |
James Fenimore Cooper |
Robert Heinlein |
Ayn Rand |
Philip K. Dick |
Ernest Hemingway |
J. D. Salinger |
Frederick Douglass |
Langston Hughes |
Mark Twain |
Theodore Dreiser |
Zora Neale Hurston |
Tennessee Williams |
British Literature Essay Topics
A. A. Milne |
George Bernard Shaw |
Jonathan Swift |
Agatha Christie |
George Eliot |
Lord Byron |
Arthur Conan Doyle |
George Orwell |
Robert Louis Stevenson |
C.S. Lewis |
Graham Greene |
Rudyard Kipling |
Douglas Adams |
H. G. Wells |
Virginia Woolf |
Dylan Thomas |
Ian Fleming |
W. H. Auden |
Emily Bronte |
J. K. Rowling |
William Blake |
G. K. Chesterton |
John Donne |
William Golding |
Geoffrey Chaucer |
John Keats |
William Shakespeare |
English Literature Essay Topics
Aldous Huxley |
Doris Lessing |
Matthew Arnold |
Angela Carter |
Harold Pinter |
P. G. Wodehouse |
Anthony Burgess |
J.R.R. Tolkien |
Roald Dahl |
Charles Dickens |
James Herriot |
Salman Rushdie |
Charlotte Bronte |
Jane Austen |
Ted Hughes |
Christopher Isherwood |
John Bunyan |
Terry Pratchett |
Christopher Marlowe |
John Milton |
Thomas Hardy |
D. H. Lawrence |
Ken Follett |
Tom Stoppard |
Daphne du Maurier |
Lewis Carroll |
William Wordsworth |
French Literature Essay Topics
Alexandre Dumas |
George Sand |
Jules Verne |
Anais Nin |
Gustave Flaubert |
Marcel Proust |
Anatole France |
Guy de Maupassant |
Moliere |
Arthur Rimbaud |
Honore de Balzac |
Simone de Beauvoir |
Charles Baudelaire |
Jean Cocteau |
Victor Hugo |
Emile Zola |
Jean-Paul Sartre |
Voltaire |
Japanese Literature Essay Topics
Haruki Murakami |
Kobayashi Issa |
Shusaku Endo |
Kazuo Ishiguro |
Kobo Abe |
Yasunari Kawabata |
Kenzaburo Oe |
Matsuo Basho |
Yukio Mishima |
Russian Literature Essay Topics
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
Fyodor Dostoevsky |
Mikhail Sholokhov |
Alexander Pushkin |
Ivan Turgenev |
Nikolai Gogol |
Anna Akhmatova |
Joseph Brodsky |
Osip Mandelstam |
Anton Chekhov |
Leo Tolstoy |
Vladimir Mayakovsky |
Bella Akhmadulina |
Marina Tsvetaeva |
Vladimir Nabokov |
Boris Pasternak |
Maxim Gorky |
Yevgeny Yevtushenko |
Spanish Literature Essay Topics
Arturo Perez-Reverte |
Gustavo Adolfo Becquer |
Miguel de Cervantes |
Camilo Jose Cela |
Jacinto Benavente |
Miguel de Unamuno |
Federico Garcia Lorca |
Juan Ramon Jimenez |
Rosalia de Castro |
In its broadest sense literature is any written work; the term “literature” derives from Latin “literatura,” which means “writing formed with letters”, although some definitions include spoken or sung texts. More restrictively, literature is writing that possesses literary merit, and language that foregrounds literariness, as opposed to ordinary language. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction and whether it is poetry or prose; it can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story or drama; and works are often categorized according to historical periods or their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).
Some of the earliest forms of literature are the myths that have been passed down through history. Myths directly represent the culture and time period from which they were born. Ideological meanings can be assigned to history through the myths that evolved from a particular society. Present day politics has its roots in the mythology that was passed down through Greek and Roman culture. The myth is the primary language of historical memory. The demonstration of the influence mythology has had on times gone by and the present is a perfect example of the powerful affect that fictitious words can have on a group of people.
Authors very often write about how they believe society should be, or will be in the future. After reading about these idea and thought, society may subconsciously try to turn them into reality. The novel 1984, by George Orwell, written earlier in the 20th century, and talks about how society will be in the year 1984. To his audience he was thought to be crazy. The technology and way of life he spoke about was absolutely unbelievable, and only few people believed that anything he spoke about was possible. But, as it turns out, society in the year 1984 wasn’t too different from what he predicted.
Many novels have been controversial in society as well, some to the point of being banned from bookstores and libraries. Very often, authors write about there own lives through a character in their novel. By using such a method of writing, the author is writing about how society really is, from his her point of view. This can sometimes cause problems, as with The Catcher in the Rye, which was banned for an extended period of time, because society couldn’t handle being criticized in such a way. However, it was in fact reality, and it only took time for society to realize this, and put the book back on the shelf.