Bøger af Ole Wagner

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Heidelberg, language: English, abstract: Emily Brontë died almost exactly one year after the publication of her novel, so she was not able to follow the course it was taking in criticism very long. Since reviewers attacked Wuthering Heights and its author, Emily¿s older sister Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) felt urged to defend the value of the novel. She did that in her famous Editor¿s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights of 1850, but not without complaining about several aspects of the novel herself. Also, the preface could not ¿provoke any reviews which showed more complete understanding¿ . It is not easy for a modern reader to imagine what exactly in Wuthering Heights made the feelings of the reviewers run so high at the time of the first publication of the novel. Moral standards and expectations towards a work of art were quite different then from how they are today. This essay, therefore, will discuss how the novel violated the moral values of the Victorian time and aroused disgust in contemporary readers by taking a closer look at the two main characters. But first it will look at the artistic complaints of the reviewers and the expectations of the Victorian readership in order to give an impression of the ideas of the time.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Heidelberg (Anglistisches Seminar ), course: Twentieth Century Crime Fiction, language: English, abstract: This essay will explore how social criticism is performed in two novels of Dashiell Hammett. Red Harvest is often described as ¿the first hard-boiled novel¿, giving it the status of a literary landmark. Here the author gives us a clear impression of his characteristic world and his social vision of it. Therefore, the novel appears to be an interesting subject to look how this kind of literature employs social criticism. The other book that will be examined here is The Maltese Falcon, one of the most popular and best known hard-boiled crime novels ever, that has served as a model for many authors. As Robert Shulman argues, Hammet gives his ¿social vision its fullest expression¿ in this novel, showing ¿his concern with American individualism¿. Thus, as this examination is limited to two works, it seems most sensible to use The Maltese Falcon along with Red Harvest for this purpose to produce a good insight into the social criticism in Hammett¿s books. Before beginning with the study, it is necessary to make clear what ¿social criticism¿ is here, as the term itself has a wide meaning. ¿Social¿ will be discussed in the sense, as the Merriam-Webster dictionary puts it, ¿of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society¿. This means that in a smaller sense, the term ¿social¿ concerns the way the individuals, the characters of the novels, deal with each other, and, in a larger sense, how the society is organized and how its institutions treat the individual and the group, which also brings economic and political components into the scope of the study. The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest are particularly well suited for such a study, as they both use distinct, in some points different, in some points similar ways to criticize. They also provide a look at different issues, therefore the essay will be able to cover a greater area combining the research results from the two novels. First, the essay will focus on the wider relations in society, the political and economical and the legal. Then, the individual relations among the characters and the criticism of them will be observed. Later, this work will also explore how the society influences the individual ¿ here the hero ¿ in his actions.