Thomas Hardy / Elizabeth Barrett Browning Considered purely as a poet, Thomas Hardy has earned the status of a Modernist, or at the very least an honorary Modernist. Claire Tomalin's recent biography of Hardy would have us believe that, in essence, Hardy had a full career as a late Victorian novelist, then retired, then was suddenly reborn as a craggy and philosophical Modernist poet, a latter-day Robert Browning for the age

Hard Times In his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens is not shy in confronting what he sees as the paramount social evils of his day, particularly when those evils come in the form of ostensibly beneficent social movements themselves. In particular, Dickens satirizes Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism through the characterization of Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby as men of cold reason and hard facts, and uses the fates of the various characters

"It was a curious childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy." Paine 14) His consummate biography written in 1912, just after his death claims that Clemens spent the majority of his childhood in the company of his siblings, and the family slaves as his parents where often otherwise engaged, his father and

Balzac and Kafka: From Realism to Magical Realism French author Honore de Balzac defined the genre of realism in the early 19th century with his novel Old Man Goriot, which served as a cornerstone for his more ambitious project, The Human Comedy. Old Man Goriot also served as a prototype for realistic novels, with its setting of narrative parameters which included plot, structure, characterization, and point-of-view. The 20th century, however, digressed