We are consuming too many of our natural resources and our use of fossil fuels threaten the survival of our planet. The developing world seems to placing further strains upon the earth, with no signs of abatement in population growth or industrializ Continue Reading...
Wilfred Owen and Brecht
Wilfred Owen is indisputably one of the best war poets of 20th century. For him war was nothing but a futile exercise that produces mass death and destruction. It is amazing what the poet managed to achieve in his short life Continue Reading...
This is evident from the first as the poet writes,
I am inside someone -- who hates me. I look out from his eyes (1-3).
This approach allows him to take a jaundiced view of himself and criticize his own shortcomings, as if they were those of someo Continue Reading...
These young men were not immersed in the high modernist traditions of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot: rather, they were immersed in the experience of war and their own visceral response to the horrors they witnessed.
Thus a multifaceted, rather than Continue Reading...
people of all ages and backgrounds. Literature, like any historical document, allows reader to gain a larger understanding of cultures, history, society, and politics. Furthermore, literature helps to instill the reader with the ability to read and Continue Reading...
Instead, the soldiers about to serve should be 'treated' to the mimicking of gunfire, so they will be prepared for the trenches. In foxholes, after all, the soldier's 'hasty orisons' must keep time to the guns and the rifles. Owen uses personificati Continue Reading...
WWI and Literature
World War I was certainly one of the most productive periods in literature with millions of poets and authors emerging on the scene and each one contributing tremendously to the growth and progress of literature. It is quite stran Continue Reading...
Tolkien and the Canon
Is J.R.R. Tolkien a canonical writer? This depends, of course, on how we define canonical status -- or indeed who we acknowledge as our arbiter of canonicity. I will begin by noting the whiff of sanctimony in the very idea of a Continue Reading...
He was twenty-five when he died." ("Wilfred Own," 2005)
One figure, however, besides the more aristocratic poets, who is entirely fictional is a working class man named Billy Prior, a who had risen through the ranks to become an officer, but is now Continue Reading...
Victorian Female Sexuality
Victorian Sexuality: George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession and Thomas Hardy's "The Ruined Maid"
Women in the Victorian era must have suffered enormously under the massive double standards and the shameful image o Continue Reading...
The world would now be required to accept socialism, Leninism, and eventually Stalinism, as part of the European landscape.
With the defeat of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire; the shift in the balance of power moved toward the only Continue Reading...