The Historical And Cultural Context Of The Novels Essay

The Russian Revolution and challenges to the British Empire abroad raised the possibility of change on a world scale. At home, the expansion of transportation and communication, the cars, telephones, and radios made affordable through mass production, also brought revolutionary changes to daily life. With this new technology, distances grew suddenly shorter and true privacy rarer. In Brave New World, such technologies and more have been introduced to The World State, and this society brings to life these exact fears of distance between people: While people in industrialized societies welcomed these advances, they also worried about losing a familiar way of life, and perhaps even themselves. Huxley’s novel also attempts to show how science, when taken too far, can limit the flourishing of human thought: “The lower the caste,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘"the shorter the oxygen.’ The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters.’” (Huxley, 70). In World War I, humanity had seen the great destruction that technology such as bombs, planes, and machine guns could cause. Huxley believed that the possibility for such destruction did not only belong to weapons of war but to other scientific advancements as well, such

W asks, Can technology "embody specific forms of power and authority" (19). He reviews the ideas of Kropotikin, Morris Hayes, Lillienthal, Boorstein and Mumford on his way to answering his question. For example, Hayes states that "deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism" because of safety concerns (19-20). W believes "that technical systems of various kinds are deeply interwoven in the conditions of modern politics [and further, that the] physical arrangements of industrial production, warfare, communications, and the like have fundamentally changed the exercise of power and the experience of citizenship" (20). Indeed, "human ends are powerfully transformed as they are adapted to technical means" (21).

In the texts 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the regulations and the restrictions imposed by the government leads to decline in the society. Technology plays a major role in both texts, the confidence of the people in these technologies eventually makes them surrender their humanness. In the novel 1984, the everyday lives of the people were monitored around-the-clock. Technology is also used to demolish the past, to make the citizens accept something divergent, a new present and the future. The central direction in the technological progress is not for promoting love between people or for the enlightenment of minds, but rather it is used for industrialization and for humanity to be the

In his article, “What are People For”, Wendell Berry muses that technological progress serves no purpose in the grand scheme of things, cynically notes that the “higher aims of ‘technological progress’ are money and ease”. By condoning this materialistic outlook of life that afflicts society with a “cultish faith in the future”, Berry urges his audience to consider taking part in a community that appreciates life in the present. Berry heralds truth in his argument that technological advancement, even ones made with good intentions, inevitably contaminates society because it enables twisted misuse of power and serves to strain human relationships.

Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” is a marvelous and unusual text. Within the first part of his book, also called C.V., he explains his life experience up to the day he finishes the book. King expresses his life with multiple literary elements that assist the readers on imagining his life of adventures, catastrophes, fears, and loves. Following are three of my favorite passages that caught my attention.

Different societies have risen and fallen in the continual search for the “perfect” society. The definition of this utopia is in constant flux due to changing times and cultural values. Many works of literature have been written describing a utopian society and the steps needed to achieve it. However, there are those with a more cynical or more realistic view of society that comment on current and future trends. These individuals look at the problems in society and show how to solve them with the use of control and power. Such a society is considered undesirable and has become known as dystopian society.

This essay originally titled Studying Literature in Grade 12, has an abundance of information regarding and convincing the readers that the grade twelve English course should be composed of Canadian literature. The grammar in this essay however, was weak. The subject did not agree to their pronouns, making many sentences awkward. Overall, improvements could have been made. Some of these include MLA format, the title, introduction paragraph, grammar, punctuation and the citation format.

Though it has become less of an issue in recent times, distrust of foreigners has always been an issue. This can be easily observed in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. Within the first few pages, a statement is made about ‘alienating foreigners’. Jake, a friend and fellow traveler, tells the main character, Jim, that while Ántonia Shimerda has “pretty brown eyes…”, he points out that you are “…likely to get diseases from foreigners.” Jim’s first impression of the Bohemians is that they are illiterate, uneducated, disease-carrying people. Even after Jim learns to accept the Bohemians’ culture, the society around him continues to look down upon the immigrants, proving throughout the book that a culture with outsiders will always scorn those

Several conflicting frames of mind have played defining roles in shaping humanity throughout the twentieth century. Philosophical optimism of a bright future held by humanity in general was taken advantage of by the promise of a better life through sacrifice of individuality to the state. In the books Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 clear opposition to these subtle entrapments was voiced in similarly convincing ways. They first all established, to varying degrees of balance, the atmosphere and seductiveness of the “utopia” and the fear of the consequences of acting in the non-prescribed way through character development. A single character is alienated because of their inability to conform – often in protest to the forced

Imagine in 2540 A.D, there is a utopian society where everything is perfect. Everything is peaceful and everyone is happy. Then one person realizes that this perfect society is not as perfect as it appears.There is a group of people who have been created to be a part of a society that focuses on sheltering and conditioning the people so that they follow whoever is in authority and believes whatever the government wants them to believe. So those in the society have no say in their lives or future. Aldous Huxley wrote about such a society in his novel Brave New World because he felt as though the future of his own society was down the path of a similar fate. In the early 20th century, The Industrial Revolution was an example where technology

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, oppression is the jail that imprisons man—and technology is its warden. “For Orwell,” writes comparative literature professor John Frodsham, “Nature was essentially good and technology essentially evil. Technology in Nineteen Eighty-Four is used to enslave men, not liberate them. The telescreen, the speakwrite, the helicopter…the book-writing machine on which Julia labors, and all the rest of the technological paraphernalia of the novel exist only to aggrandize the power of the state and violate human nature.”

It is a common view that the opening and ending of a novel is considered the most memorable and pertinent. Therefore, both authors, Ishiguro and Atwood, utilise openings and endings in their novels significantly. The opening of a novel plays a major part in establishing the tone of what is to come, with the ending leaving a lasting, final impression on the reader. The security of the first person narration in Never Let Me Go encourages the reader to engage with Kathy H in order to destroy our relationship at the end. This disillusionment serves to anger the reader and fuel our sense of disappointment. Never Let Me Go ends in uncertainty as Kathy drives away still looking for Hailsham yet for the reader there is no uncertainty; we know

The fear that drove society and a complete farce was the idea that everything on which the modern world relied would simply come to a halt at the turn-of-the-century. This contemporary concern of the time over technology caused an alarming dissonance between people 's daily realities and the threat of an impending apocalyptic future.

There are many ways to supplement a story in order to add lucidity. It is done through literary devices and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is no different. "The Things They Carried" is a narrative about a soldier at war in Vietnam. However, this story provides multiple layers of meaning through O'Brien's tone and style that help the reader further understand it. Both of these literary devices are embedded in the story and gradually help define it.

The genre of historical fiction novels can be subdivided into many categories and often crosses genres, such as historical mysteries and romances. The traditional definition of the historical fiction genre is “fiction set in the past” where the author is writing from research rather than personal experience. This definition leaves a lot of room for interpretation, controversy, and contradiction. Critics in the media, even when they praise individual historical novels in their reviews, somehow manage to turn this praise into criticism of the genre as a whole. In 1950, author Howard Fast, a historical novelist himself, wrote: “This is an era of many historical novels, few of them good and very few indeed which have more than a nodding