Violence is an act that causes harm to someone. The harm can be physical or mental. Physical harm includes wounds and injuries, while mental harm is the words said that causes you to be hurt mentally. Bullying someone can cause you mental harm. There is many more meanings to violence than this. There is not only one.

Violence is an act that is always present all around you and in almost all books. Where ever you look you can see some type of violence.

Violence can be taken as “symbolic, thematic, biblical, Shakespearean, Romantic, allegorical, transcendent” (Foster 88). Violence also can be cultural or societal.

Violence in literature, many times, has to be looked and thought about in deeper meaning not just as fighting and killing.

According to Foster, there are two types of violence in literature. The first type of violence in literature includes injuries the author causes a character. The injuries that the author causes the character result from, “ shootings, stabbings, garrotings, drownings, poisonings, bludgeonings, bombings, hit-and-run accidents, starvations,” and many more (Foster 89). The injuries that are caused can be because of another person in the story or themselves.

An example could be Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, in which the character “Emma Bovary solves her problems with poison” (Foster 89).

The second type of violence in literature is the death of a character an author causes “in the interest of plot advancement and thematic development” (Foster 90). So basically to help the story and interest the readers the author includes death.

An example of this would be the death of Mrs. Joe in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Another example of this would be “death of Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)” (Foster 90).

An example that fits for both types of violence is the Harry Potter books because of the hatred between Harry and Voldemort. This hatred caused many injuries and deaths of the people in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The most prominent or famous genre for violence is mysteries. Many deaths occur during the whole book. Those deaths that

occur in mysteries are meaningless, and “we scarcely notice the deaths in a detective novel” (Foster 90).

Deaths in mysteries aren’t symbolic, but they do play an important role in the story because mysteries are about solving the crime.

There is no deeper meaning to the violence in these books, it is just a problem that is solved, a question that is answered, and the criminal that’s punished.

Fiction, drama, and poetry have layers, which mean that the violence in the book are symbolic or have deeper meaning.

Beloved is a book in which a slave, Sethe, kills her daughter. This violence is symbolic because Sethe didn’t want her daughter to go through what she had. Slavery was torture to her. This was “an action that speaks for the experience of a race at a certain horrific moment in history” (Foster 91). You can’t just think that she killed her daughter without having a reason behind it; Sethe didn't want her daughter to suffer.

Accidents happen all the time in life, but in literature they are not accidents because they are "planned, plotted, and executed by somebody” (Foster 95).

Violence is almost never introduced to you straightforwardly in books.

Many authors wouldn’t be well known today if they hadn’t included violence in their books. Some authors are Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Great Expectations has both types of violence that is in present literature. The first type is present when Orlick hits or injures Mrs. Joe with a hammer on her head. When Pip saw Mrs. Joe injured, he became aware that his sister “lying without sense or movement on the bare boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand when her face was turned towards the fire” (Dickens 115). The second type of violence occurs when Magwitch dies and doesn’t get hanged after Pip told him about Estella “his head dropped quietly to his chest” (Dickens 427).

Almost every book you read has some kind of violence in it. You see violence all the time on the news, in movies, and on the internet. Violence is something you always hear about everyday, whether it occurs to you or someone else. If you turn on your TV at home, and switch to a news channel you are almost always likely to hear about violence. Violence is hard not to hear about in this world because it is always happening.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Delaware: Prestwick House, Inc., 2005. Print.

Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature like a Professor. New York; Harper-Collins Publishers, Inc., 2003. Print.