By Charles Dickens
Set amid smokestacks and factories, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is a blistering portrait of Victorian England because it struggles with the large monetary turmoil caused by the economic Revolution.
Championing the mind-numbing materialism of the interval is Thomas Gradgrind, one in every of Dickens’s such a lot vibrant characters. He opens the unconventional via arguing that girls and boys could be taught “nothing yet proof. evidence on my own are sought after in life.” Forbidding the advance of mind's eye, Gradgrind is eventually pressured to confront the result of his philosophy—his personal daughter’s bad sadness.
Full of suspense, humor, and tenderness, Hard occasions is a super safety of artwork in an age of mechanism.
Karen Odden acquired her Ph.D. from ny collage, the place she did her dissertation on Victorian literature. so much lately a lecturer at collage of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she is now a contract author and lives in Arizona.
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2 of this set) in the living library of every young and old adult. Ulysses was a divinely descended king, Crusoe a common sailor boy. Their adventures were in some ways radically different: Ulysses had his men and his ships, and wherever he went his life was thronged with companions lovely or terrible, human or divine; Crusoe, shipwrecked on a desert island, lived without the sound of human voice or the sight of human face until his “man Friday” came and relieved the solitude in which he faced and mastered fate.
Setting down the thing that befell”—as if history were an almanac, and an endless almanac at that! “Clearly,” the Syntopicon says, “the historians have different criteria of relevance in determining the selection and rejection of materials and different principles of interpretation in assigning the causes which explain what happened. ” The writer of history is not an Olympian—or even a Martian. The historian is a citizen of one nation or another, conditioned, like all of us, by the values and habits of time and place.
We are all ground-floor astronauts, air-conditioned explorers, nineteenth-hole champions, careening over the highways in our aerodynamic, turbo-charged automobiles, to arrive at work in time to make our meetings and generate our reports. ” Of all the adventurers who ever were—or were ever imagined— 28 Gateway to the Great Books two of the world’s favorites are Homer’s Odysseus (Ulysses) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Homer and Defoe lived thousands of years apart, but The Odyssey and Robinson Crusoe continue to fascinate the old and the young in every language and in every land.
