Adam Bede, George Eliot uses some of the conventions of the Romantic novel while violating others. In the end the book asks us, as readers, to answer the fundamental question posed in so many books written within the Romantic tradition: Do the hero and heroine live happily ever after? But this is not the mindlessly vacuous posing of that question that we come across in so many works, for

The rise of the middle class and the Industrial Revolution brought forth a demand to render this emerging class in fiction, and not simply relegate it to the sidelines of prose narratives in the United States. Realism in the United States is often said to stretch from the Civil War to the end of the 19th century. The interest in Realism was also spawned by the crisis of national confidence

Dark Spirituality as a Symbol of Female Frustration: Voodoo Gothic and the Mill on the Floss George Eliot's The Mill On the Floss is arguably one of the most widely read novels of the Victorian period. Although many differ as to just why this is the case, one thing is clear -- what was once a rather straightforward tragic tale, tinged with the time's popular romantic/gothic influence, has become a bastion of

Literary realism, of course, focuses on the everyday cultural experience of everyday people who may, within their banal experience, do extraordinary things. The Postmodern movement, as a reaction to a number of 20th century trends, tends to be anti-establishment and looks for meanings hidden in the text, those meanings needing to be exposed and reflected through deconstructing that text (Perkins & Perkins, 2008).But what of the authors who tend

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

Obama & Romney -- Foreign Policy Approaches If "realist" stands for a person who pursues "security" based on "self-interest," "determinism," and "morality" on the international scene (quotes chosen from Chapter 1); and if "liberal" stands for "capable of cooperating," "cooperation," the impact of "non-governmental groups" (NGOs), "having many interests" and "international society," then President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both reflect some of each of these traits, albeit Obama leans more