¶ … Character Struggle:
An Analysis of Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen
and Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once wrote that, "Nothing endures but change." In the novels Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy, character development is used to explored the novelists underlying perspectives on the meaning and possibility of a utopian human society. In Watchmen the character of The Comedian transitions from one of a socially-conscious war hero to that of a nihilistic vigilante with little regard for human life which reflects the authors' larger philosophical message that a utopian society is impossible as the "watchmen" who would defend it would inevitably become corrupted by their power. In contrast, in Looking Backward, Julian West transitions from embodying the harsh, competitive world of the Nineteenth Century to understanding the social equality and utopian nature of a fictional Twentieth Century by forging a relationship with Dr. Leete and by falling in love with Edith. In both works the authors utilize changes in characters'...
WOMEN AND FEMINISM IN SIR THOMAS MORE'S UTOPIA First published in 1516, Sir Thomas More's Utopia is considered as one of the most influential works of Western humanism. Through the first-person narrative of Raphael Hythloday, More's mysterious traveler, Utopia is described as a pagan communist city-state or polis governed by intellect and rationality. By addressing such issues as religious pluralism, women's rights, state-sponsored education, colonialism and justified warfare, the main protagonist
" In other words to understand any writer's utopian vision, one must compare and contrast that particular vision to what utopian authors in the classic traditions have already put forward. DEFINITIONS of UTOPIA: J.H. "JACK" HEXTER: Historian, professor and humorist Jack Hexter wrote that "Utopia implies that the nature of man is such that to rely on individual conscience to supply the deficiencies of municipal law is to embark on the bottom-less
" (Eksteins, 1994) Eksteins writes that Britain had "in the last century...damned her great poets and writers, Byron had been chased out of the country, Shelley forbidden to raise his children, and Oscar Wilde sent to prison." (1994) Pearce (2003) states that Wilde "was a major symbol of the sexual anarchy that threatened the purposive and reproductive modes of the bourgeois family. Algy mocks the utilitarian nature of modern marriage thus:
Coetzee and Defoe Coetzee's novels like Foe and Dusklands are an explicit rejection of the old cultural and literary canons, of which Robinson Crusoe has always been part. Indeed, his stories reverse the standard narrative of white male narrators, adventurers and colonizers, who explore and conquer the 'savage' regions of the world and mold them in the image of Western-Christian civilization. White men literally tell these stories, while blacks, Asians, American
As Canada has become less wild, many of these obstacles have been recognized by writers to exist internally, as Atwood says: "no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what we may call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human being." Grim survival is that sort of survival which overcomes a specific threat which destroys everything else about one, such as a hurricane or plane
Immigration in My Antonia IMMIGRATION AND MY ANTONIA With America gaining significant economic growth in the 19th and 20th centuries, its popularity among other nations of the world increased dramatically. There was a wave of immigrants entering the country during that period and especially after the Great wars when there were disturbances in the European countries many people left their homeland and entered United States in search of better jobs and a
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