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Description
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, most famous for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” wrote Women and Economics in 1898, at a time when the roles of women in society were already undergoing radical change: women were entering the work force in large numbers, the suffrage movement was agitating for the vote, and young women were looking for a new definition of their place other than as a wife or mother.
The book takes the position that humans are the only species in which the female depends on the male for her survival, and that this arrangement must change for the human race to continue to be successful. Gilman argues for the evolution of marriage, family, home life, and what she calls the sexuo-economic relationship between men and women.
Although she was in demand as a lecturer and writer, Women and Economics was the first book-length work to consolidate her views. As a feminist text, it’s significant not necessarily for its profundity or for its appeal for women’s rights, but rather for its application of social Darwinism, espousing the theory that the roles played by women inevitably evolve and that the gendered division of labor produces warped human beings of both sexes. Its popularity was also helped by its accessibility—as one of her critics stated, “it stirs no deep reverberations of the soul … but you can quote it, and remember its points.”
As suffragism progressed and first wave feminism began to fade, Gilman’s ideas were somewhat forgotten. But as feminism resurged in the 1960s, her work was rediscovered and interest rebounded in this groundbreaking feminist who played an important role in shaping public opinion, disseminating radical ideas, and encouraging women (and men) to change their thinking about gender roles.
Description
Katharine Susannah Prichard was born in 1883 to Australian parents then living in Fiji, but she grew up in Tasmania, lived for a while in both Melbourne and London before finally settling in Western Australia. She was one of the co-founders of the Communist Party of Australia in 1921, and her status as a communist and a female writer led to her being frequently under surveillance and harassment by the Australian police and other government authorities.
She wrote The Black Opal in 1921, and the novel focuses on the very close-knit opal-mining community living and working on Fallen Star Ridge, a fictitious location set in New South Wales, Australia. Life is hard for the miners as their fortunes rise and fall with the amounts and quality of black opal they can uncover. Black opal is a beautiful mineral with fiery gleams of color, much valued for jewelry. Finding productive seams of such opal is a matter of both hard work and good luck.
The novel is a well-drawn study of the relationships of the people living on the Ridge, and the two main characters are portrayed with clarity: Michael Brady, an older man much respected by the other miners for this knowledge and ethical approach, and Sophie Rouminof, a beautiful teenage girl who is the darling of the camp but who abruptly runs away to America after being disappointed in love.
Despite the difficulties the individual miners face, there is a community spirit and an agreement on basic values and principles of behavior at the Ridge. But this community of shared endeavor is eventually jeopardized by the influence of outsiders, in particular an American who wishes to buy up the individual mines, operate them under a company structure, and simply pay the miners a salary. This conflict between capitalism and honest manual labour becomes one of the most important themes of the work.
Description
The Nibelungenlied was Germany’s first heroic epic put into writing. Thomas Carlyle considered it “a precious national possession, recovered after six centuries of neglect, [which] takes undisputed place among the sacred books of German literature.” Due to a lack of interest in copying the manuscripts, the work was forgotten, only faintly remembered as an influence in other German writing. Today, a total of 36 manuscripts have been unearthed. Many of these are only poem fragments, but three manuscripts have been viewed as the most complete and authentic versions to exist: these manuscripts are referred to as “A,” “B,” and “C.”
“A” follows most of the original written forms, but is the shortest manuscript of the three. “C” is the most altered edition, as it was changed to suit later cultural tastes. Manuscript “B” is considered the gold standard since it shows signs of minimal alterations and is of intermediate length. Alice Horton has used manuscript “B” as the foundation of her English edition, creating a work that is accurate in translation and with its lyrical quality preserved. It portrays an epic adventure that grabs and holds the reader’s attention.
Siegfried, the knighted prince of Netherland, has plans to marry the beautiful Princess Kriemhilda of Burgundy. He visits Worms to bargain with the three kings and Kriemhilda’s brothers: Gunther, Gernot, and Giselher. Famed for his impenetrable skin and inhuman strength after bathing in dragon’s blood, Siegfried may be the perfect man to help them. To marry their sister and receive her wealth, Siegfried must convince the ruler beyond the sea and the mighty maiden warrior to be Gunther’s wife. This queen has sworn only to marry a man who can beat her three challenges, at the risk of beheading if he should fail.
Description
The sisters Olga, Masha, and Irina live with their brother Andrey in a provincial Russian town, and plan to return to Moscow, where they grew up, as soon as they’re able. Olga doesn’t want to continue working at the school where she’s a teacher and occasional headmaster; Masha is disillusioned in her marriage; Irina hopes to find her true love; and Andrey shows promise of becoming a professor. Also stationed in their town is a battery of soldiers that provide them with a social life. When Andrey falls in love with Natasha, their hopes for change are dashed, bit by bit.
First performed in 1901 at the Moscow Art Theatre, Three Sisters is considered one of Chekhov’s best plays. While critical reception at the time was mixed, the show was popular enough to become a part of the company’s repertoire, and is still commonly staged and adapted today.
Description
In 1841, Solomon Northup was a free black man, married with three children and living in upstate New York, when he was tricked into going to Washington DC. There, he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, eventually ending up on a plantation in the Red River area of Louisiana. For twelve years he experienced and witnessed the arbitrary beatings and whippings, around-the-clock back-breaking work, and countless other degradations that came with being enslaved in the antebellum south. Through the sympathetic ear of a white man and with miraculous timing, he was eventually freed and returned home. He then wrote this memoir and contributed to the abolitionist movement before disappearing from the pages of history.
Like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Twelve Years a Slave stands in stark contrast to the era’s bucolic propaganda that the enslaved in the south were well treated, well provided for, and made “part of the family.” As a first-hand account, it exposes slavery for what it is: barbaric, dehumanizing, and evil.
Description
In The Servile State, British-French writer and historian Hilaire Belloc makes a provocative case that capitalism will inevitably move toward the reestablishment of slavery. The thesis in this book forms the backbone of Belloc’s life-long effort as an advocate for reform to the existing socioeconomic system in the direction of what he terms as “distributism.”
As a critic of both socialism and capitalism, and a fervent Catholic, Belloc lays out a history of Europe where, over generations, the pagan slavery of the Roman Empire was transformed into a “distributive” model of the Middle Ages. But, he argues, this model was broken by the rise of capitalism in England during the reign of Henry VIII. Ever since, capitalism has been moving ever closer towards the servile state: the restoration of status in the place of contract, and a vast proletariat of wage-earners with few incredibly wealthy owners.
Description
Published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane was widely heralded as one of the first masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, and its author as “a bright morning star” of the movement. Toomer himself, however, was reluctant to embrace an explicitly racialized identity, preferring to define himself as simply an American writer.
Inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer conceived Cane as a mosaic of intricately connected vignettes, poems, stories, songs, and even play-like dialogues. Drawing on both modernist poetry and African-American spirituals, Toomer imbues each form with a lyrical and often experimental sensibility.
The work is structured in three distinct but unnamed parts. The first is set in rural Georgia and focuses on the lives of women and the men who desire them. The second part moves to the urban enclaves of the North in the years following the Great Migration. The third and final part returns to the rural South and explores the interactions between African-Americans from the North and those living in the South.
Although sales languished in the later years of Toomer’s life, the book was reissued after his death and rediscovered by a new generation of American writers. Alice Walker described Cane as one of the most important books in her own development as a writer: “I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it.”
Description
Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, was George Eliot’s last novel. It deals with two major characters whose lives intersect: One is a spoiled young woman named Gwendolen Harleth who makes an unwise marriage to escape impending poverty; the other is the titular character, Daniel Deronda, a wealthy young man who feels a mission to help the suffering.
During her childhood Gwendolen’s family was well-off. She lived in comfort and was indulged and pampered. But the family’s fortune is lost through an unwise investment, and she returns to a life of near-poverty, a change which she greatly resents both for herself and for her widowed mother. The only escape seems to be for her to marry a wealthy older man who has been courting her in a casual, unemotional way. The marriage turns out to be a terrible mistake.
Daniel Deronda has been raised by Sir Hugo Mallinger as his nephew, but Daniel has never discovered his true parentage, thinking it likely that he is Sir Hugo’s natural son. This consciousness of his probable illegitimacy moves him to kindness and tolerance towards anyone who is suffering from disadvantage. One evening, while rowing on the river Thames, he spots a young woman about to leap into the water to drown herself. He persuades her instead to come with him for shelter to a family he knows. The young woman turns out to be Jewish, and through his trying to help her find her lost family, Deronda comes into contact with Jewish culture—and in particular with a man named Mordecai, who has a passionate vision for the future of the Jewish race and who sees in Daniel a kindred spirit.
The paths that Gwendolen and Daniel follow intersect often, and Daniel’s kindly nature moves him to try to offer her comfort and advice in her moments of distress. Unsurprisingly, Gwendolen misinterprets Daniel’s attentions.
In Daniel Deronda Eliot demonstrates considerable sympathy towards the Jewish people, their culture, and their aspirations for a national homeland. At the time this was an unpopular and even controversial view. A foreword in this edition reproduces a letter Evans wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, defending her stance in this regard. Nevertheless, the novel was a success, and was translated almost immediately into German and Dutch. It is considered to have had a positive influence on Zionist thinkers.
Daniel Deronda has been adapted both for film and television, with the 2002 B.B.C. series winning several awards.
Description
In early 1787, the Congress of the United States called a meeting of delegates from each state to try to fix what was wrong with the Articles of Confederation. The Articles had created an intentionally weak central government, and that weakness had brought the nation to a crisis in only a few years. Over the next several months, the delegates worked to produce the document that would become the U.S. Constitution.
When Congress released the proposed Constitution to the states for ratification in the fall of 1787, reaction was swift: in newspapers throughout each state, columnists were quick to condemn the radical reworking of the nation’s formative document. In New York State, a member of the convention decided to launch into the fray; he and two other men he recruited began writing their own anonymous series defending the proposed Constitution, each one signed “Publius.” They published seventy-seven articles in four different New York papers over the course of several months. When the articles were collected and published as a book early the following year, the authors added another eight articles. Although many at the time guessed the true identities of the authors, it would be a few years before the authors were confirmed to be Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, Hamilton and Madison both being delegates at the convention.
Although the articles’ influence on the Constitution’s ratification is debated—newspapers were largely local at the time, so few outside New York saw the articles—their influence on the interpretation of the Constitution within the judiciary is immense. They are a window not only into the structure and content of the document, but also the reasons for the structure and content, written by men who helped author the document. Consequently, they have been quoted almost 300 times in Supreme Court cases. They remain perhaps the best and clearest explanation of the document that is the cornerstone of the United States government.
Description
The popular history of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody remains more myth than anything else, yet it’s undeniable that he was a central figure in the American Old West. Pony Express rider, stagecoach driver, trapper, soldier, bison hunter, scout, showman—his résumé reads like the quintessential record of all that makes up the Old West mythology, and it’s all documented in this, his original 1879 autobiography.
While The Life of Buffalo Bill is rife with the dramatic stylings of the dime novels and stage melodramas so popular at the time, in it Cody presents his version of his life: from his boyhood settling in the newly-opened Kansas territory, to his early life as a frontiersman. It was written when Cody was only thirty-three years old, just after he started his career as a showman and a few years before he created his world famous Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Originally titled The Life of Hon. William F. Cody Known as Buffalo Bill the Famous Hunter, Scout, and Guide: An Autobiography, it is an arguably more accurate account of both his life and the American West than the later 1917 autobiography The Great West That Was: “Buffalo Bill’s” Life Story which was ghostwritten by James Montague and published after his death. Although it makes many claims that are disputed today, The Life of Buffalo Bill reveals much about both the historical William F. Cody and the Buffalo Bill of American legend, and gives insight into the history of the American West.