Edith Wharton is an important, though neglected novelist in the history of American literature. Her novels study the status of the women and explore their relationship with men in a male dominated society. Again and again she presents the state of exceptional, rising, ‘New Woman’ of the turn of the century to break out of her compressible role and attempting a venture rebellion. The Age of Innocence is on the theme that deals ironically with the affluent social world of New York. The novel has a theme of entrapment and the struggle of the intruder, both to maintain an adult sense of self in a childish society and to rescue a trapped male from that society.
It traces his life by comparing the author to her famous novel Dangerous Liaisons. The success of the scandal that has hosted Dangerous Liaisons is undoubtedly for many the ambiguity of the character of Laclos. How could a career officer, a good father and a good husband, write this burning epistolary novel? How could a man apparently so discreet have been in the turmoil of the Revolution, and take a not insignificant role? From there to deduce that Laclos was an embittered and revanchist, perhaps doubled by a redoubtable libertine, there was only one step, which was sometimes crossed very quickly, too much perhaps.
However, in the early and mid-twentieth century, many people criticized that it was barely a play to amuse the audience, but without any meaningful inspiration. In order to overturn this comment, it is necessary to have an analysis of the play. “… He developed a set of attitudes and postures for which he would eventually become famous. Chief among these were his flamboyant style of dress, his contempt for conventional values, and his belief in aestheticism…” (SparkNotes Editors), Wilde was dissatisfied with the Victorian social values. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde satirized the ideas of the Victorian upper class society through a few aspects.
Ezekiel 28:17 “Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor.” The world is made of first impressions and has been for as long as organized society has been around. This is usually based on family lineage, appearance, wealth, and intelligence. Jane Austen challenges this notion in her last work, Persuasion. She makes this clear by introducing characters in a very matter of fact form, and then contradicting her description with their dialogue and actions throughout the rest of the novel undeniably making reference to the idea that first impressions are not only a waste of meditation but are also usually quite off. The story of Persuasion is focused around the issues that surround marriage and courting during Jane Austen’s life.
The Great Gatsby understands the intricate struggle citizens possess with their desire for wonder and fantasy, particularly in American society. As Gatsby had with Daisy, fantasies for the future are a universal experience. The search for wonder and fantasy occasionally leads to the point of self-destruction, of which Joshua Rothman in his New Yorker article “The Serious Superficiality of The Great Gatsby” states is “most appealing about ‘Gatsby’; its mood of witty hopelessness, of vivacious self-destructiveness… This atmosphere of casual, defiant, disillusioned cool is the novel’s unique contribution to literature. It’s the reason the novel’s endured.” The Great Gatsby reflects Americans and the ultimate risks that will be held from their ideals. The novel serves as a cautionary tale of the costs of fantasy.
The Great Gatsby is a novel written by the author F. Scott Fitzgerald in nineteen twenty five. An important theme in this novel is the materialism of the nineteen twenties and the death of the American Dream. No character represents these two themes better than Daisy. Although the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, tries his best to make her appear to be worthy of Gatsby’s loyalty in the end she turns out to be shallow and selfish, despite her charm and looks. The novel’s main plot revolves around Gatsby trying to win her back.
he social and cultural background of the genre gothic novel Cultural and (academic.edu (2009)), the English Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole 's The Castle of Otranto (1765), which was enormously popular and quickly imitated by other novelists and soon became a recognizable genre, (academic.edu (2009)) continued to state that, modern readers, saw, The Castle of Otranto as a dull reading; except for the villain Manfred, the characters are insipid and flat; the action moves at a fast clip with no emphasis or suspense, despite the supernatural manifestations and a young maiden 's flight through dark vaults. The genre takes its name from Otranto 's medieval–or Gothic–setting; early Gothic novelists tended to set their novels in remote times like the Middle Ages and in remote places like Italy (Matthew Lewis 's The Monk, 1796) or the Middle East (William Beckford 's Vathek, 1786) (academic.edu (2009)). (academic.edu (2009)) continue to state some of the elements of a gothic novel which include: A castle, ruined or intact, haunted or not (the castle plays such a key role that it has been called the main character of the Gothic novel), Ruined buildings which are sinister or which arouse a pleasing melancholy, dungeons, underground passages, crypts, and catacombs which, in modern houses, become spooky basements or attics, extreme landscapes, like rugged mountains, thick forests, or icy wastes, and extreme weather, omens and ancestral curses, magic, supernatural manifestations,
Using such female authors as Jane Austen and Emily and Charlotte Bronte, she examined women and their struggles as artists, their position in literary history and need for independence. She also invented a female fellow of William Shakespeare, a sister named Judith to at times emphasize her feministic ideals. Woolf proved to be an innovative and influential 20th Century author. In some of her novels she didn’t follow the rules of plot and structure, but she chose to use stream-of-consciousness to emphasize the psychological aspects of her characters, as she claimed and asked the artists to be concerned with the fact that the psychological facet of the character is an
Charlotte and Emily Bronte are the most successful authors of their time; writing stories that contain truths that have stood the test of time. However, their success did not come easy. Bronte used a pen name to conceal her identity and shield herself from ridicule for the first few months after Jane Eyre was published. Even though Charlotte was not the most beautiful woman, she found abundant success in her talents in spite of the Victorian era’s belief that women’s value is found solely in how much beauty and money she possessed. In Charlotte Bronte’s coming of age novel, Jane Eyre, outward beauty deceives as it ironically represents a true evil in oneself.
Doubtless, this attitude represents a problem for Bronte. To some extent, she fails to shape an ideal orphan not only to the Victorian society, but also to any objective reader considering the different destines of both Jane and Bertha: "Yes" responded Abbot, "if [Jane] were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness: but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that" ( Bronte, 28). At the first glance, Jane appears to be a romantic novel in which the penniless, orphaned heroine, gets a home, and wealth at the end. But many of the critics regarded the novel to be "a dangerous book due to the outrages on decorum, as well as the moral perversity of a woman who defied Victorian social conventions" (Mozley, 432). Bronte can present her moral purpose in Jane Eyre in a calm manner to be more