Oliver Twist Essay -- Essays Papers

Oliver Twist Have you ever thought about how it would be to live in a time of poverty? How would life be if you were poor and did not know from where you would be getting your next meal? What would it be like to be forced to live in a workhouse? These are some of the questions you might ask yourself if you were living in early nineteenth century England. Dickens addresses these issues in his timeless masterpiece Oliver Twist. In the story of Oliver Twist, Dickens uses past experiences from his childhood and targets the Poor Law of 1834 which renewed the importance of the workhouse as a means of relief for the poor. Dickens' age was a period of industrial development marked by the rise of the middle class (Wagenknecht 219). In the elections brought about by the accession of William IV in 1830, the Tories lost control of the government. Assumption of power by the Whigs opened the way to an era of accelerated progress (Kaste 8). In this time period children worked just as much, if not more, than some of the adults. After 1833, an increased amount of legislation was enacted to control the hours of labor and working conditions for children and women in manufacturing plants. The Poor Law of 1834 provided that all able bodied paupers must reside in a workhouse (8). Widespread hostility was felt to the new law; many believed that life was harder in a workhouse than in prison (Rooke 22). The plan was successful from one standpoint, for within three years the cost of poor relief was reduced by more than one-third. However, this system was sharply censured. The increased prevalence of crime was attributed towards it. Inmates of the workhouses became objects of public stigma, and to further heighten the unpopularity of the institutions, living conditions were deliberately made harsh (Kaste 8). Poverty was at it's peak around this time in England. Houses were overcrowded, packed together in narrow streets and courts which were often piled deep in rotting refuse (Rooke 33). New problems of food and public health were faced by a parliamentary and economic system which was better suited to the eighteenth century. On June 20, 1837, Queen Victoria came to the throne of England as the long period of middle class ascendancy was gaining momentum (Kaste 8). The Victorian age, which this time period is often referred, comes from "Queen Victor... ...cked full of suspense and action. This piece of literature will never be forgotten. In Conclusion, Dickens had a rough childhood which helped prompt him to write many classic novels. Dickens wrote to make people think about how the government was being run. He wrote Oliver Twist to almost protest the Poor Law of 1834 and the use of the workhouses. Since Dickens was such an original writer his presence in literature will be forever appreciated. Bibliography: Blount, Trevor. Dickens: The Early Novels. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1968. â€Å"Dickens, Charles† Discovering Authors. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1993. â€Å"Dickens.† Encyclopedia Brittanica. 1998 ed. Hardy, Barbara. â€Å"Charles Dickens.† British Writers. Ian Scott-Kilvert. vol. 5. 12 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Son’s, 1982. Kaste, Harry, M.A. Cliff’s Notes on Oliver Twist. Lincoln: Cliffs Notes Inc., 1997. â€Å"landow.stg.brown.edu† Price, Martin. Dickens. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967. Rooke, Patrick. The Age of Dickens. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978. Wagenknecht, Edward. Cavalcade of the English Novel. Chicago: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston Inc., 1967. "www.sparknotes.com"

Stephen King, Christine – Text Analysis

Stephen King is perhaps the most widely known American writer of his generation, yet his distinctions include publishing as two authors at once: Beginning in 1966, he wrote novels that were published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. When twelve, he began submitting stories for sale. At first ignored and then scorned by mainstream critics, by the late 1980’s his novels were reviewed regularly in The New York Times Book Review, with increasing favor. Beginning in 1987, most of his novels were main selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which in 1989 created the Stephen King Library, committed to keeping King’s novels â€Å"in print in hardcover. † King published more than one hundred short stories (including the collections Night Shift, 1978, Skeleton Crew, 1985, and Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993) and the eight novellas contained in Different Seasons (1982) and Four Past Midnight (1990). King has published numerous articles and a critical book, Danse Macabre (1981). King’s detractors attribute his success to the sensational appeal of his genre, whose main purpose, as King readily confesses, is to scare people. Like Edgar Allan Poe, King turned a degenerated genre — a matter of comic-book monsters and drive-in films—into a medium embodying the primary anxieties of his age. He is graphic, sentimental, and predictable. His humor is usually crude and campy. His dark fantasies, like all good popular fiction, allow readers to express within conventional frames of reference feelings and concepts they might not otherwise consider. is vision articulates universal fears and desires in terms peculiar to contemporary culture. King is â€Å"Master of Postliterate Prose,† as Paul Gray stated in 1982—writing that takes readers mentally to the films rather than making them imagine or think. On the other hand, King’s work provides the most genuine example of the storyteller’s art since Charles Dickens. He has retu rned to the novel some of the popular appeal it had in the nineteenth century and turned out a generation of readers who vastly prefer some books to their film adaptations. He encountered two lasting influences, the naturalist writers and contemporary American mythology. Stephen King may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a â€Å"brand name,† describing his style as â€Å"the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s. † His fast-food version of the â€Å"plain style† may smell of commercialism, but that may make him the contemporary American storyteller without peer. From the beginning, his dark parables spoke to the anxieties of the late twentieth century. King’s fictions begin with premises accepted by middle Americans of the television generation, opening in suburban or small-town America—Derry, Maine, or Libertyville, Pennsylvania—and have the familiarity of the house next door and the 7-Eleven store. The characters have the trusted two-dimensional reality of kitsch: they originate in cliches such as the high school â€Å"nerd† or the wise child. From such premises, they move cinematically through an atmosphere resonant with a popular mythology. King applies naturalistic methods to an environment created by popular culture. This reality, already mediated, is translated easily into preternatural terms, taking on a nightmarish quality. King’s imagination is above all archetypal: His â€Å"pop† familiarity and his campy humor draw on the collective unconscious. As with his fiction, his sources are the classic horror films of the 1930’s, inherited by the 1950’s pulp and film industries. He hints at their derivations from the gothic novel, classical myth, Brothers Grimm folktales, and the oral tradition in general. In an anxious era both skeptical of and hungry for myth, horror is fundamentally reassuring and cathartic; the tale-teller combines roles of physician and priest into the witch doctor as â€Å"sin eater,† who assumes the guilt and fear of his culture. Christine †¢ In Christine, the setting is Libertyville, Pennsylvania, during the late 1970’s. The monster is the American Dream as embodied in the automobile. King gives Christine all the attributes of a fairy tale for â€Å"postliterate† adolescents. Christine is another fractured â€Å"Cinderella† story, Carrie for boys. Arnie Cunningham, a nearsighted, acne-scarred loser, falls â€Å"in love with† a car, a passionate (red and white) Plymouth Fury, â€Å"one of the long ones with the big fins,† that he names Christine. An automotive godmother, she brings Arnie, in fairy-tale succession, freedom, success, power, and love: a home away from overprotective parents, a cure for acne, hit-andrun revenge on bullies, and a beautiful girl, Leigh Cabot. Soon, however, the familiar triangle emerges, of boy, girl, and car, and Christine is revealed as a femme fatale—driven by the spirit of her former owner, a malcontent named Roland LeBay. Christine is the medium for his death wish on the world, for his all-devouring, â€Å"everlasting Fury. † LeBay’s aggression possesses Arnie, who reverts into an older, tougher self, then into the â€Å"mythic teenaged hood† that King has called the prototype of 1950’s werewolf films, and finally into â€Å"some ancient carrion eater,† or primal self. As automotive monster, Christine comes from a variety of sources, including the folk tradition of the â€Å"death car† and a venerable techno-horror premise, as seen in King’s â€Å"Trucks† and Maximum Overdrive. King’s main focus, however, is the mobile youth culture that has come down from the 1950’s by way of advertising, popular songs, film, and national pastimes. Christine is the car as a projection of the cultural self, Anima for the modern American Adam. To Arnie’s late 1970’s-style imagination, the Plymouth Fury, in 1958 a mid-priced family car, is an American Dream. Her sweeping, befinned chassis and engine re-create a fantasy of the golden age of the automobile: the horizonless future imagined as an expanding network of superhighways and unlimited fuel. Christine recovers for Arnie a prelapsarian vitality and manifest destiny. Christine’s odometer runs backward and she regenerates parts. The immortality she offers, however—and by implication, the American Dream—is really arrested development in the form of a Happy Days rerun and by way of her radio, which sticks on the golden oldies station. Indeed, Christine is a recapitulatory rock musical framed fatalistically in sections titled â€Å"Teenage Car-Songs,† â€Å"Teenage Love-Songs,†and â€Å"Teenage Death-Songs. † Fragments of rock-and-roll songs introduce each chapter. Christine’s burden, an undead 1950’s youth culture, means that most of Arnie’s travels are in and out of time, a deadly nostalgia trip. As Douglas Winter explains, Christine reenacts â€Å"the death,† during the 1970’s, â€Å"of the American romance with the automobile. † The epilogue from four years later presents the fairy-tale consolation in a burnedout monotone. Arnie and his parents are buried, Christine is scrap metal, and the true Americans, Leigh and Dennis, are survivors, but Dennis, the â€Å"knight of Darnell’s Garage,† does not woo â€Å"the lady fair†; he is a limping, lackluster junior high teacher, and they have drifted apart, grown old in their prime. Dennis narrates the story in order to file it away, all the while perceiving himself and his peers in terms of icons from the late 1950’s. In his nightmares, Christine appears wearing a black vanity plate inscribed with a skull and the words, â€Å"ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE. From Dennis’s haunted perspective, Christine simultaneously examines and is a symptom of a cultural phenomenon: a new American gothic species of anachronism or deja vu, which continued after Christine’s publication in films such as Back to the Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and Blue Velvet (1986). The 1980’s and the 1950’s blur into a seam less illusion, the nightmare side of which is the prospect of living an infinite replay. The subtext of King’s adolescent fairy tale is another coming of age, from the opposite end and the broader perspective of American culture. Written by a fortyish King in the final years of the twentieth century, Christine diagnoses a cultural midlife crisis and marks a turning point in King’s career, a critical examination of mass culture. The dual time frame reflects his awareness of a dual audience, of writing for adolescents who look back to a mythical 1950’s and also for his own generation as it relives its undead youth culture in its children. The baby boomers, King explains, â€Å"were obsessive† about childhood. â€Å"We went on playing for a long time, almost feverishly. I write for that buried child in us, but I’m writing for the grown-up too. I want grownups to look at the child long enough to be able to give him up. The child should be buried. † â€Å"sometimes ownership can become possession† The story is set in a middle-class suburb of Pittsburg, in 1978. Dennis Guilder and Arnie Cunningham vie for the attentions of the new girl in town, Leigh Cabot. But when Christine, a 1958 Plymouth Fury, enters the picture, the course of action changes drastically. As Leigh neatly observes, â€Å"cars are girls†. Arnie’s love affair with Christine turns from a love song to a death song. As soon as he sees her he wants her. Her name is Christine, she is 1958 Plymouth Fury, and Arnold Cunningham has fallen head over heels in love with her. Arnold's best friend Dennis Guilder is not quite so impressed by the rusting rolling iron with the custom paint job. Dennis looks at the cracked windscreen and the damaged bodywork, the flat tyre and torn upholstery, and his heart sinks even before he notices the pool of oil underneath the car. Arnie might as well be looking at a different car though. He sees something else. Maybe a little of what the car once was, and perhaps a little of what it could be if the work was put in. He is a man in love and first loves can often become all consuming things. There is nothing that Dennis can do to stop Arnie from buying Christine and in the end he goes along with his life-long friend. He lends him some money towards a deposit on the car and even takes him to pick the car up, the next day, after work. Sometimes the company a person keeps can have an effect on them and almost from that very first meeting between Arnie and Christine Dennis can see changes in his best friend. Some of them good, like the fact that his acne seems to be miraculously clearing up. The other changes though, are not so positive in nature. Arnie's whole attitude takes a turn for the worse and he develops an uncharacteristic mean streak. All of his life Arnie has been the guy who was targeted by the bullies of this world, but when Buddy Repperton takes a jack handle to one of Christine's lights the worm not only turns, but turns on Repperton leaving him with a bloody nose and a score to settle. As I clocked up the chapters in Christine I watched Arnie's relationship with his parents and with his friend Dennis start to fall apart; and his relationship with the beautiful Leigh Cabot form and then fail. It was all because of the car and from the very first chapter, as a reader, I was aware that there was something not quite right about that Plymouth Fury. Christine is just a little under 600 pages long. It is written in memoir form and is split into the three parts. Part one, Dennis Teenage Car Songs, is written in the first person and from Dennis' point of View. In part two, Arnie Teenage Love songs, Dennis is still telling the story, but it is now written in the third person because all of the events in that part of the book occurred while Dennis was lying in a hospital bed and does not concern things that he experienced first-hand. For part three, of the book, Christine Teenage Death Songs, the story returns to the first person perspective because Dennis is on his crutches and out and about, all be it at a bit of a hobble. A nice touch to Christine is that every chapter opens up with a few lines from a different song that involves cars, which is probably why the three parts of the book are named the way that they are. I enjoyed Christine. King brings all of the characters to life for his readers and it was easy for me to look at Arnie's mother, for instance, through both Arnie and Dennis' eyes and think: what a bitch! But it was just as easy for me to look through the mother's eyes and feel the pain and fear as she watched her family being torn apart. The characters seem real and the unreal situations feel real.

Essay on Media Influence on Black Children - 5404 Words

Media Influence on Black/African-American Children Abstract: An overview of how media in the decades since the 1950s had influenced the education of Black/African-Americann Students. Media in the decades since the 1950s has dramatically influenced the education of Black/African-American children. The media, which includes television, newspapers, magazines, radio, advertising and the internet, is a vital part of constantly creating and reinforcing stereotypes. Media affects and influences the nation and the world through many different ways. Mass media is a name given to organizations that communicate to our society. Mass media also shows us what kind of society we live within. Television is the biggest type of media simply because†¦show more content†¦Blacks faced social, economical, physical and political disadvantages. Even cartoons in the 50’s continued to show blacks characters that were depicted as very dark brown, wooly black hair, large red lips, so large there were disproportionate with the rest of the face, the animated Colored character appeared dim witted and usually took the brunt of the joke. The image of African-Americans has been greatly depreciated by the roles they play on television sitcoms. On these shows African-Americans are depicted as being maids, clowns, and buffoons. This misrepresentation of African-Americans has become common place through out the media. Black people faced many injustices in America. One of the most controversial sitcoms was the Amos ‘n Andy Show. This sitcom included two black comedic men, this show is the start of the creation of the African-American stereotypes that most people have grown accustom to today. Initially, the Amos ‘n Andy Show began as a radio show with two white men portraying two black men. When the show transferred to television, it consisted of two black men portraying the two black comedic dummies. They were still performing the slapstick comedy as made popular on the radio show, but to be able to see them visually had a greater effect. The roles that the two black men played are the typical roles that blacks play inShow MoreRelatedThe Media s Inf luence On Black Children Essay1151 Words   |  5 PagesThe media has conditioned society into thinking that racial stereotypes are the norm. â€Å"Irish people are drunks† and â€Å"Asians are good at math† are all classic examples of common racial stereotypes. Author Michael Omi of â€Å"In Living Color: Race and American Culture† asserts how media presentation of minorities establishes people perspectives of â€Å"these groups†. But where do these racial stereotypes at the media fingertips originate from? 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