Oscar Wilde’s Essay Example for Free

Oscar Wilde’s Essay The following essay will examine British Literature in two fold: the first being that of Oscar Wilde’s contribution to British Literature and the second being feminism in British Literature in the 1800’s and on. It is hoped that focusing on two separate but entangled subjects will make the paper more accessible and therefore broader in scope and understanding of the reader to British Literature. Peacocks and Sunflowers:Oscar Wilde’s â€Å"Immoral Aestheticism† as an Escape from Reality into the Realm of Beauty Gilbert, the author’s alter ego in Oscar Wilde’s essay â€Å"The Critic as Artist† (originally published in 1888) declared that â€Å"[a]ll art is immoral† (274), and that phrase turned into a manifesto for the â€Å"immoral aestheticism† doctrine of the famous dandy who decorated rooms with peacock feathers and showed in public with a sunflower in the buttonhole. The writer was condemned by contemporaries as a breacher of Victorian ‘moral’ style of living but justified by successors. As Ellmann explains, â€Å"[s]in is more useful to society than martyrdom, since it is self-expressive not self-repressive† and thus contributes more significantly to the acute goal of â€Å"the liberation of the personality† (Ellmann 310). The man who used to be convicted of the offence of â€Å"gross indecency† is praised now as an icon of decadent and modernist style, a revolutionary in aesthetics and ethics, and a prophet of beauty which is above and outside any boundaries. The concept of art and beauty as abstract notions being unrelated to the narrowly dichotomous morals takes a key position in Wilde’s oeuvre. Today’s critics are never tired in their coining of appropriate definitions for the writer’s aesthetic programme. Gillespie, one of the most important researchers of Wilde’s legacy, viewed it as consisting of â€Å"paradoxical gestures† which â€Å"delineate an aesthetic that celebrates the impulse to integrate, amalgamate, and conjoin rather than separate, dissipate, or disperse† (37). Although the writer was aware of â€Å"the grave spiritual dangers involved in a life of immoral action and experiment† (Pearce 164), he underlined the right of an artist to be immoral for the sake of eternal beauty. In his aestheticism, Wilde was an admirer and disciple of essayist and art critic Walter Horatio Pater with the latter’s emphasis on the esthete as a novel kind of being (Murphy 1992; Wood 2002). He was also immersed into the late 19th century cultural milieu as being involved into a polylogue on the topics of art, artist, ethics, and beauty which resulted in the emergence of Decadence and Modernism (Bell 1997). Altogether with the English fin de siecle men of art such as A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Christopher Dowson, George Moore Symons, and D. G. Rossetti, Wilde researched the concept of aesthetics as being constructed by a person who was proud of â€Å"[his] non-participation †¦ in ethical controversy† (Woodcock 53) and thus freed from the restrictions imposed by society and common law. Oscar Wilde’s â€Å"immoral aestheticism† as an integral part of the decadent and early modernist styles is what the present proposal attempts to look at. It will research Wilde’s critical and fictional legacy in regard to ideas and concepts as pertinent to the new understanding of relationship between art and morals. This proposal attempts to re-examine Oscar Wilde as a theorist of the novel aesthetics, establishing a link between the writer and other theorists and critics to prove that the call for immoral aestheticism was a brilliant attempt to overcome the boredom of reality and enter the world of absolute beauty. Modern Women’s Voices: Sexual Subjectivity in the texts of Victorian and contemporary British women writers Feminism is still one of the most popular critical lenses to zoom into details of history of literature and social life (Brennan 2002; Jackson 1998; Kemp 1997; Scott 1996), and it is proven to be useful within the framework of the given proposal aimed at tracing the common and differentiating points of the two critical periods of British literature. I am especially interested in the late Victorian epoch with its rise of independent women’s suffragist voices and the latest period with its diversity of tones and melodies composed by women writers amidst the turmoil of free speech and re-thinking of common gender values such as career, family, child-rearing, and gender relationships. The novels chosen are The Story of a Modern Woman by Ella Hepworth Dixon (1894), Anna Lombard by Victoria Cross (the pseudonym of Annie Sophie Cory1901), Foreign Parts by Janice Galloway (1994) and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding (2004). The earlier and later books are divided by almost a century but despite a temporal distance there are common motives and aspirations which approximate the Victorian ‘New Woman’ and a modern British female as depicted in fiction. The feminist movement of the late Victorian period was pre-conditioned by many factors which made the trend not accidental but seriously grounded in the wider social context being permeated by patriarchal ascendance and rigidness of social structure (Bernstein 1997; Lewis and Ardis 2003). The ‘New Women’ movement that acquired much power during the period from the late 1890s to roughly 1915 featured a range of opinions concerning the heightened role of a female in a modern society (Walls 2002; Mitchell 1999). As Ardis (1990) observed, Dixon went farther than her colleagues in asserting the preciousness and independency of a woman as a self-sustaining creature (see also Fehlbaum 2005), whereas Cross’s Anna Lombard represents another type of the late Victorian womanhood as sacrificing her desires and aspirations for the sake of the traditional familial institution. The most recent books by Galloway and Fielding cannot be straight-forwardly labeled as ‘feminist’ writing, although they utilise some stylistic elements of feminist narration (Greene 1991). Whereas Galloway vividly portrays contemporary women as being able to function outside the patriarchic framework but provides no answer to the question about the appropriateness of such life style, Fielding is often criticised for the attempts to find consensus with a men’s world and, therefore, to abandon the programme of modern Amazons (Marsh 2004). Anyhow, both contemporary British women of letters share specific ideas concerning authorship and the interplay between feminist and non-feminist traditions to the extent that they can be seen as spiritual sisters of their Victorian predecessors. Being equipped with solid theoretical instruments from gender studies and psychology (e. g. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory) to conceptualise the evolution of womanhood and gendered selves in Great Britain throughout a century, I hope to establish a link between late Victorian and recent women’s writings with a special emphasis on the literary features of the female novel. The freshness of the proposal is in the choice of research objects (all the four novels are not enough extensively discussed by academic critics) and the carrying of analysis within the theoretical framework concerning authorship that was proposed by a Russian scholar Michael Bakhtin.

Life :: essays research papers

Life; A Work In Progress The average person has a grand total of 2 billion seconds to live out their existance. For those of us lucky enough to live out this time in relative health, or to exceed it, shouldn't we be trying for something more? It ends, people. Life ends. There is coming a time when your heart stops beating and you lie dead and cold on the floor somewhere--and that is it. No redo's, no timeouts, no second chances. Only the bittersweet what-ifs that you will have plagued yourself with for the remaining moments of life. 2 billion seconds doesn't seem nearly as long as my life feels, and I am still a kid. And yet we waste time bickering over the television, fighting over the computer, and resenting each-other over petty quarrels. A saying comes to mind when you consider how sad people can be; when you honestly consider that they would throw their time away on such things. It is a classic case of not being able to see the forest, through all the trees. When infact, those trees that you are so desperately trying to see around are the forest. You are trying to get past that next tree and then, then the forest will be in plain site. Only, it isn't there, and one more tree is in the way. First the tree of graduation is in your way and soon the tree of college jumps behind it. The tree of mediocre jobs blocks your view for years as you try and see around it it. The tree of midlife, or of retirement get in your way as you try and see the trees of contentment, happiness and fulfillment that affirm that 'yes, you have made a difference', and that when your two billionth second chimes to a close, and your eyes glaze over, you will not have been forgotten. That is all we want, people. That is it. One simple goal that will push every American until they die. That one goal of having meaning. Trying to hold on to the fact that, "if I make a difference in someone else's life, then mine will have mattered." So the question is, if making a difference to someone else's life is so important, and they are trying for the same goal you are, then why isn't making a difference in your own life just as important.

Grimm Fairy Tales vs Disney Stories

Grimm vs. Disney: The Making of a Fairy Tale Amber Brandenburg English 121 Proffessor Kari Lomanno 8/13/2012 The fairy tales that we grew up with are not the originals. Disney and the brothers Grimm had two very different versions. While many of us grew up watching cute birds and mice following the woe begotten princess, the original stories were forgotten by most. These stories were far darker, ending in cruel justice for a stepsister or worse. The difference between aspects of the two tales discussed, in some instances, is the difference between night and day. Grimm fairy tales contain more violence, harsher villains, and swifter justice.The first example of this can be seen in the difference between Disney’s and Grimm’s versions of Cinderella. In the Disney version of the story, Cinderella is a poor girl who lives with her stepmother and sisters. She wishes to go to the ball and she falls in love with him before running off to make her curfew. Then of course, he come s to her rescue and everything ends happily ever after. The good characters are good and the bad characters are bad. There is a happy ending and no one really gets hurt in the end. Grimm’s Cinderella is a similar tale with some fiercer consequences to the villains.The Grimm version has many of the same plot elements and devices as the story we all know and love. In this version her father is still alive and still lets the rest of the family treat her like a slave. Instead of a fairy godmother granting her wish it is a tree she planted on her mother’s grave and some birds. When the sisters try on the golden shoe one cuts off her toes, while the other cuts off her heels and the birds chant that neither could be the prince’s proper bride. Finally, the sisters are punished at Cinderella’s wedding by birds who peck their eyes out, leaving them forever blind.Snow white, another acclaimed Disney tale, also contains plot devices and ending punishments that are ve ry different from the cookie cutter nice endings of Disney. Everyone knows that Snow white is the daughter of a King who remarries an evil stepmother. Everyone knows that when the queen discovers that Snow White’s beauty is greater than hers, she asks the huntsman to kill her. Finally, we all know that the dwarves take care of her until her death, at which point the prince comes to the rescue and awakens her with a kiss. These are all elements of the story that we come to expect when we hear the name Snow White.In the brothers Grimm version, the queen still demands the death of Snow White and the Huntsman still lets her go. Only this time he kills a boar and brings the queen back its lungs and liver and she eats them, thinking that they are from Snow White’s body. Snow White still meets the dwarves in the woods, but their introduction to her was more akin to that of goldilocks and the three bears. Then, when she is poisoned by the apple, the kiss of the prince is not w hat awakens her. Instead the prince begs the dwarves to have her dead body and the trip to the castle dislodges the apple bite caught in her throat.Finally, at the marriage of the happy couple, the queen arrives and is forced to dance in red hot iron shoes until she dies. Definitely not what one would remember from the Disney adaptation. These are just two examples out of many. The versions of fairy tales by Grimm and Disney are always similar in nature and moral. The differences in the details of the story range from minute to highly significant. The punishments placed upon the villains are always more severe than those placed upon the villains in the tales spun by Disney.The older Grimm stories definitely place a higher importance on the eye for an eye methodology of punishment than its newer Disney counterpart. The morals are the same, just the details and severities of the punishments differ. References Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm,  Sneewittchen, Kinder- und Hausmarchen, (Children 's and Household Tales — Grimms' Fairy Tales), final edition (Berlin, 1857), no. 53 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Cinderella (Children's and Household Tales — Grimms' Fairy Tales), final edition (Berlin, 1857), no. 21

Fact and Fiction About the Origins of Thanksgiving

Among the origin stories of the United States, few are more mythologized than the Columbus discovery story and the Thanksgiving story. The Thanksgiving story as we know it today is a fanciful tale shrouded by myth and omissions of important facts. Setting the Stage When the Mayflower Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock on December 16, 1620, they were well-armed with information about the region, thanks to the mapping and knowledge of their predecessors like Samuel de Champlain. He and untold numbers of other Europeans who had by then been journeying to the continent for well over 100 years already had well-established European enclaves along the eastern seaboard (Jamestown, Virginia, was already 14 years old and the Spanish had settled in Florida in the mid-1500s), so the Pilgrims were far from the first Europeans to set up a community in the new land. During that century the exposure to European diseases had resulted in pandemics of illness among the natives from Florida to New England that reduced Indian populations (aided as well by the Indian slave trade) by 75% and in many cases more — a fact well known and exploited by the Pilgrims. Plymouth Rock was actually the village of Patuxet, the ancestral land of the Wampanoag, which for untold generations had been a well-managed landscape cleared and maintained for corn fields and other crops, contrary to the popular understanding of it as a â€Å"wilderness.† It was also the home of Squanto. Squanto, who is famous for having taught the Pilgrims how to farm and fish, saving them from certain starvation, had been kidnapped as a child, sold into slavery and sent to England where he learned how to speak English (making him so useful to the Pilgrims). Having escaped under extraordinary circumstances, he found passage back to his village in 1619 only to find the majority of his community wiped out only two  years before by a plague. But a few remained and the day after the Pilgrims’ arrival while foraging for food they happened upon some households whose occupants were gone for the day. One of the colonists’ journal entries tells of their robbery of the houses, having taken â€Å"things† for which they â€Å"intended† to pay the Indians for at some future time. Other journal entries describe the raiding of corn fields and of â€Å"finding† other food buried in the ground, and the robbing of graves of â€Å"the prettiest things which we carried away with us, and covered the body back up.† For these findings, the Pilgrims thanked God for his help for how else could we have done it without meeting some Indians who might trouble us. Thus, the Pilgrims’ survival that first winter can be attributed to Indians both alive and dead, both witting and unwitting. The First Thanksgiving Having survived the first winter, the following spring Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to harvest berries and other wild foods and plant crops the Indians had been living on for millennia, and they entered into a treaty of mutual protection with the Wampanoag under the leadership of Ousamequin (known to the English as Massasoit). Everything we know about the first Thanksgiving is drawn from only two written records: Edward Winslow’s â€Å"Mourt’s Relation† and William Bradfords Of Plimouth Plantation. Neither of the accounts is very detailed and certainly not enough to conjecture the modern tale of Pilgrims having a Thanksgiving meal to thank the Indians for their help that we are so familiar with. Harvest celebrations had been practiced for eons in Europe as thanksgiving ceremonials had been for Native Americans, so its clear that the concept of Thanksgiving was not new to either group. Only Winslows account, written two months after it happened (which was likely sometime between September 22 and November 11), mentions the Indians’ participation. In the exuberance of the colonists’ celebration guns were fired and the Wampanoags, wondering if there was trouble, entered the English village with around 90 men. After showing up well-intended but uninvited they were invited to stay. But there wasnt enough food to go around so the Indians went out and caught some deer which they ceremonially gave to the English. Both accounts talk about a bountiful harvest of crops and wild game including fowl (most historians believe this refers to waterfowl, most likely geese and duck). Only Bradfords account mentions turkeys. Winslow wrote that the feasting carried on for three days, but nowhere in any of the accounts is the word â€Å"thanksgiving† used. Subsequent Thanksgivings Records indicate that although there was a drought the following year there was a day of religious thanksgiving, to which Indians werent invited. There are other accounts of Thanksgiving proclamations in other colonies throughout the rest of the century and into the 1700s. There is a particularly troubling one in 1673 at the end of King Phillips war in which an official Thanksgiving celebration was proclaimed by the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony after a massacre of several hundred Pequot Indians. Some scholars argue that Thanksgiving proclamations were announced more often for the celebration of the mass murder of Indians than for harvest celebrations. The modern Thanksgiving holiday America celebrates is thus derived from bits and pieces of traditional European harvest celebrations, Native American spiritual traditions of thanksgiving, and spotty documentation (and the omission of other documentation). The result is the rendering of a historical event that is more fiction than truth. Thanksgiving was made an official national holiday by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, thanks to the work of Sarah J. Hale, an editor of a popular ladies magazine of the time. Interestingly, nowhere in the text of President Lincoln’s proclamation is any mention of Pilgrims and Indians. For more information, see â€Å"Lies My Teacher Told Me† by James Loewen.