...The Age of Innocence The title of the novel is The Age of Innocence. This title is significant because it describes the time period of the novel. In this time period, people were afraid of scandal and would do anything to prevent it. This is a time period when people attempt to be seen as innocent as possible. The title is also ironic because it states that this is a time of innocence, but two of the main characters commit a sin far from innocent. Therefore, the title is significant to the setting of the novel. The Age of Innocence is written by Edith Wharton. Newland Archer is the protagonist of the novel. Newland is a handsome young man thriving in New York. He is a lawyer invested in the American values of New York. He is engaged to the equally as beautiful May Welland who is the cousin of the Countess Olenska. Newland falls in love with the Countess, but is loyal to May and the two are married. He is still desperately in love with the Countess and has an affair with her despite Newland’s paranoia of May’s knowledge of the affair. The guilt of the affair bothers Newland, but he never fully confesses his adultery to May. He grows to become quite loyal to May even though he was in love with the Countess. May Welland is the fiancee of Newland Archer. She is from a prominent New York family and has grown up with the same values as...
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...In the novel The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton presents May Welland as a naïve and pure girl; the embodiment of everything Newland Archer perceives as immaculate. But in truth she is not as ignorant as she is described as; she knows all of the things Newland has been doing and she shows him that she is not all he expected her to be. May was previously depicted as being abysmally pure, and Archer loves this part about her; he wants to expose her to all types of literature and open her eyes to the real world. May later shatters this façade with her knowledge that one would not expect; that Archer didn’t expect. She first indicates her awareness by saying, “And if you feel yourself in any way pledged…pledged to the person we’ve spoken of…and...
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...“Edith Wharton” Edith Wharton was born on January 24th 1862, going by the name Edith Newbold Jones, to the couple George Fredrick Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander in New York City. Her first engagement was broken up by her fiancés mother. In 1885 she married Edward Robbens Wharton whom she later divorced in 1913 after 28 years of marriage. Wharon died August 11, 1937 in France due to a stroke. Throughout those 75 years that she was alive she has accomplished a lot. For example, she won the French Legion of Honor during her work in WWI. She also won the Pulitzer prize on her 12th book The Age of Innocence. During Wharton’s work in World War I she served in as an American war correspondent and refugee aid worker. “Wharton’s World War I articles have been published together in a book called Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.” (Mead pg.51) Her war work has also earned her a French Legion of Honor medal in 1916. That means although she may look like one of the Gilded Age society matrons out of her novels like The Age of Innocence or House of Mirth she can roll her sleeves up and prove anyone can help in a...
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...The Suffering of Wharton’s Men Edith Wharton wrote about New York high society. She depicts the pressures of the conventions of the time on the people, both men and women. Some of her stories talk of the pressures of society on the individual to marry well, meaning someone with money and from their social class, such as in “The Introducers” and “The House of Mirth”. Wharton also shows how other conventions of behavior, such as single, young women not being alone, especially at night or in private rooms, with men, are expected to be followed in “The House of Mirth”. Wharton also depicts the ideals of fealty in marriage, and the consequences in society for both the men and women in how they follow the conventions of marriage. The ways people both behave within these ideals and the ways people ignore these ideals are shown in a wide range of her stories such as “The Age of Innocence”, “The House of Mirth”, “Souls Belated” and “Pomegranate Seeds”. The expectations of society during Wharton’s life were that a person would marry. To remain unmarried was a disgrace for a woman, but it was also a frowned upon status for men. Marriage was a way of gaining wealth and influence in society. The convention of marriage made an individual considered to be respectable and cemented their position in society. In “The Introducers” the main two characters, Miss Grantham and Frederick Tilney were unable to catch themselves a rich spouse, and are working as secretaries for people...
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...Threshold experiences in the novels My Antonia and The Age of Innocence In any a piece of literature setting is an essential pillar of narrative construction: it not only includes some factual information about time and place or provides the background in which the events take place, but also has the power to shape the habits and attitudes of their users, or characters. Both Willa Cather in My Antonia and Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence create the particular narrative texture that implicates some dynamics, i.e. some shifts and changes – on the one hand, the setting of the novels continually changes, and this invariably entails the changing of the characters. Since the setting doesn’t remain static, each time it changes there should be some “turning point”, from which moment on the further development of events becomes completely different. But what exactly this turning point is, what are those “triggers” that help to create this dynamic picture, how can we trace the changes and the molding and development of characters’ personalities, the changes of their identities? The thing is that the authors of both above-mentioned novels create series of “threshold experiences” taking place at the most significant, climatic points in the lives of the protagonists, acting like triggers, indicating some transformations in the outer world of the characters that entail the changes in their inner world as well. These thresholds operate on all levels: separating the interior...
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...Laboratory but Affettuoso Naturalism in literature, still popular and widely appreciated nowadays, is a crucial part of the evolution of American literature. In this essay, I’ll explain naturalism from my point of view by referring to some information I found and analyze a few clips of The Age of Innocence in depth to seek the naturalistic technique in it. Naturalism, a prominent literary movement in the mid-19th-century France, spread all its way to many countries’ literature circle and exerted profound effect on the development of the later literature. It is a completely different tune from literally realism while it provided warm-bed for the emergence of the later literal category, temporary literature in America. Though it didn’t last for a long time, plus no systematic formula for it was created, its influence and how popular it was with the readers and critics can be easily seen nowadays. As one of the most well-known naturalists, Zola, once said, “Naturalism, in literature…is the return to nature and to man, direct observation, correct anatomy, the acceptance and the depiction of that which is. The task is the same for the scientist as for the writer. Both have to abandon abstractions for realities, ready-made formulas for rigorous analysis. Hence no more abstract characters in our words, no more history of everyone, the web and woof of the daily life…” We could clearly see that naturalists tend to depict the society and people in the most objective way, trying to...
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...Ellen and Charity Comparison After reading Summer a novel by Edith Wharton, and watching the movie Age of Innocence, a movie based Edith Wharton’s book, I found two characters from each to be very similar. Ellen from Age of Innocence and Charity from Summer are very similar in many ways, such as, they are both outsiders in the societies in which they live. Also, they are in secret romances that would be forbidden if ever caught. So throughout this paper I am going to talk about their similarities, and also the few differences they have, and how there societies shape the character they are. First, I am going to touch on the subject that Charity and Ellen both do not fit into their societies, and are considered outsiders. Ellen is in New York City in the 1870’s during this story. During this time era in New York City, the society consisted of wealthy and well respected families, who had special customs and ways of going about things. Ellen being from Europe was not aware of these customs, therefore making her an outsider, because many people looked down on her because she did not act the way that she was suspected to. An example of this would be Ellen was estranged from her husband, and although they were separated, they were still married, so Ellen ran around with a gentleman named Julius who was also married and that was unacceptable in this society. Another example would be that Ellen was talking about getting a divorce from her husband, and that was looked down upon for...
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...The Role of Women In The Age of Innocence, a satiric account of the society of New York, women play a major role in the development of the plot. This novel, by Edith Wharton, is about a society that controls its individuals, particularly women. For many years, women have followed the same customs and traditions and have not been given the opportunity to develop new talents and encounter new experiences. The women have been carefully trained not to possess “the experience, the versatility, [or] the freedom of judgment” (Page 38). This conventional society ignores reality and pretends to act innocently. “In reality [they] lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs” (Page 39). Women are expected not only to be pure and innocent, but also to pretend to be oblivious of the unpleasantness of society. May Welland and Ellen Olenska, two of the main female characters of the novel, set the conflict and develop the story with their contradicting personalities. The protagonist, Newland Archer, is a wealthy lawyer that is happily engaged to the pure and innocent May Welland. May is the perfect model of a wife in that society. She is a traditional woman that has been pressured by her family to remain unimaginative and predictable. She is conventional and a typical conformist. Because society has trained her not to speak of unpleasantness, May ignores unsettling situations, particularly...
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...1. "1984" by George Orwell 2. "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking 3. "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers 4. "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah 5. "A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning: The Short-Lived Edition" by Lemony Snicket 6. "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle 7. "Alice Munro: Selected Stories" by Alice Munro 8. "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll 9. "All the President's Men" by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein 10. "Angela's Ashes: A Memoir" by Frank McCourt 11. "Are You There, God? It's me, Margaret" by Judy Blume 12. "Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett 13. "Beloved" by Toni Morrison 14. "Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" by Christopher McDougall 15. "Breath, Eyes, Memory" by Edwidge Danticat 16. "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller 17. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" by Roald Dahl 18. "Charlotte's Web" by E.B. White 19. "Cutting For Stone" by Abraham Verghese 20. "Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead" by Brene Brown 21. "Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1" by Jeff Kinney 22. "Dune" by Frank Herbert 23. "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury 24. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" by Hunter S. Thompson 25. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn 26. "Goodnight...
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...a background where discipline was the most importance. As a result all the attitudes and manners that were established in Fitzgerald’s character came from his father and all the concerns of stability in the society came from his mother. Between the years of 1898-1901 and 1903- 1908 he lived in Buffalo, New York. And this is when he attended Nardin Academy. However when his father was fired from his job, his family had to move back to Minnesota, where he now went to school at St. Paul Academy in St. Paul. He went to school there for three years. Although the reason for the family to go back to Minnesota was not a happy one, its effect was good, because around this time Fitzgerald created his first piece of literature at his school at the age of thirteen. After that great event he left St. Paul to go to a...
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...New York City The first native New Yorkers were the Lenape, an Algonquin people who hunted, fished and farmed in the area between the Delaware and Hudson rivers. Europeans began to explore the region at the beginning of the 16th century--among the first was Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian who sailed up and down the Atlantic coast in search of a route to Asia--but none settled there until 1624. That year, the Dutch West India Company sent some 30 families to live and work in a tiny settlement on “Nutten Island” (today’s Governors Island) that they called New Amsterdam. In 1626, the settlement’s governor general, Peter Minuit, purchased the much larger Manhattan Island from the natives for 60 guilders in trade goods such as tools, farming equipment, cloth and wampum (shell beads). Fewer than 300 people lived in New Amsterdam when the settlement moved to Manhattan. But it grew quickly, and in 1760 the city (now called New York City; population 18,000) surpassed Boston to become the second-largest city in the American colonies. Fifty years later, with a population 202,589, it became the largest city in the Western hemisphere. Today, more than 8 million people live in the city’s five boroughs. New York City in the 18th Century In 1664, the British seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch and gave it a new name: New York City. For the next century, the population of New York City grew larger and more diverse: It included immigrants from the Netherlands, England, France and Germany;...
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...NORTH AMERICAN FICTION BRIEF INTRODUCTION: Before starting our study of American Fiction we must understand what American Literature is in itself and which pieces of writing we can include within this label. It is believed that when a piece is written in North America, more precisely in the USA, it would automatically be given this epithet. But it should be taken into account that this idea is quite broad and doesn’t reflect the real essence of the term. However, there is also another definition that gathers this essence: American Literature is the one that represents the Americanism, the singularity of the USA philosophy and culture. This way, instead of focusing on who the author is, it is focused on the content of the writing. In that which concerns Fiction, the following documents are the ones considered as narrative: Speeches Letters Short Stories Essays Political Documents Sermons Novels Diaries 1 FIRST LITERARY EXPRESSIONS The first documents in which the idea of Americanism is very present are the Sermons. They respond to the strict Protestantism settled in the New Continent after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans in the Mayflower (1620) and the Arabella (1630). They established a theocratic community whose main and only point of reference was the Bible. That is why the idea of the ‘city upon a hill’ is still very present in American mentality. As we all know...
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...critical theory today critical theory today A Us e r - F r i e n d l y G u i d e S E C O N D E D I T I O N L O I S T Y S O N New York London Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN © 2006 by Lois Tyson Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑97410‑0 (Softcover) 0‑415‑97409‑7 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97410‑3 (Softcover) 978‑0‑415‑97409‑7 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Tyson, Lois, 1950‑ Critical theory today : a user‑friendly guide / Lois Tyson.‑‑ 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0‑415‑97409‑7 (hb) ‑‑ ISBN 0‑415‑97410‑0 (pb) 1. Criticism...
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...《GRE填空教程》分析（1） 1、 There are no solitary, free-living creatures; every form of life is______other forms. (A) segregated from (B) parallel to (C) dependent on (D) overshadowed by (E) mimicked by |分析：空格要填的是某种生命形式和其他生命形式的关系，是形容词+介词的结构。分号表示前后复指关系，题目中黄色和绿色部分是对应语义，空格填上以后表现“非独立、 | |自由”的特征。（A）从……中隔离；（B）和……并行；（C）依赖……；（D）被……遮蔽掩盖；（E）被……模仿。因此答案C正确。 | |翻译：不存在孤独的，生活无拘束的生物；每一种生命形式总是和其他的相互依赖。 | |扩展：本题涉及的是关于生物之间相互依赖的问题，可以扩展到生物多样性的问题，与环境保护，动物保护、生物链等话题关联。 | 2、 As for the alleged value of expert opinion, one need only______ government records to see----______evidence of the failure of such opinions in many fields. (A) inspect … questionable (B) retain … circumstantial (C) distribute … possible (D) consult … strong (E) evaluate … problematic |分析：空格1要填的是一个动词，作用对象是government records；空格2要填的是一个形容词，修饰“failure of such opinions”的证据。As for（至于……）表示两个分句是 | |因果关系，题目中黄色和绿色部分是对应语义。前半句的alleged（所谓的）表示对“专家意见”持负评价，所以空格2应该对于“专家意见失败的证据”做出正评价。（A）检查……| |可疑的；（B）保持……依据情况的；（C）分布……可能的；（D）参考，考虑……强有力的；（E）评价……有问题的。其中（C）和（D）可以候选。根据语义，空格1只能表示“查阅”| |一类的含义，才能“看到证据”，因此答案只能是（D）。 | |翻译：就专家意见所谓的价值而言，人们需要仅仅查询政府的档案就能发现这些意见在很多领域失败的强有力的证据。 | ...
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...cover next page > title author publisher isbn10 | asin print isbn13 ebook isbn13 language subject publication date lcc ddc subject : : : : : : : : : : : cover next page > < previous page page_i next page > Page i 1100 Words You Need to Know Fourth Edition Murray Bromberg Principal Emeritus Andrew Jackson High School, Queens, New York Melvin Gordon Reading Specialist New York City Schools . . . Invest fifteen minutes a day for forty-six weeks in order to master 920 new words and almost 200 useful idioms < previous page page_i next page > < previous page page_ii next page > Page ii © Copyright 2000 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc. Prior edition © Copyright 1993, 1987, 1971 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microfilm, xerography, or any other means, or incorporated into any information retrieval system, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the copyright owner. All inquiries should be addressed to: Barron's Educational Series, Inc. 250 Wireless Boulevard Hauppauge, NY 11788 http://www.barronseduc.com Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 00-030344 International Standard Book Number 0-7641-1365-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bromberg, Murray. 1100 words you need to know / Murray Bromberg, Melvin Gordon. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-7641-1365-8 1. Vocabulary. I. Title: Eleven hundred words you need...
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