[Edit] Works
Thackeray began as a satirist and parodist, writing papers with a sneaking fondness for roguish upstarts like Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair and the title characters of The Luck of Barry Lyndon and Catherine. In his earliest works, writing under such pseudonyms as Charles James Yellowplush, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, and George Savage Fitz-Boodle, he tended towards the savage in his attacks on high society, military prowess, the institution of marriage, and hypocrisy.
One of his earliest works, "Timbuctoo" (1829), contained his burlesque upon the subject set for the Cambridge Chancellor's medal for English verse, (the contest was won by Tennyson with "Timbuctoo"). His writing career really began with a series of satirical sketches now usually known as The Yellowplush Papers, which appeared in Fraser's Magazine beginning in 1837. These were adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2009, with Adam Buxton playing Charles Yellowplush.[5]
Between May 1839 and February 1840, Fraser's published the work sometimes considered Thackeray's first novel, Catherine, originally intended as a satire of the Newgate school of crime fiction but ending up more as a rollicking picaresque tale in its own right.
In The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a novel serialised in Fraser's in 1844, Thackeray explored the situation of an outsider trying to achieve status in high society, a theme which he developed more successfully in Vanity Fair with the character of Becky Sharp, the artist's daughter who rises nearly to the heights by manipulating the other characters.
He is best known now for Vanity Fair, with its deft skewerings of human foibles and its roguishly attractive heroine. His large novels from the period after this, once described unflatteringly by Henry James as examples of "loose baggy monsters," have faded from view, perhaps because they reflect a mellowing in the author, who became so successful with his satires on society that he seemed to lose his zest for attacking it.
The later works include Pendennis, a sort of bildungsroman depicting the coming of age of Arthur Pendennis, a kind of alter ego of Thackeray's who also features as the narrator of two later novels, The Newcomes and The Adventures of Philip. The Newcomes is noteworthy for its critical portrayal of the "marriage market," while Philip is noteworthy for its semi-autobiographical depiction of Thackeray's early life, in which the author partially regains some of his early satirical zest.
Also notable among the later novels is The History of Henry Esmond, in which Thackeray tried to write a novel in the style of the eighteenth century. In fact, the eighteenth century held a great appeal for Thackeray. Not only Esmond but also Barry Lyndon and Catherine are set then, as is the sequel to Esmond, The Virginians, which takes place in America and includes George Washington as a character who nearly kills one of the protagonists in a duel.
28. Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.
While he regarded himself primarily as a poet who composed novels mainly for financial gain, he became and continues to be widely regarded for his novels, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd. The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional county of Wessex (based on the Dorchester region where he grew up) and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances.
Hardy's poetry, first published in his fifties, has come to be as well regarded as his novels and has had a significant influence over modern English poetry, especially after The Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s cited Hardy as a major figure.
28. Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, also known as Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, Tess of the d'Urbervilles or just Tess, is a novel by Thomas Hardy, first published in 1891. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper, The Graphic.[1] Though now considered an important work of English literature, the book received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual mores of Hardy's day. The original manuscript is on display at the British Library,[2] showing that it was originally titled "Daughter of the d'Urbervilles."[3]
Hardy's writing often illustrates the "ache of modernism", and this theme is notable in Tess, which, as one critic noted,[4] portrays "the energy of traditional ways and the strength of the forces that are destroying them". Hardy describes modern farm machinery with infernal imagery; also, at the dairy, he notes that the milk sent to the city must be watered down because the townspeople cannot stomach whole milk. Angel's middle-class fastidiousness makes him reject Tess, a woman whom Hardy often portrays as a sort of Wessex Eve, in harmony with the natural world. When he parts from her and goes to Brazil, the handsome young man gets so ill that he is reduced to a "mere yellow skeleton." All these instances are typically interpreted as indications of the negative consequences of man's separation from nature, both in the creation of destructive machinery and in the inability to rejoice in pure nature.
Another important theme of the novel is the sexual double standard to which Tess falls victim; despite being, in Hardy's view, a truly good woman, she is despised by society after losing her virginity before marriage. Hardy plays the role of Tess's only true friend and advocate, pointedly subtitling the book "a pure woman faithfully presented" and prefacing it with Shakespeare's words from The Two Gentlemen of Verona: "Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed/ Shall lodge thee." However, although Hardy clearly means to criticise Victorian notions of female purity, the double standard also makes the heroine's tragedy possible, and thus serves as a mechanism of Tess's broader fate. Hardy variously hints that Tess must suffer either to atone for the misdeeds of her ancestors, or to provide temporary amusement for the gods, or because she possesses some small but lethal character flaw inherited from the ancient clan.
From numerous pagan and neo-Biblical references made about her, Tess has been viewed variously as an Earth goddess or as a sacrificial victim.[5] Early in the novel, she participates in a festival for Ceres, the goddess of the harvest, and when she performs a baptism she chooses a passage from Genesis, the book of creation, over more traditional New Testament verses. At the end, when Tess and Angel come to Stonehenge, commonly believed in Hardy's time to be a pagan temple, she willingly lies down on an altar, thus fulfilling her destiny as a human sacrifice.
This symbolism may help explain Tess as a personification of nature — lovely, fecund, and exploitable — while animal imagery throughout the novel strengthens the association. Examples are numerous: Tess's misfortunes begin when she falls asleep while driving Prince to market, thus causing the horse's death; at Trantridge, she becomes a poultry-keeper; she and Angel fall in love amid cows in the fertile Froom valley; and on the road to Flintcombe-Ashe, she kills some wounded pheasants to end their suffering. In any event, Tess emerges as a character not because of this symbolism but because "Hardy's feelings for Tess were strong, perhaps stronger than for any of his other invented personages."[6]
In his novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) deals with issues of morality in two fundamental ways; one is the relativity of moral values – their variation according to time and place – the other is the opposition between man-made laws and Nature. These issues are explored through the experiences of Tess Durbyfield as she encounters the problems of life, and exemplify Hardy’s idea of the ‘two forces’:
So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. (p.332)
The ‘circumstantial will against enjoyment’ is often a matter of morality or convention, but equally often it is a matter of chance, or fate.
The first example of the relativity of moral values is seen in the clash of attitudes between Tess and her mother. Tess’s education has given her a wider and more advanced outlook, transcending the parochial conventions of her mother’s world.
Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folklore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely revised code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily understood. (p.50)
In their attempt to solve their problems by re-associating themselves with their old family Mr. and Mrs. Durbyfield are clinging to an old, dead tradition. It is an unrealistic retrogressive act with which Tess would rather not be associated.
If there is such a lady, it would be enough for us if she were friendly – not to expect her to give us help . . . I’d rather try to get work. (p.64)
Tess is reluctant to approach, then to work for, the d’Urbervilles, but her reluctance is outweighed by her sense of a duty to make reparation for the loss of the horse – a virtuous motive – and the obstinate insistence of her mother. Tess is trapped; her freedom of choice is curtailed by a combination of ‘the fates’, (the death of the horse and the discovery of family connections), and filial duty.
She had hoped to be a teacher at the school, but the fates seemed to decide otherwise. (p.77)
In Hardy’s world worthy ambitions are thwarted by circumstance, and modern enlightenment is strangled by old conventions.
The representation of the cheapening and decay of ancient traditions is one of the many roles of Alec d’Urberville. He is of course not a d’Urberville at all, and Hardy depicts his house in a way which highlights its modernity, and its disharmony with the natural and ancient surroundings.
It was of recent erection – indeed almost new – and of the same rich red colour that formed such a contrast with the evergreens of the lodge. Far behind . . . stretched . . . a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primeval date, where Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks . . . all this sylvan antiquity . . . was outside the immediate boundaries of the estate . . . On the extensive lawn stood an ornamental tent. (p.67)
Mr. and Mrs. Durbyfield cling to their obsolete idea of the family in total ignorance of the reality, and Tess suffers as a result.
In this first section of the novel specific moral issues have not been raised, but the absence of a fixed viewpoint in a changing society has been established, as has the way a combination of fate and social pressure can restrict personal freedom.
The specific moral issues come into play with Tess’s pregnancy by Alec. In the scene of Tess’s seduction Hardy avoids examining to what extent she was compliant, though by reference to the ‘primeval yews’, ‘roosting birds’, and ‘hopping rabbits’ (p.107) he stresses the naturalness of the event. With respect to its wider significance, in and authorial comments, he indicates one of his main themes, the inexplicable injustice and cruelty of fate:
Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousands of years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order. (p.107)
Tess is repeatedly, as in the passage above, described in terms of natural simplicity and beauty.
Tess’s first encounter with the unnatural artifice of moral dogma coincides with her seduction into the corrupt world of Alec d’Urberville. The Christian slogan in red paint conflicts physically and spiritually with nature, and Tess is the spokesperson for nature:
THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBRETH, NOT 2 Pet.ii.3
Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying tints of the copses, the blue air of the horizon, and the lichened stile-boards, these staring vermilion words shone forth . . . ‘I think they are horrible’, said Tess. ‘Crushing! Killing! (p.114-115)
Hardy’s attitude towards Christianity is made quite clear:
The last grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time. (p.115)
Tess feels guilty about her liaison with Alec. Hardy looks very closely at this feeling of guilt and suggests that it is unnecessary for a number of reasons. Firstly, although she has broken an accepted social law, the villagers of Martlott do not morally censure her. She has an illegitimate child, but they still accept her as an individual, a member of the community, and do not look upon her as an outcast.
She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly – the thought of the world’s concern at her situation – was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides herself Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to them – ‘Ah, she makes herself unhappy.’ (p.127)
Tess imagines her guilt to be a natural consequence of her actions, not only in the eyes of the community but also in the eyes of nature. Hardy dispels this notion too. While walking in the hills:
She looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference . . . She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly. (p.121)
Her mind is tormented by ‘a crowd of moral hobgoblins’ (p.120), which have been put there by her exposure to Christianity and which pervert her natural inclinations.
Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations. (p.127)
Hardy’s intention with Tess is to test his concept of true natural goodness against the world.
her moral values having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency. (p.309)
She had set herself to stand or fall by her qualities (p.341)
Tess adheres to no doctrine or tradition, and represents Hardy’s direct challenge to both when she confronts the vicar on the subject of her baby’s baptism and burial. After baptising her baby herself she (as does Hardy) feels:
If Providence would not ratify such an act of approximation she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the irregularity. (p.131)
Hardy undermines the authority of the vicar by calling him a ‘tradesman’ (p.132) and showing how Tess’s genuine human feelings sway his nobler feelings against his doctrine. He cannot give the baby a Christian burial, but with the account of Tess’s simple sincerity in tending the baby’s grave we are made to feel that the refusal was more off a loss to Christianity than to Tess.
Angel Clare’s history parallels that of Tess in that he has broken away from his family through exposure to modern ideas. He outrages his father, the ‘straightforward simple-minded . . . man of fixed ideas’ (p.153) by wishing to use a university education for the ‘honour and glory of man’ (p.154) and not of God. Just as Tess is breaking away from parochial convention and superstition, he is breaking away from adherence to received dogma.
At Talbothay’s Dairy Angel becomes aware of the closeness to natural rhythms involved in the agricultural way of life. He imagines he can appreciate and adjust to this new way of life, but he cannot become part of it. He sees Tess in idealised terms:
What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is! (p.158)
And he cannot accept it when that illusion is shattered
In the growing relationship between Tess and Angel, Hardy stresses the natural inevitability of their passion.
All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale. (p.168)
But the immorality attached to Tess’s past has been established as ‘unnatural’, and this brings about a crisis for both of them, in which fate plays its part in making the results as tragic as possible. Later, Angel says that if Tess had told him her history earlier he might have been able to accept it. Tess must be held to blame for not telling him, though fate, in the letter she wrote him remaining unseen, and social pressure from her mother, are also partly responsible. Angel has imagined himself to be an enlightened humanist, but when he discovers his wife’s immoral history he finds that his new attitudes have penetrated no deeper than his intellect.
‘I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all.’ ‘And love me?’ To this question he did not answer. (p.274-5)
And Tess, as she often does, verbalises the viewpoint Hardy is expressing through her:
‘It is in your own mind what you are angry at Angel; it is not in me.’ (p.274)
So the intellectual and free-thinking Angel is the ‘slave to custom and conventionality’ (p.309), and the relatively ignorant Tess is the true humanist. It takes Angel a year of travelling and suffering during which ‘he had mentally aged a dozen years’ (p.388) before he can throw off his strictly moral upbringing and realise the validity of Tess’s viewpoint.
34. Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of the City of Leicester CBE (15 October 1905 – 1 July 1980) was an English physicist and novelist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government.[1] He is best known for his series of novels known collectively as Strangers and Brothers, and for "The Two Cultures", a 1959 lecture in which he laments the gulf between scientists and "literary intellectuals".[2] Corridors of Power (1964) is the ninth book in C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series.
Its title had become a household phrase referring to the centres of government and power after Snow coined it in his earlier novel, Homecomings. (A slightly rueful Foreword to Corridors of Power expresses the hope that he is at least entitled to use his own cliché.)
Corridors is concerned with the attempts of an English MP to influence the country's policy on nuclear weapons in the 1950s.
35. Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Greene was notable for his ability to combine serious literary acclaim with widespread popularity.
Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.[3] Several works such as The Confidential Agent, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage.
Greene suffered from bipolar disorder,[4] which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife Vivien, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".[5] William Golding described Greene as "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety." Henry Graham Greene was born in 1904 in St. John’s House, a boarding house of Berkhamsted School on Chesham Road in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England, where his father was housemaster.[7] He was the fourth of six children; his younger brother, Hugh, became Director-General of the BBC, and his elder brother, Raymond, an eminent physician and mountaineer.
His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were second cousins; both members of a large, influential family that included the owners of Greene King brewery, bankers and businessmen. Charles Greene was Second Master at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry, who was married to Charles' cousin. Another cousin was the right-wing pacifist Ben Greene, whose politics led to his internment during World War II.
In 1910 Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry as headmaster of Berkhamsted. Graham also attended the school as a boarder. Bullied and profoundly depressed he made several suicide attempts; including, as he wrote in his autobiography, by Russian roulette and by taking aspirin before going swimming in the school pool. In 1920, aged 16, in what was a radical step for the time, he was sent for psychoanalysis for six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day student. School friends included Claud Cockburn the satirist, and Peter Quennell the historian.
In 1922 he was for a short time a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.[8]
In 1925, while an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, his first work, a poorly received volume of poetry entitled Babbling April, was published.[9] Greene suffered from periodic bouts of depression whilst at Oxford, and largely kept to himself.[10] Of Greene's time at Oxford, his contemporary Evelyn Waugh noted that: "Graham Greene looked down on us (and perhaps all undergBrighton Rock is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1938, and later made into films, a 1947 film and a 2010 film. The novel is a murder thriller set in 1930s Brighton. The title is a reference to a confectionery traditionally sold at seaside resorts, used as a metaphor for human character. The novel ties into Greene's earlier 'entertainment' A Gun for Sale, Raven's murder of mob boss Kite, mentioned in A Gun For Sale, allows Pinkie to take over his mob and thus sets the events of the novel in motion.raduates) as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelryCharles "Fred" Hale comes to Brighton on assignment to anonymously distribute cards for a newspaper competition (this is a variant of "Lobby Lud" in which the name of the person to be spotted is "Kolley Kibber"). The antihero of the novel, Pinkie Brown, is a teenage sociopath and up-and-coming gangster. Hale had betrayed the former leader of the gang Pinkie now controls, by writing an article in the Daily Messenger about a slot machine racket for which the gang were responsible. Ida Arnold, a plump, kind-hearted and decent woman, is drawn into the action by a chance meeting with the terrified Hale after he has been threatened by Pinkie's gang. After being chased through the streets and lanes of Brighton, Hale accidentally meets Ida again on the Palace Pier, but eventually Pinkie murders Hale. Pinkie's subsequent attempts to cover his tracks and remove evidence of Hale's Brighton visit lead to a chain of fresh crimes and to an ill-fated marriage to a waitress called Rose who unknowingly has the power to destroy his alibi. Ida decides to pursue Pinkie relentlessly, because she believes it is the right thing to do, and also to protect Rose from the deeply disturbed teenage gangster she has married.
Although ostensibly an underworld thriller, the book is also a challenge to Roman Catholic doctrine concerning the nature of sin and the basis of morality. Pinkie and Rose are Catholics, as was Greene, and their beliefs are contrasted with Ida's strong but non-religious moral sensibility.
Main Characters
Pinkie: The anti-hero of the story, merciless to his victims, simultaneously obsessed and repulsed by sex and human connection. He is the leader of 'the mob' despite being the youngest at 17.
Dallow: Pinkie's second in command - the only member of the mob Pinkie feels he can confide in.
Cubitt Another mob member who lives at 'Frank's' with Pinkie and Dallow. He leaves the gang when Pinkie reveals that he (Pinkie) killed Spicer.
Spicer: An aging mob member resident at Frank's . From the beginning he expresses discomfort with the gang's increasing violence. Pinkie's mistrust of him leads to him being murdered by Pinkie for fear of him being 'milky' and leaking incriminating information to Ida Arnold or the Police.
Rose: A poor, modest, and naive girl who becomes Pinkie's girlfriend and wife. She is also a Roman Catholic like Pinkie and falls in love with him despite his advances on her being purely to keep her from giving incriminating evidence. Pinkie is usually repulsed by her but later has the occasional feeling of tenderness towards her.
Ida Arnold: Ida takes up the role of the detective, hunting down Pinkie to bring justice to Hale. Although this is her original motive, when she finds out that Pinkie is marrying Rose she does so to save the girl. Ida represents the force of justice in this novel, and in contrast to Pinkie and Rose is on the side of 'Right and Wrong'. She acquires information from Cubitt once he is cast out of the gang which significantly aids her investigation.
36. of young from the more democratic layers of society to receive higher education at universities. But on graduating, these students found they had no prospects in life; unemployment had increased after the war. There appeared works dealing with such characters, angry young men who were angry with everything and everybody, as no one was interested to learn what their ideas on life and society were. Outstanding writers of this trend were John Wain,
Kingsley Amis and the dramatist John Osborne. The sixties saw a new type of literature. The criticism was revealed in the "working-class novel" as it was called. These novels deal with characters coming from the working class. The best known writer of this trend is Alan Sillitoe. Much of post-war English literature is in the form of novels, and up to the present the novel remains
the most popular literature genre in Britain. Contemporary English novelists are represented by several different trends. Since sixties the literary life in Great Britain has developed greatly. The new time brings new heroes, new experience in theatrical life and poetry, new forms and standards in prosaic works. The specific feature of nowadays literature is the variety of genres and styles, which
inrich the world's literature. Alongside with the realistic method the symbolic one takes place and develops further. On the one hand, the themes in the modern literary works concern more global problems: the Peace and the War, the environmental protection, the relations between the mankind and Universe. But on the other hand, the duties and the obligations of the individual man, the psychology of the human nature, the life's situations and the ways of solving the problems, the power and money
37. The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in America in the mid-to-late 18th century (1715-1789), especially as it relates to American Revolution on the one hand and the European Enlightenment on the other. Influenced by the scientific revolution of the 17th century and the humanist period during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature, society and religion.
Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon liberty, democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance – culminating in the drafting of the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Attempts to reconcile science and religion resulted in a rejection of prophecy, miracle and revealed religion, often in preference for Deism. Historians have considered how the ideas of John Locke and republicanism merged together to form republicanism in the United States. The most important leaders of the American Enlightenment include Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
The Americans closely followed English and Scottish political ideas, as well as some French thinkers such as Montesquieu.[1] They paid little attention to Voltaire or Rousseau or to German theorists. John Locke was especially influential.[2] In addition the Americans paid very close attention to the ideas of the "country party" in England, which attacked the Court party that was in power. From the Country Party the Americans picked up republicanism, which became a major component of American political values Both the Moderate Enlightenment and a Radical or Revolutionary Enlightenment were reactions against the authoritarianism, irrationality and obscurantism of the established churches. Philosophes such as Voltaire depicted organized Christianity as a tool of tyrants and oppressors and as being used to defend monarchism, it was seen as hostile to the development of reason and the progress of science and incapable of verification.
An alternative religion was Deism, the philosophical belief in a deity based on reason, rather than religious revelation or dogma. It was a popular perception among the philosophes, who adopted deistic attitudes to varying degrees. Deism greatly influenced the thought of intellectuals and Founding Fathers, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, perhaps George Washington and, especially, Thomas Jefferson.[14] The most articulate exponent was Thomas Paine, whose The Age of Reason was written in France in the early 1790s, and soon reached America. Paine was highly controversial; when Jefferson was attacked for his Deism in the 1800 election, Republican politicians took pains to distance their candidate from Paine.[
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705[1]] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed both the first public lending library in America and the first fire department in Pennsylvania.
Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity; as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies, then as the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation.[2] Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical and democratic values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat."[3] To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."[4]
Franklin, always proud of his working class roots, became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies. He was also partners with William Goddard and Joseph Galloway the three of whom published the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper that was known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the British monarchy in the American colonies.[5] He became wealthy publishing Poor Richard's Almanack and The Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin gained international renown as a scientist for his famous experiments in electricity and for his many inventions, especially the lightning rod. He played a major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and was elected the first president of the American Philosophical Society. Franklin became a national hero in America when he spearheaded the effort to have Parliament repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations. For many years he was the British postmaster for the colonies, which enabled him to set up the first national communications network. He was active in community affairs, colonial and state politics, as well as national and international affairs. From 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he freed his slaves and became one of the most prominent abolitionists.
His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and status as one of America's most influential Founding Fathers, have seen Franklin honored on coinage and money; warships; the names of many towns, counties, educational institutions, namesakes, and companies; and more than two centuries after his death, countless cultural references
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 (April 2, 1743 O.S.) – July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Father who was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and the third President of the United States (1801–1809). At the beginning of the American Revolution, Jefferson served in the Continental Congress, representing Virginia. He then served as a wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781). In 1768 he designed and built a large mansion on a 5,000 acre plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia, which he named Monticello. Just after the war ended, from mid-1784 Jefferson served as a diplomat, stationed in Paris, initially as a commissioner to help negotiate commercial treaties. In May 1785, he became the United States Minister to France. He was the first United States Secretary of State (1790–1793) during the administration of President George Washington. Upon resigning his office, with his close friend James Madison he organized the Democratic-Republican Party. Elected Vice-President in 1796 opposed to John Adams, Jefferson with Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which attempted to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts and formed the basis of states' rights.
Elected president in what Jefferson called the Revolution of 1800, he oversaw a peaceful transition in power, purchased the vast Louisiana Territory from France (1803), and sent the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806) to explore the new west. His second term was beset with troubles at home, such as the failed treason trial of his former Vice President Aaron Burr, and escalating trouble with Britain. With Britain at war with Napoleon, he tried aggressive economic warfare; however, his embargo laws did more damage to American trade and the economy, and provoked a furious reaction in the Northeast. Jefferson has often been rated in scholarly surveys as one of the greatest U.S. presidents, though since the mid-twentieth century, some historians have increasingly criticized him.[1][2]
A leader in the Enlightenment, Jefferson was a polymath who spoke five languages and was deeply interested in science, religion and philosophy. His interests led him to assist in founding the University of Virginia in his post-presidency years. While not an orator, he was an indefatigable letter writer and corresponded with many influential people in America and Europe. As part of the Virginia planter elite and, as a tobacco planter, Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves throughout his lifetime. Like many of his contemporaries, he viewed Africans as being racially inferior. His views on slavery were complex, and changed over the course of his life. He was a leading American opponent of the international slave trade, and signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves on March 2, 1807.
After Martha Jefferson, his wife of eleven years, died in 1782, Thomas remained a widower for the rest of his life; his marriage produced six children, with only two surviving to adulthood. In 1802 allegations surfaced that he was also the father of his house slave Sally Hemings' children. In 1998, DNA tests revealed a match between her last child and the Jefferson male family line. The paternity of these children remains a matter of debate among historians.
Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 [1] (NS February 9, 1737) – June 8, 1809) was an English American author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.[2] He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination."[3]
Born in Thetford, in the English county of Norfolk, Paine immigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), the all-time best-selling American book that advocated colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. "Common Sense" was so influential that John Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of 'Common Sense,' the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”[4]
Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), in part a defense of the French Revolution against its critics. His attacks on British writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and conviction in absentia for the crime of seditious libel. Despite not speaking French, he was elected to the French National Convention in 1792. The Girondists regarded him as an ally, so, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December of 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of The Age of Reason (1793–94), his book that advocates deism, promotes reason and freethinking, argues against institutionalized religion and Christian doctrines. He also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.
In 1802 he returned to America where he died on June 8, 1809. Only six people attended his funeral as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity.[5]
38. Romanticism (or the Romantic era/Period) was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe and strengthened in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.[1] In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,[3] education[4] and natural history.[5]
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror, and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made spontaneity a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.
Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the standard ways of contemporary society.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.[6] Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.
39James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.
40Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of one of America's most famous and popular books, helped to strengthen the Abolition movement by bringing white Americans and people around the world to the realization of the cruelties and misery endured by black slaves in the 1850s. Her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was one of the biggest sellers of the nineteenth century, second only to sales of the Bible. Since its publication, the book has never been out of print.
Stowe was born June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut. She was the seventh child of prominent Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher and his wife Roxana Foote Beecher, who died when Harriet was five. The Stowes grew up in an environment steeped in a Protestant tradition that demanded living a pious and moral life. Stowe's younger brother, Henry Ward Beecher, eventually became one of the country's most famous preachers and a major leader of the abolition movement. Her sister, Catharine, established several schools for young women throughout the United States.
Stowe attended Catharine's Hartford Female Seminary, one of the only schools open to young women at the time. She received an excellent education, and blossomed as a writer under her sister's tutelage. In 1832, she accompanied her sister and father to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Catharine opened another school and
their father became president of Lane Theological Seminary. The following year, in 1833, Stowe coauthored and published her first book—a children's geography—under her sister's name.
Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction written by English writers seeking an end to the slave trade in Britain and its colonies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Historians and literary critics find the roots of English nineteenth-century abolitionist literature in the preceding century. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals such as compassionate humanitarianism and a new concept of liberty, combined with a growing religious zeal which stressed the perfectibility of mankind and the brotherhood of all races, caused profound changes in how the English thought and wrote about slavery. A great deal of scholarship has devoted itself to tracing the growth of antislavery sentiment in English poetry and literature from the eighteenth century, especially in that century's romantic idealization of the “noble savage.” However halting and sporadic these changes in racial attitudes expressed in literature were, most critics agree that by the end of the eighteenth century abolitionism had gained considerable momentum and had become a cause championed by many of England's most respected and influential Romantic writers.
41. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),[2] the latter often called "the Great American Novel."
Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He apprenticed with a printer. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", which became very popular and brought nationwide attention. His travelogues were also well-received. Twain had found his calling.
He achieved great success as a writer and public speaker. His wit and satire earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.
He lacked financial acumen, and, though he made a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he squandered it on various ventures, in particular the Paige Compositor, and was forced to declare bankruptcy. With the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers he eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain worked hard to ensure that all of his creditors were paid in full, even though his bankruptcy had relieved him of the legal responsibility.
Twain was born during a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it" as well. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age,"[3] and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature."[4]
