(London, 1795 – Rome, 1821) British poet. The death of his father and his humble origins led him to work as a practitioner in a surgeon’s house, to later enter as an external student at Guy’s Hospital in London (1815). His love of reading introduced him to the world of poetry, in which he began under the influence of Edmund Spenser. At the home of his friend Leigh Hunt, a critic and poet, he met Percy Shelley, with whom he befriended.

He published his first volume of poems in 1817 and, despite its limited success, he decided to abandon surgery to devote himself only to literature. The following year Endimion appeared (1818), which was poorly received by critics. On his return to London, after a spell in the Lochs and the West of Scotland, he witnessed the death of his brother, suffering from tuberculosis, which affected him deeply.

Keats himself suffered from the same illness; After moving to the house of his friend Charles Armitage Brown, in Hampstead, he fell in love with a neighbour’s daughter, Fanny Brawne, who inspired most of his poems, collected in the volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of Saint Agnes and others. poems (1820), which included his best poems: the unfinished Hyperion, on Greek mythology, and especially his celebrated series of odes (Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to a Grecian Urn).

His health condition deteriorated, so he decided to embark with his friend Severn to Naples, in what seemed like the poet’s last chance to heal, although he died a few months later. Despite being the youngest poet among the great British romantics, he is one of the most important lyricists in the English language. In 1848 his letters and his diary appeared, completing a work of exceptional expressive purity and admirable poetic mastery in his aspiration to attain absolute beauty.

What was John Keats known for?

John Keats was an English Romantic lyric poet whose verse is known for its vivid imagery and great sensuous appeal. His reputation grew after his early death, and he was greatly admired in the Victorian Age.

What is Keats most famous poem?

Apart from being one of the most anthologized poems in the English language, Ode to a Nightingale is the most famous poem by John Keats.

What kind of person was John Keats?

He was not a shy, bookish child; Clarke remembered an outgoing youth, who made friends easily and fought passionately in their defense: “He was not merely the ‘favorite of all,’ like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his …

What was Keats first poem?

His first poem, the sonnet O Solitude, appeared in the Examiner in May 1816, while his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other poems was published in July 1820 before his last visit to Rome.

Who wrote the first poem?

The oldest known “poems” are anonymous – such as the Rig Vedas of Hinduism, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Song of the Weaver by an unknown Egyptian of the Second Dynasty.

Who was the father of Romantic poetry?

William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and important intellects.

Who is the father of English poetry?

‘The Father of English Poetry’ (Chapter 8) – Geoffrey Chaucer.

Who is the father of English literature?

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the “father of English literature”, or, alternatively, the “father of English poetry”.

Who founded Romanticism?

Robert Burns is considered the pioneer of the Romantic Movement. Although his death in 1796 precedes what many consider the start of Romanticism, his lyricism and sincerity mark him as an early Romantic writer. His most notable works are “Auld Lang Syne” (1788) and “Tam o’ Shanter” (1791).

What is the theme of Keats poetry?

Imagination; Beauty that is central in Keats poetry: for this reason beauty becomes a key point and it is the only consolation in a life of sorrow.

What influenced Keats writing?

Influences. Keats’s greatest influence was Milton, from whose long shadow he spent most of his literary career attempting to escape, but he also drew inspiration from his nearer contemporaries Wordsworth and Coleridge.

What are the characteristics of John Keats poetry?

Pursuit of Beauty. As with other Romantic poets, Keats focused his writerly attention on understanding and exploring beauty.
Focus on Familiar Things.
Removal of Self.
Odal Hymns.

What inspired John Keats to write the ode to the Nightingale?

The nightingale has longstanding literary associations, but Keats’s famous ode was inspired by a real-life nightingale as much as by previous poetry. Stephen Hebron considers how Keats uses the bird to position poetic imagination between the mortal and the immortal.

Henry René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a 19th-century French writer and journalist. Today, alongside Stendhal, Balzac and his patrons Flaubert and Zola, he is considered one of the most important French authors of his time. Many of his novellas have been filmed.

Guy de Maupassant spent his childhood in Fécamp, France. His father was a nobleman whose expenses were reportedly always higher than his income and who, contrary to the marital vow of fidelity, liked to have an affair or two. In 1859 he had to earn his living as a bank clerk and the couple separated.

De Maupassant’s mother went with him to Normandy for his younger brother Hervé, who was to suffer from mental illness in later years. He went to a Catholic school but couldn’t find his way around. His first literary attempts date back to his school days, at the age of 17 he was expelled from school because of a poem. After school, De Maupassant first studied law in Paris in 1869 and lived with his father during this time. However, he had to give up his studies because he was drafted – France was at war with Prussia.

After returning home in 1872, he could have continued his studies, but instead decided to work as a middle civil servant. Various affairs sweetened his little challenging job until he fell ill with syphilis in 1877. Guy de Maupassant became acquainted with the writer Gustave Flaubert and, through him, with the great authors of the Paris of his time, and he now increasingly experimented – under Flaubert’s guidance – with various literary genres. It was not until 1880 that Guy de Maupassant achieved great success with his novella Fat Dumplings. The work appeared in an anthology (“Les soirées de Médan”) in which Emil Zola published, among others, and made him famous overnight.

Subsequently, De Maupassant began to write prolifically, publishing over 300 works, mostly short stories, thereby cementing his reputation as well as his income. In addition to novellas, he also published a few novels, travelogues and poems. He now earned his living as a writer, although of course not every work immediately became a bestseller.

Guy de Maupassant’s best-known work is probably the bestseller Bel Ami, published in 1885, but Une Vie also enjoys widespread popularity to this day. The writer usually wrote about Normandy and Paris, the two places with which he had a personal point of reference. The autobiographical work “Bel Ami” is a story of the rise of the middle-class provincial writer to the well-respected capital journalist and member of the better society.

The best-selling author was also politically active. For example, as a journalist he opposed current government policies in his articles and as an artist he opposed the construction of the Eiffel Tower, which he was unable to assert, to the delight of millions of tourists in subsequent generations.

De Maupassant had three children with different mothers and otherwise led a rather unsettled life. He lived temporarily in Étretat, Cannes, Antibes and undertook extensive trips to North Africa. The consequences of syphilis, the use of drugs in later years and also the fear of becoming insane like his brother led to the writer’s final years of frustration.

He spent his last months in a psychiatric hospital in Passy near Paris before dying in 1893. He was buried on Montparnasse in Paris.

What is Guy de Maupassant best known for?

Guy de Maupassant is regarded as the best French writer of short stories. His 300 stories were written in the naturalist style and often described the life of the lower and middle classes. “Boule de suif” (“Ball of Fat”) is regarded as his best story, while the best known is “La Parure” (“The Necklace”).

Who is the father of the short story?

Maupassant is often described as the father of the modern short story—a literary form that’s more condensed and immediate than the novel. His work was admired by his contemporaries and imitated by those who came after him.

What was Guy de Maupassant first short story?

He wrote 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse. His first published story, “Boule de Suif” (“The Dumpling”, 1880), is often considered his most famous work.

Why did Guy de Maupassant become a writer?

Through her parenting, he was exposed to literature, which would set him on the path to becoming a writer. Guy de Maupassant met Gustave Flaubert, another French writer, in high school in 1867. His mother, seeing his love for literature, encouraged him to connect with Flaubert, which paid off later in his life.

What is the theme of Guy de Maupassant?

Although Maupassant wrote on a wide variety of topics, the major recurring themes in his short stories are war, prostitution, and madness.

How do you read Guy de Maupassant?

Why Guy de Maupassant wrote The Necklace?

The author’s purpose for writing The Necklace was to show things happen for a reason. Mathilde did not know her own worth or value and ended up doing foolish things to feel satisfied. The new dress was not necassary but she just asked for more than the good things she didn’t cherish enough.

José M. Sousa Saramago was born on November 16, 1922 in Azinhaga in the Portuguese province of Ribatejo. As he pointed out in his speech at the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm on December 10, 1998, his paternal grandparents – Jerónimo Melrinho and Josefa Caixinha – were illiterate pig farmers. His parents – José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade – were landless peasants until his father moved the family to Lisbon in 1924, where he got a job as a policeman. Although José’s mother never learned to read or write until the end of her life, she bought her inquisitive son a book when he was twelve years old. However, in 1936 he had to drop out of high school because his parents could no longer afford the school fees. José switched to a technical secondary school and completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith. In the evenings he often sat in a public library. In 1944 he married the painter Ilda Reis. Three years later his daughter Violante was born, who remained Saramago’s only child. He earned his family’s living as a technical draftsman, civil servant, publisher, translator, journalist and literary critic.

At the age of 47 he joined the Portuguese Communist Party, banned under Salazar and Caetano. After the failure of his first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1970, he lived with the writer Isabel da Nóbrega until 1986. In 1988 he married the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río, with whom he moved back to the Canary Island of Lanzarote five years later – after the scandal surrounding his novel “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ”. José Saramago published his first novel at the age of twenty-five (“Land of Sin”, 1947). Then thirty years passed before his second appeared (“Handbook of Painting and Calligraphy”, 1977). He became internationally known in 1982 with the novel “The Memorial”. In 1998, José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. When asked why he conveyed a gloomy, pessimistic view of the world in his novel parables, he replied: “I’m not a pessimist, just a well-informed optimist.” José Saramago died on June 18, 2010 at his home in Lanzarote.

José Saramago: Bibliography (selection)

Hope in the Alentejo (1980), The Memorial (1986), The Year of Ricardo Reis’ Death (1984), The Stone Raft (1986), The City of the Blind (1995), The Double (2002), The City of the Seeing (2004 ), A Time Without Death (2005), Little Memories (2006), The Journey of the Elephant (2008), Cain (2009).

What is Jose Saramago famous for?

José Saramago, (born November 16, 1922, Azinhaga, Portugal—died June 18, 2010, Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain), Portuguese novelist and man of letters who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

What did Jose Saramago win the Nobel Prize for?

In 1995, I published the novel Blindness and in 1997 All the Names. In 1995, I was awarded the Camões Prize and in 1998 the Nobel Prize for Literature. José Saramago died on 18 June 2010.

Is Jose Saramago still alive?

Date of death: June 18, 2010
Place of death: Tías, Spain

Where is Jose Saramago from?

He was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. His parents were José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade.

What language did Jose Saramago write in?

He was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, and more than two million copies of his books have been sold, his longtime friend and editor, Zeferino Coelho, said. A novel by Mr. Saramago, “The Elephant’s Journey,” is to be published posthumously in English on Sept.

After beginning in the tradition of Viennese modernism, the Austrian writer, storyteller, poet and essayist from the Jewish educated middle class created a psychologically differentiated work that identifies him as one of the last significant realists in German-language literature. Stefan Zweig became the most translated German author of his time. His wish was the creation of a humanistic basic understanding in Europe, which should reach through society to politics, in order to put an end to terror through the idea of nationalism…

Stefan Zweig was born on November 28, 1881 in Vienna, the son of the wealthy Jewish textile entrepreneur Moritz Zweig and his wife Ida Brettauer.

Here he grew up in the Jewish educated middle class, together with his brother Alfred. The Zweig family was not religious. He passed his Matura at the Wasagymnasium in Vienna. It was here that Zweig wrote his first poems. At that time he was influenced by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannstahl and Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1901, Stefan Zweig’s first volume of poetry was published, entitled “Silberne Saiten”. He also began translating works by French writers at this time. In 1904 he completed his doctorate in German and Romance Studies. By 1910 he was on numerous trips through Europe. The focus here was on the exchange with other writers and artists, with whom he mostly maintained friendships through intensive correspondence. By 1911, works such as “Tersites”, “The House by the Sea” or “Burning Secret” as well as his first biography “Émile Verhaeren” had been created.

With his writing First Experience. Four Stories from Children’s Land, Zweig approached an intuitive psychological style. At the beginning of the First World War, Stefan Zweig volunteered. Here he was employed in the war press headquarters until 1917. In order to demonstrate against the war in any form, he wrote the drama “Jeremias”, which premiered in Zurich in 1918. From 1918, Zweig also worked as a journalist and correspondent for the Swiss newspaper “Neue Freie Presse”. He also uses this medium to publish his non-party views. After the end of the war he settled in Salzburg. It was his idea to found an intellectually, holistically and humanistically motivated alliance in Europe. So he began, initially in numerous lectures and essays, to warn against radicalization through nationalism and to call for calm, diplomacy and patience.

In 1920, Zweig published the writings “Fear”, “Der Zwang” and from 1920 three essays on master builders of the world: “Three Masters”, 1925 “The Fight with the Demon” and 1928 “Three Poets of Your Life”. In 1926, Zweig celebrated great success on the stage with the adaptation of Ben Jonson’s “Volpone”. Just as successful was the publication of the book “Sternstunden der Menschen” in 1927. In 1928 he traveled to the Soviet Union, where his books were also published in Russian at the instigation of Maxim Gorki, with whom he corresponded. After the NSDAP took power in Germany, Stefan Zweig fled to London for fear of persecution. This is where the book “Impatience of the Heart” was written. From 1934 his work was no longer published in Germany and with the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich in 1938 production in his homeland also stopped. In 1935, Zweig wrote the libretto for the opera “The Silent Woman” for Richard Strauss.

In 1936 the NSDAP immediately banned the sale of all his works. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1938 and his second marriage in 1939 to Charlotte Altmann. In 1940 he received English citizenship from Great Britain. Nevertheless, he left Europe and traveled on to New York. In 1942 his chess novella and the monograph Brazil were published. After a short stay he visited Argentina and Paraguay. He then settled in Brazil. Here Stefan Zweig fell into deep sadness and depression.

Stefan Zweig committed suicide on February 22, 1942 in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro. In 1944 his autobiography was published posthumously under the title “The World of Yesterday”.

Where is Stefan Zweig buried?

Petrópolis Municipal Cemetery, Petrópolis, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Is Stefan Zweig public domain?

The author died in 1942, so works by this author are also in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 75 years or less.

Why is Stefan Zweig important?

Stefan Zweig; (28 November 1881 – 22 February 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and most popular writers in the world.

Where did Stefan Zweig live?

Zweig was raised in Vienna. His first book, a volume of poetry, was published in 1901. He received a doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1904 and traveled widely in Europe before settling in Salzburg, Austria, in 1913.

How many books has Stefan Zweig written?

The Royal Game
1943

The World of Yesterday
1941

Letter from an Unknown Woman
1922

Beware of Pity
1939

Fear
1925

Amok
1922

What did Stefan Zweig write?

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. During World War I, he wrote the influential anti-war tragedy Jeremias. This 1917 work was an unsparing indictment of an insane war.

When Herman Melville died of heart failure on September 28, 1891, his literary fame had faded into oblivion. Her widow, Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of an eminent Boston judge, published a discreet obituary in the press, noting that her late husband was a writer. It was a gesture of delicacy with an author mistreated by the public and critics. A sailor, a whaler, a bank clerk, a rural teacher, Melville had spent his last years working as an inspector in the New York customs house. Apparently he performed his duties with carelessness and honesty.

Abandoned by the public and scorned by critics, he took refuge in poetry. His lyrical creations circulated in small editions paid for by his own pocket. Appeared in 1876, Clarel, a colossal epic poem —18,000 lines in 150 songs— longer than the Iliad, only caused perplexity and the suspicion that its author had lost his mind. Melville’s funeral summoned only his widow and two of his sisters. His eldest son had committed suicide by shooting herself in the head and his youngest son had disappeared, having run away from home for unknown reasons. The misfortune affected even his own tombstone, as they altered his name, recording Henry instead of Herman.

Nobody would pay much attention to Moby Dick until 1920, when critics rescued the novel and highlighted its merits, assuring that it was a masterpiece. Currently, Moby Dick is considered to be the most representative novel of American literature, the story that best reflects the spirit of a country with a conscience divided between guilt and pride, the yearning for redemption and the will to power, the vocation of universality and the narrowest provincialism.

Melville perceived God as a terrible sovereign who had thrown man into a world of suffering and scarcity, where the possibility of happiness was almost non-existent.

Allegories can be annoying, particularly when their meaning is clear and unequivocal. It has been pointed out countless times that Moby Dick, the White Whale, represents evil. Not the moral evil, but the metaphysical one that accompanies the human being since the Fall. If the albino sperm whale is the embodiment of absolute malice, Captain Ahab would be the champion of good. However, Ahab is not a hero. Haunted by the humiliation inflicted by the White Whale, who amputated his leg, he does not seek justice, but revenge, even if his price is the loss of his ship and the death of his men. It seems more likely to me to say that Moby Dick is a metaphor for God. In fact, whalers who have survived his attacks claim that he is immortal and ubiquitous. From this perspective, it can be ventured that Ahab is an Adam who does not forgive his creator for expulsion from paradise. Educated in the severe principles of Calvinism, Melville perceived God as a terrible sovereign who had thrown man into a world of suffering and scarcity, where the possibility of happiness was almost non-existent. One could only resignedly accept that fate or rebel against it. Ahab chooses to rebel and God punishes him, burying him under the waters.

In his correspondence with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville states that Moby Dick is a “wicked” book. His vision of his universe could not be more subversive: man is corrupt to the root; God perhaps does not exist and if he exists, he does not notice our world, an insignificant point in the cosmos; death reduces everything to insignificance: fame, wealth, wisdom. We know very little, almost nothing. The big questions will never find an answer.

Melville only believed in American democracy. The United States is the chosen people, the nation that carries on its shoulders the ark of freedom. In Casaca Blanca (1850), Melville writes: “The past is dead and has no resurrection; but the future is imbued with so much life that it lives for us even in advance.” The Manifest Destiny of the United States is not to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific, as the journalist John L. O’Sullivan claimed, but to spread the democratic principles of fraternity and liberty throughout the world. The Declaration of Independence does not spring from nothing, but from a universal lineage forged by great spirits, such as Paul of Tarsus, Luther, Homer and Shakespeare. Melville is not a hot-headed patriot. He admits that the United States has committed serious sins, such as slavery, racism and imperialism. His desire to dominate resembles Ahab’s madness; his violence against his real or imagined opponents evokes the wrath of the White Whale. America is great for its hubris, but that greed could also be the cause of its destruction.

Melville believes that patriotism should be linked to the values ​​of the Enlightenment, not to an expansionist mysticism that justifies illegal wars. This critical vision permeates Moby Dick, transforming it into the great American epic, the chronicle of a colossal undertaking that has given birth to splendor and misery, heroism and vileness, love of life and an irrepressible death instinct. Melville is not Ajab, but Ishmael, the witness of the recklessness and excess of the captain of the Pequod or, if you prefer, of America intoxicated with power that does not accept any limits.

Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819 into a wealthy family. His father, Allan, was a cultured man who had traveled Europe and his mother, Mary Gansevoort, a refined, educated woman with sincere religious piety. For the first five years of their marriage, they lived in Albany, but then moved to New York to open a French lingerie business. Herman was born there, the third of eleven children.

In 1830, the family business went bankrupt and Allan went mad. He died shortly after, leaving as his only inheritance an accumulation of debts. Herman had no choice but to drop out of school. He worked in a bank, a warehouse, a farm and, at seventeen, he embarked as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Liverpool. Years later, he would write: “The need to do something for myself, coupled with a natural disposition for wandering, conspired within me to cast myself out to sea as a sailor.”

After his first maritime adventure, he worked as a school teacher, but found his experience unrewarding. He soon returned to the sea. In 1841 he sailed from New Bedford on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. His relationship with his classmates was not easy. Despite his sympathy for the less favored classes, his manners and knowledge collided with the brutality and ignorance of the crew. That paradox would lead to a painful isolation.

He boarded the first boat to arrive on the island, not without wrestling with his guests, upset at his departure, which perhaps deprived them of a long overdue lunch.

Fifteen months later, the whaler dropped anchor at Nuku Hiva, an island in the Marquesas. Melville went inside with another sailor, fleeing life on board, increasingly unbearable. The Taipi welcomed them hospitably, despite being cannibals. Abandoned by his accomplice, Melville spent four months among the natives, enjoying a comfortable and relaxed existence, but he got on the first ship that arrived at the island, not without a fight with his guests, upset by his departure, which perhaps deprived them of of a long overdue lunch. It is said that he killed an indigenous man with a boat hook, but it is not known for certain. The ship that picked him up was another whaler, the Julia, and his routine was as hellish as that of the Acushnet. In fact, the crew mutinied in Tahiti. Melville ended up on the island of Moorea, planting potatoes for a small wage, but he didn’t last long. He embarked on another whaler, which he called Leviathan and which took him to Honolulu. He would once again sail on an American frigate, the United States, where he served as a common seaman.

Unstable, unpredictable and withdrawn, W. Somerset Maugham attributes repressed homosexual tendencies to him, relying on some particularly fiery descriptions of his male friends, such as Tobias Greene, the boy who eloped with him from the Acushnet: “His naturally dark skin had gone darkening from exposure to the tropical sun, and a mass of jet-colored curls gathered at his temples, and cast a darker shadow over his large black eyes. In Liverpool, Melville befriended a boy named Harry Bolton, whom he would describe in no less fiery tone: “His skin was of a dark tinge, feminine as a girl’s; […] Her voice was like the sound of a harp.” Somerset Maugham points out that Melville did not deviate from the morals of his day, but he allowed his imagination to take certain liberties. That tension could have affected his character, since these were not harmless fantasies, but desires that were considered perverse and subject to severe prison sentences, not to mention scandal and social disapproval. Was Maugham wrong? We cannot answer unequivocally, but there is no doubt that Melville was a tormented and mysterious man, who grew up with an acute feeling of helplessness caused by the death of his father, the ruin and disdain of his mother, who did not approve of his inconstancy and his tendency to slack off.

In the immensity of the sea, Melville felt that man had been abandoned by God. When he returned to the United States at the age of twenty-five, his adventures aroused the interest of family and friends, who encouraged him to write. He would emerge that way Taipi. A cannibal Eden, his first book. Published in 1846—first in London and then in New York—it enjoyed moderate success. Melville narrates his adventures in the South Seas with a sensual prose that oscillates between travelogue, ethnography and social criticism: “The Marquesas! What strange visions of exotic things this very name evokes! Naked houris, cannibalistic feasts, coconut groves, coral reefs, tattooed wrens, and bamboo temples.” Melville incurs the prejudices of Western civilization towards other cultures, but at the same time celebrates a society free of greed and moral repression, a kind of Arcadia that has not yet suffered the ravages of capitalism and Christianity.

Taipi’s success prompted him to write a second play entitled Omoo, which—in the native language—means “wanderer.” Published in 1847, it continues the account of his experiences in the South Seas. His criticism of the exploitation suffered by the indigenous people at the hands of their alleged civilizers aroused the wrath of politicians and missionaries. Faced with the asceticism of the Christian tradition, Melville exalts the freedom of the natives, who live in perfect harmony with nature, oblivious to feelings of guilt and sin. That same year, he married and settled in New York. He is born to his first child, Malcolm, and travels to Europe to meet with potential publishers of his next books.

In 1849, Mardi appears: and a journey beyond. His initial intention was to write an adventure set in the Pacific, but his readings and an increasingly demanding conception of writing as a form of knowledge will transform the work into an allegorical journey through the imaginary Mardi archipelago, threaded with reflections on the myth of the Fall, the meaning of suffering and the problem of evil. Melville raises the possibility of a cosmos without God or, what is more frightening, with an indifferent God. A satirical-philosophical novel inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (The Patched Tailor), Mardi sold poorly and baffled readers, who were expecting a new adventure book. Melville, who had been deluded by the prospect of making a living from literature, hastily wrote Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) and White Coat; or the world of the warrior (1850), which once again spoke of his youthful travels through Europe and the Pacific.

‘Mardi’ sold poorly and baffled readers, who were expecting a new adventure book. Melville hastily wrote ‘Redburn’ and ‘White Coat’

Influenced by reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Redburn is riddled with autobiographical elements: family bankruptcy, early poverty, the trip to Liverpool, and the return to America, a nation that still played the role of refuge. and asylum for the disinherited of the earth. White Coat narrates life aboard an American warship, denouncing the brutal discipline of the officers with the crew. Marked by the reading of Emerson, Melville praises the democratic brotherhood and calls for the moral regeneration of society. He is not a revolutionary, but he is very critical of classism and rigid hierarchies.

In the fall of 1850, Melville takes out a loan from his mother-in-law to buy Arrowhead, a farm in Pittsfield. Among his neighbors is Nathaniel Hawthorne, with whom he will maintain a close friendship for fifteen intense months. At that time, he has already started working on Moby Dick, with such dedication that his family fears for his health. The relationship with Hawthorne begins in a very literary way, when both take shelter from a storm under a rock. During the storm, they talk about literature and religious issues. From then on, they will spend long evenings chatting animatedly, often until dawn breaks. Between shots of brandy and good cigars, they exchange impressions. Melville’s infatuation is sometimes embarrassing: “I have the impression that I will leave the world more satisfied to have met you.” Moved by that fervor, he dedicates Moby Dick to his friend “as a sign of admiration for his genius.” Hawthorne sends him a letter commenting on the novel. It is lost, but we retain Melville’s emphatic reply: “His heartbeat in my ribs and mine in his, and theirs in God. That you have understood the book has produced in me a feeling of inexpressible security. I have written a devilish book and I feel pure as a lamb”. A supporter of “an unconditional democracy in all things”, Melville confesses that he feels “aversion for the human race”. Or, more exactly, by “the mass”. He considers democratic egalitarianism to be compatible with the vindication of the “aristocracy of the brain”. In a corrupt society, the hero can only be a rebel, which will mean that many consider him a criminal.

Melville and Hawthorne will only see each other twice. Some point out that the author of The Scarlet Letter felt uncomfortable with the intensity of his friend and tried to distance himself from him. Melville will refer to his long evenings as nights of “ontological heroics.” Hawthorne seems as profound to him as Shakespeare. In his work, he appreciates compassion, love and a certain fatality that he defines as “blackness”. Despite his ambition, Moby Dick, or the Whale, published in 1851, receives a cool reception. In the United States, an edition of 3,000 copies is published. In the United Kingdom, only 300 are published. Neither edition sold out during Melville’s lifetime. Readers’ reticence turned to hostility when accusations of blasphemy began to circulate, a crime that at the time could carry a prison sentence. Son-in-law of a notable judge, the family pressured the writer to attend divine services, but he refused. He had embarked on a path of no return. He was no longer looking for success, but rather the recognition reserved for the greatest writers, almost always misunderstood by his contemporaries. He was not a cursed, but he was a rare and unclassifiable feather. His next novel, Pierre or the ambiguities (1852), definitively stripped him of the support of the public and publishers. Incestuous love story between stepbrothers, a critic appreciated its enormous dramatic force and defined the work as “the tragedy of an American Hamlet”. In its pages, it is clear that Melville has settled into an implacable nihilism. There is definitely no God and if he exists, he doesn’t care about us. It is not possible to know others or oneself. The mind is an ocean of abyssal depth, cloudy and unfathomable. Knowledge is only a mirage. The truth is always elusive. It is only possible to adopt a heroic, lonely and hopeless resistance against an indifferent universe and a decadent society.

3,000 copies of ‘Moby Dick’ were published in the US and only 300 in the UK. Neither edition sold out during Melville’s lifetime

Exhausted and on the verge of mental collapse, Melville still published fourteen stories and sketches anonymously between 1853 and 1856 in Putnam’s and Harper’s magazines. Among them there are masterpieces, such as Bartleby, the clerk and Benito Cereno. His paymasters had demanded that he not address complex or offensive topics. Melville accommodates these demands, practicing the art of irony and allusion. Bartleby is a new Ahab, but he no longer wants revenge on a God who has betrayed his promises. He just lets himself die. It is a silent revenge, but full of rage. Benito Cereno prefigures the plots of Joseph Conrad, with characters thrown into labyrinths with no way out, condemned to fail and disappoint those who had placed great expectations in them. At the end of these anonymous accounts, Melville is thirty-seven years old. He is old, abuses alcohol and has failed as a writer. He dedicates himself to writing poems that reflect his disappointment with everything. He has doubts about the role of the United States as the herald of a brotherly democracy and does not believe in a transcendent God. The only thing sacred is life, infinite and imperfect and of dramatic beauty. Melville moved to New York, where he died at the age of seventy-two. Hardly anyone remembered him and his books were hardly read. He left behind a posthumous and unfinished work, Billy Budd, which would not appear until 1924. Billy Budd is a sailor wrongfully sentenced to death. The only crime of his is his youth and his innocence. Before being executed, Billy forgives the executioners of him. Perhaps Melville wanted to tell us that he said goodbye to the world without rancor.

Moby Dick is a classic because it deals with the great themes that have never ceased to concern human beings: friendship, education, the transition to maturity, the struggle between good and evil, the existence —or absence— of God, politics and social order, the conflict between civilization and nature. Moby Dick is the story of a frustrated deicide. The deed of the Pequod announces the definitive loss of confidence in divine providence. Ahab is a new Adam, but he does not represent a beginning, but rather the twilight of hope, the end of certainties, the hegemony of dust over life, of nothingness over being. Moby Dick is not evil, but that God who has abandoned man to his fate, remembering him only when he dares to challenge him. Imbued in the reading of the Bible, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe and Carlyle, Herman Melville resorts to the myth of dragons and sea monsters that embody the forces of chaos, quoting in the preliminary “Excerpts” from the prophet Isaiah: “That day The Lord will punish with his sword, fierce and powerful, Leviathan, the elusive serpent, Leviathan, the crooked serpent, and he will kill the dragon that lives in the sea” (27, 1). Melville reverses Bible prophecy. Ahab is that fierce and powerful sword, but the Leviathan is not the devil, but God himself. Perhaps the chaos is not the result of the Fall, but of the laziness of the creator, whose acts are as incomprehensible as the most hermetic hieroglyphics.

Melville fused the myths of the Old World (Perseus, Saint George) with the spirit of the New, without a tradition of epic literature, but with an unlimited confidence in his destiny as a beacon and foam of the future. The Quaker captain of the Pequod exudes the same grandeur and fatalism as the heroes of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Ismael is not a particularly seductive figure, perhaps because his personality is forged during the hunt for the White Whale. Witness and sole survivor of the tragedy, he will establish a close bond of friendship with the harpooner Queequeg, the noble savage. The young sailor and the cannibal will establish such an intimate relationship that they will become “inseparable twins”. It can be said that they embody the double face of Melville: on the one hand, the concern to learn, the desire to create, the desire for adventure, and, on the other, the immediacy of natural life, the innocence of primitive man, the freedom of living without philosophical or theological dogmas. Melville dreamed of a community of spirits with a high and creative mind. He felt he was getting closer to that goal during his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, but in the years spent with the Marquesas Indians he also saw greatness. Melville’s aim to overcome the oppressive and alienating Western perspective perhaps explains the Pequod’s crew of blacks, easterners, mestizos, and outlaws. Ismael affirms that he has not been a pirate. Can we ensure that he is not lying?

Captain Bildad and Captain Peleg are Quakers. They do not embark, but recruit the crew. It is impossible to sympathize with them: authoritarian, solemn, hypocritical, inflexible, greedy. It is the same with the officers: Starbuck, sensible and determined, but afraid of the extraordinary; Stubb, with a courage born of his defective imagination, unable to notice danger; Flask, ignorant, unaware and without a shred of sensitivity. By contrast, you don’t have to look too hard to appreciate the three harpooners: Queequeg, a cannibal with a ghostly tattooed face, but “a simple and honest heart”; Tashtego, a redskin with the untainted blood of his proud ancestors; Daggoo, a corpulent and majestic black man who involuntarily arouses in his companions a feeling of “physical humility”. Melville professes the religion of the “great democratic God”, where racial differences are doomed to melt into a flame of brotherhood.

The harpooners do not hate the whales they hunt, perhaps because they have never thought that they live under the protection of a father God. On the contrary, Ahab allows himself to be carried away by a “bold, inexhaustible and supernatural revenge” because he has discovered the helplessness of man before the cosmos. His monomania is born from a childish spite that Ismael will come to share. Both are orphans, insignificant creatures in the dance of being, where life and death follow each other without purpose or purpose. God has forsaken man, but continues to mistreat him with his wrath. Father Mapple’s homily, heard by Ismael in the Whalers’ Chapel before embarking, travels the seas, showing that the sacred is not something benevolent, but rather terrible and implacable. Father Mapple preaches from a bow-shaped pulpit, proclaiming that eternity belongs only to God. The kingdom of man is death. The priest’s words are ambiguous and imprecise. If they are interpreted with any audacity, it could be thought that God is sick, almost dying, and he will not tolerate man surviving him.

Melville set out to map the cosmos. Given the vastness of it, he chose the sea, a microcosm with the appearance of totality.

Melville has been criticized for his digressions, which would supposedly prove his narrative ineptitude and his pedantry as a school teacher, eager to display his knowledge. Is there another explanation to justify his long explanations about the hunting and butchering of cetaceans, accompanied by detailed taxonomies? Would it be convenient for him to purge these chapters from the reading? Undoubtedly not, because they would disfigure the work. Melville set out to map the cosmos. Given the vastness of it, he chose the sea, a microcosm with the appearance of a whole. In a chaotic and meaningless universe, knowledge is the only sword that can defeat evil, or at least mitigate its devastations.

Melville is not satisfied with narrating the contest between good and evil. He wants to convey to us the soul of the titanic struggle, which requires being exhaustive and meticulous. If Moby Dick had no digressions, it would be an infinitely less valuable novel. The core of it is not intrigue, but the vocation to encompass the universe. It is the same ambition that inspired the Iliad or Dante’s Comedy. Between dust and life, the word emerges, struggling to undermine the empire of death. However, the sword does not defeat the monster. The White Whale destroys the Pequod. Does that mean that Melville ends his song with a terrible failure? No, because there is a survivor, Ishmael, who returns from the last circle of hell. Instead, Melville sends Ahab to the bottom of the ocean. It is a way of exorcising the inner demons from him, of annihilating resentment and dissatisfaction. Ishmael does not claim to be a new Adam, like Ahab, but rather a free man reconciled with finitude. The feeling of emptiness that death causes us can only be combated with the creative energy of life. Ahab is not Prometheus, but a vulgar Othello.

D. H. Lawrence states that Moby Dick “is a symbol. About what? I doubt very much that even Melville didn’t know exactly. That’s the best of all.” It is an open and fruitful hypothesis, since it does not exclude any reading, but I dare to venture that Moby Dick is a branch of the tree of knowledge. Tasting its fruit does not make us gods, but it reminds us that we live in the open. Helpless, but free. Melville was an unhappy man. He did not know glory. He perhaps he lost faith in his work. He did not stop writing, but he did so with the anguish of the creator who is spared recognition. He probably did not suspect that Moby Dick would open the gates of Olympus reserved for geniuses such as Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Milton or Goethe, whom he admired so much. When I think of Melville, I imagine him on the highest mast of the Pequod, acting as a lookout, a hundred feet above our heads, carving out a route that would be navigated by names like James Joyce, William Faulkner, Hermann Broch, and Kafka, heirs to —sometimes unknowingly— from his visionary pen.

What is Herman Melville best known for?

Not until the early 20th century was Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick first recognized as a literary masterpiece and touted as a cornerstone of modern American literature. Born to a New York City merchant in 1819, Melville fought for a greatness that would not be realized during his lifetime.

How did Herman Melville influence literature?

Melville was rediscovered in the 1920s and is now recognized as a starkly original American voice. His major novel Moby-Dick, short stories, and late novella, Billy Budd, Sailor, published posthumously, made daring use of the absurd and grotesque and prefigured later modernist literature.

How did Herman Melville impact the world?

Herman Melville’s writings influenced America mainly after his death as we discovered the underlying beauty and validity of his literature, developed from his years of experience as a seaman. There are many reasons why Herman Melville is considered one of the most decorated literary authors of his time.

How do you pronounce Melville?

Virginia Woolf was an English writer, publisher and social critic. Virginia Woolf became internationally famous with her novels and is still one of the most influential essayists on the subject of the women’s movement.

Early strokes of fate in Virginia Woolf’s youth

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882 in London. She grew up with eight siblings and half-siblings. Even as a young girl, Virginia was interested in books and literature, having access to her father’s large library. However, she did not enjoy schooling.
When Virginia was thirteen her mother died; nine years later, in 1904, her father also died. Both tragedies plunged Virginia into depression and she suffered mental breakdowns that she found difficult to overcome.

Bloomsbury Group and marriage to Leonard Woolf

She co-founded the Bloomsbury Group the same year her father died. The group brought together many artists, scientists and writers, and most notably enabled Virginia and two other women to break free from the moral bonds of Victorian restraint by being able to actively participate in community activities and express their opinions.

In addition, the Bloomsbury Group offered the opportunity to deal with modern English and American literature. In the years that followed, Virginia pursued her desire to become a writer. She began writing articles and book reviews for newspapers including The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. She also taught at Morley College.

In 1912 Virginia married the writer Leonard Sidney Woolf. She again suffered from mental disorders that affected her so badly that she attempted suicide in September of the same year.

Lifelong mental breakdowns

Virginia Woolf was plagued by depression and breakdowns her entire life. Why she kept getting sick remained unclear until her death. So far, her mental illnesses can be explained by the early blows of fate and abuse by her half-brothers. Despite her serious illness, Virginia Woolf managed to get her first novel, The Voyage Out, published in 1915 to positive public acclaim.

Two years later she founded her own publishing house with her husband, “The Hogarth Press”, which published all her other works, but also works by other writers. Little by little Virginia Woolf’s novels were published in the following years and she gained more and more fame and respect.
In 1936 she finished her novel The Waves, but soon fell ill again. A year later her critical work The Three Guineas was published.

Virginia Woolf did not get her recurring mental illnesses and breakdowns under control until the end of her life. She suffered too much from her early childhood strokes of fate. On March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse in the town of Sussex, where she and her husband had moved in 1919. Her last novel, Between the Acts, was published posthumously shortly thereafter.

Influence of works

In the 1970s, letters, diaries and essays by Virginia Woolf were discovered and public attention returned to the writer, especially her feminist writings. The 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own” is considered one of the most important and most cited texts of the new women’s movement.

Virginia Woolf was not only a writer, but also an essayist, publisher and critic. In her novels she dealt mainly with human consciousness and the psyche and tried to fathom them. In addition, in her late work “The Three Guineas” she criticized the patriarchal social order and linked it to the then emerging militarism and war.

To this day, Virginia Woolf is widely discussed and quoted, especially when it comes to gender studies and feminism.

What is Virginia Woolf most known for?

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is recognised as one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century. Perhaps best known as the author of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), she was also a prolific writer of essays, diaries, letters and biographies.

How did Virginia Woolf change the world?

Virginia Woolf, the pioneering female novellist, who was born on January 25 1882, till date is remembered to be one of the most bold modernist classic writers as she raised the question of why women can not be independent. Given the era she comes from, women were always taught to be submissive in nature.

What happened Virginia Woolf?

After a lifelong struggle with her mental health, including periods of severe depression and suicide attempts, Woolf died in 1941 by drowning herself near her house in Sussex, England, at the age of 59. As TIME noted in her obituary, she left behind a body of work that was complex and lyrical.

Who is Virginia Woolf feminism?

By India Today Web Desk: Virginia Woolf, the much-admired English writer and a pioneer of feminism and modernism, was born on January 25, 1882, as Adeline Virginia Stephen. Woolf became a prominent personality in the English literary spectrum in the years between the two World Wars.

What inspired Virginia Woolf to feminist?

How the theory of Feminism influenced Virginia as an adolescent. The relationship between her parents, the talented and highly respected Leslie Stephen and his beautiful wife, who was always there to give him support and her unshared attention, had great effect on Virginia’s attitude towards men.

Is Virginia Woolf a liberal feminist?

Through examination of laws and practices, liberal feminists including Mary Astell (1666–1731), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–99), Harriet Taylor (1807–58), John Stuart Mill (1806–73), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) drew on the liberal tradition’s value of equality and individual freedom.

What are the 4 types of feminism?

There are four types of Feminism – Radical, Marxist, Liberal, and Difference.

What do you mean by black feminism?

Black feminism, however, centers on the experiences of African American women, understanding intersectionality between racism, sexism, and classism, as well as other social identities. Black feminism highlights and engages with the many aspects of racial inequities along with gender inequality.

What does Virginia Woolf mean by patriarchy?

It refers to the system of male domination. over women in society. This domination takes different forms: discrimination, disregard, insult, control, exploitation, or violence. Patriarchy does not survive on its own.

The German writer became an international bestseller with his anti-war novel “Nothing New in the West” (1928/29). In it, Erich Maria Remarque processed personal experiences and experiences in the First World War in the memorable story of the soldier Paul Bäumer and his suffering. The realistic depiction divided the audience into enthusiastic pacifists and outraged militarists who – like the National Socialists – saw the book as a disparagement of German soldiers. He landed a second major success with the title “Arch of Triumph” (1945)…

Erich Maria Remarque was born on June 22, 1898 in Osnabrück, the son of the Catholic book printer Peter Remark.

Remarque, whose real name is Erich Paul Remark, attended the catholic teacher training college in Osnabrück after school. In 1916 he was drafted as a volunteer to fight on the western front. He was wounded and was hospitalized in his home country until the end of the war. After the war he took on various jobs, for example as a dealer, organist, teacher or theater and concert critic for the “Osnabrücker Tageszeitung”. In addition, he published poems and prose texts. In 1920 his impressionist artist novel “Die Traumbude” was published. On behalf of a company newspaper, Remarque traveled to Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Italy, England and Belgium.

From 1925 he worked as an editor for the Berlin newspaper “Sport im Bild”. In 1929 his novel “Nothing New in the West” was published. He became a worldwide hit. The writer presents his own wartime experiences using the figure of the 19-year-old soldier Paul Bäumer, his suffering and his death. In doing so, he unmasks the sublime heroic death, flattered from above as propagandistic, as an involuntary, cruel death on the battlefield. Its realistic depiction becomes an accusatory cry against the madness of war. The title has been translated into more than thirty languages ​​and filmed three times. In Germany, the book provoked divided opinions: on the one hand, the pacifists were enthusiastic about the anti-war depictions, on the other hand, the militarists were outraged by the descriptions of the soldiers at the front, which they recognized as an insult.

The National Socialists were of the same opinion and burned Remarque’s books. In 1930 the American director Lewis Milestone made the first film adaptation of “Nothing New on the West”. In 1931 the author wrote a sequel to his worldwide success entitled “The Way Back” as a description of those returning from the war. In 1932 Remarque emigrated to Switzerland. There he lived in the former villa of the Swiss painter Alfred Böcklin. Together with the writer Elke Lasker-Schüler, he looks for escape routes for emigrants. In May of the following year his books were banned from public libraries and publicly burned. They were branded with the note “literary treason against soldiers of the world war”.

In 1937 his novel “Three Comrades” was published in London, a year later in Amsterdam in German. In 1938 he was stripped of his German citizenship. In the same year the book “Three Comrades” was published, which was also filmed. A year later he fled to the United States. Many of his novels were filmed there, including a star cast with David Niven and Barbara Stanwyck. He himself played a small supporting role alongside Liselotte Pulver, Dieter Borsche, Barbara Rüttig and Klaus Kinski in his English anti-fascist book “A Time to Love and a Time to Die”. While his first world hit “Nothing New in the West” made him financially independent, he became a made writer in the USA. Two years later, in 1941, his English-language novel “Flotsam” was published in London. In German, the title was presented as “Love your neighbor” in Stockholm.

From 1945 Remarque lived alternately in New York and in Porto Ronco, Switzerland. In 1946 he published his second worldwide literary success, the exile novel “Arch of Triumph”, which was first published in the USA. In it he describes the life of German emigrants before the Nazis invaded. His other books could not connect to the two literary successes. A year later, Remarque became an American citizen. In 1952 his anti-war novel “Funke des Lebens” was published. In 1954 the book “Time to Live and Time to Die” followed, the action of which takes place in Nazi Germany. The publication of “The Black Obelisk”, a novel from the time of the Weimar Republic, followed two years later.

In 1963 the novel “The Night of Lisbon” was published, which also turned against the war. In 1967 Erich Maria Remarque was honored with the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Erich Maria Remarque died on September 25, 1970 in Locarno, Switzerland.

His last novel, Shadows in Paradise, was published posthumously in 1971. 30,000 material documents on the life and work of the author are archived in the Erich Maria Remarque Archive of the City of Osnabrück, including the manuscript for “Nothing New in the West”.

What did Erich Maria Remarque do in the war?

In November 1916, Remarque, along with a number of his classmates, was drafted into the German army. After a period of military training, his unit was sent to the Western Front. There he took part in the trench warfare in Flanders, Belgium.

What happened to Erich Maria Remarque?

Remarque died of heart failure at the age of 72 in Locarno on 25 September 1970. His body was buried in the Ronco Cemetery in Ronco, Ticino, Switzerland.

Was Remarque in the war?

A student at the University of Munster, Remarque was drafted into the German army at the age of 18. He fought on the Western Front during World War I and was wounded no fewer than five times, the last time seriously.

Where Did Erich Maria Remarque live?

Osnabruck