Agrégateur de flux

“Whatever one man is capable of conceiving, other men will be able to achieve.”

- Jules Verne

Baghdad and many other cities in this Islamic world were international melting pots that attracted entrepreneurs and intellectuals of many languages, ethnicities, and faiths, including Jewish astrologers and Christian doctors.

Some time ago close correspondences were discovered between the content of the Tabula and a very unusual text composed in the eighth century, the Cosmographia of the Anonymous of Ravenna.

eurThe vast belt of the Steppes, located between the Hungarian plains and the Great Wall of China, runs along the southern edge of the Eurasian arboreal zone. Starting in the 1st millenium B.C. this region has been inhabited by Iranian, Hunnish, Turkish and Mongol mounted nomads who, at various times, unified a large portion of the Steppes into a single empire.

Today's nationalist movements in many eastern European countries have rediscovered the nineteenth-century ideal of the homogeneous nation-state; it is sad to see that after so many tragedies it has brought about, some more seem to follow, and often in the name of history.

In the tenth century, it was still the Ecclesia rather than the pope which constituted the fundamental reality. The men of the Gregorian reform, in contrast, saw the Church as dependent upon the pope and derived in some way from papal power.

Newscasts


Electric Submarines


Solar Sails


Lunar Modules


Skywriting


Videoconferencing


Taser


Splashdown Spaceship

8 Jules Verne’s inventions that came true.

Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, would be 188 years old today.

He was a french author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and before practical means of space travel had been devised. He is the second most translated author in the world (after Agatha Christie). Some of his books have also been made into live-action and animated films and television shows… (more)

The most important extant document for our understanding of Anglo-Saxon manorial social structure is a text scholars call the Rectitudines singularum personarum

The foundation of a large fortress that was situated there during the First Temple period was exposed in an excavation the Israel Antiquities Authority conducted with funding provided by Hofit – Ashdod Development & Tourism Company, Ltd.  Sa'ar Ganor [Credit: Israel Antiquities Authority] At ‘Giv'at Yonah’ (the Hill of Jonah) in Ashdod, which according to various traditions is identified with the burial place of the...

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With its backdrop of tier upon tier of snow-capped peaks cleft by dizzyingly steep gorges, hidden coves, curving slivers of sandy beach, dramatic headlands, towering cliffs and a smattering of rocky islets studding a sea that is more often than not either an astonishing azure or startling turquoise, Turkey’s southwest Mediterranean has to be one of the most spectacularly beautiful stretches of coastline in the...

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Family histories don't come much more bizarre. Three-quarters of the fish in the sea can trace their origins back to a freshwater ancestor. The finding highlights how important rivers and lakes are as a source of new species, just as that supply is under threat from disappearing freshwater habitats.  Started in fresh water [Credit: Reinhard Dirscherl/Getty Images] Fish first evolved in the sea. The oceans have been teeming...

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The Great Altar of Pergamon, a sculpted frieze dating from the 2nd century BC and one of Berlin's top tourist attractions, will be closed for repair work from 2014, the museum said Tuesday.  The western side of the Pergamon Altar as reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin [Credit: Raimond Spekking] The Pergamon Museum -- which opened to house the Ancient Greek masterpiece in 1930 on Berlin's renowned Museum Island --...

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The Punjab University archaeology department has discovered a rare Indus seal in steatite material with carved figure of Ibex with two pictographs from Wattoowala, Cholistan, during a survey of different sites near Derawar Fort along the ancient bed of River Hakra. The seal dates back to 2500-2000 BC.  The archaeologists team leader said the excavation revealed a circular platform at Sui-Vihar built with sun-dried bricks and...

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Biography: Charles Dickens was born on February 7th, 1812 in Landport, Portsmouth, England, the second of eight children, to John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father was a poor manager of the family’s finances, and was eventually sent to a debtor’s prison. The family’s poverty forced Charles to leave school when he was 12 years old to begin working ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on blacking. The strenuous — and often cruel — work conditions made a deep impression on Dickens, and later influenced his fiction and essays, forming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions.

Fortunately, Charles was able to leave this work behind and find employment as a newspaper reporter. By the mid-1830s he was also starting to write fiction – his first novel, The Pickwick Papers was published in 1836. That work was a popular success, allowing Charles more time to write other works – Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickelby and The Old Curiosity Shop. In December of 1844, A Christmas Carol, was published.

It is likely that A Christmas Carol stands as his best-known story, and it has inspired many versions and adaptations. This is a simple morality tale of the redemption of Ebeneezer Scrooge, and for many the true meaning of Christmas. A prominent phrase from the tale, ‘Merry Christmas’, was popularised following the appearance of the story.The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, with ‘Bah! Humbug!’ dismissive of the festive spirit. More importantly, Dickens developed a new secular vision of Christmas, which focused on the importance of family, generosity and the joy and happiness of the season.

Dickens continued to write more successful novels, including David Copperfield, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities – the latter of which was published in 1859, and has sold over 200 million copies.

Dickens’s novels were not just great literature, but also works of social commentary. At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as sanitation and the workhouse—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result.

Many of his readers will know also remember Charles Dickens for the characters he created. The hundreds of people who filled his novels had believable personalities and vivid physical descriptions. They are among the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Miss Havisham, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep and many others are so well known that they continue to this day to be household names.

In his later years Charles traveled throughout Europe and the United States, and often gave readings of his works. Charles Dickens continued to write and work until the day of his death

In 1870 he was buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, and a printed epitaph circulated at the time of his funeral said, “He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England’s greatest writers is lost to the world.”

Articles about Charles Dickens and his works

“The wife of Lucifer” : women and evil in Charles Dickens, by C.A. Ebelthite

Dickens’s Haunted Christmas: The Ethics of the Spectral Text, by Brad Fruhauff

The anatomy of Charles Dickens: a study of bodily vulnerability in his novels, by Adrienne Elizabeth Gavin

The Voice of Objects in The Old Curiosity Shop,  by Michael Hollington

Law, Literature and Symbolic Revolution: Bleak House, by Dolin Kieran

A Mechanized Society in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, by Nadir Meddouri

The importance of Charles Dickens in Victorian social reform, by Jeffrey Frank Teachout

More Videos about Charles Dickens

More Resources

Dickensian Christmas dreamt up by marketers, says historian

Dickens’s fans sought to celebrate author’s bicentenary

Charles Dickens Museum to shut for 200th anniversary year

Links

The Dickens Fellowship

BBC Radio 4 Program In Our Time: Dickens 

Victoria and Albert Museum – section on Dickens

Celebrating Dickens – from the the University of Warwick

Dickens2012 – follow the bicentenary of his birth

A Mechanized Society in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times

Meddouri, Nadir

Masters Degree in British and American Studies, Mentouri University of Constantine, June (2010)

Abstract

This work deals mainly with the mechanization and dehumanization of the English society during the industrial revolution through Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. It comes to show this and to emphasize how the ignorance of the morals and emotions leads to inhumane relations between people; employers and employees, teachers and students, and turns men to heartless ones, interested in concretes and materials, leaving aside a great deal of their lives, the human values and principles. This work, also, provides us with the after aftermaths of the industrial revolution, especially on British society, and with an account about the early, middle and late Victorian thoughts and interests.

This work is a critical description of a mechanized society from Charles Dickens‟s Hard Times. This work comes to emphasize and intensify the importance of the emotional and fictional side of the lives of English people, in general, and Dickens‟s characters, especially. Interpreters tended to interpret the novel into industrialism and its bad effects in life. As it is clear in the novel‟s text, they refer to heart versus head, fancy versus fact and showed the intention of attack of those conditions of life in England‟s industrial cities.

 

 

 

Click here to read this thesis from the Mentouri University of Constantine

 

Sir Thomas More, best known for his Utopia, would be 534 years old today… (more)

After a long and painstaking restoration the mosaic of the St. Mark Basilica, in Venice, has returned to the original splendour. Placed inside the Dome of the Creation, the mosaic was designed by Venetian craftsmen in the early decades of 1200 and shows strong influences of the Byzantine style: 26 scenes arranged in three bands, which represent the foundation of the world, the creation of the first man, the original sin and the...

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“The wife of Lucifer” : women and evil in Charles Dickens

Ebelthite, C.A.

Masters Thesis, Rhodes University, February (2002)

Abstract

This thesis examines Dickens’s presentation of evil women. In the course of my reading I discovered that most of the evil women in his novels are mothers, or mother-figures, a finding which altered the nature of my interpretation and led to closer examination of these characters, rather than the prostitutes and criminals who may have been viewed negatively by Nineteenth century society and thereby condemned as evil. Among the many unsympathetically portrayed mothers and mother-figures in Dickens’s works, the three that are most interesting are Lady Dedlock, Miss Havisham, and Mrs Skewton. Madame Defarge initiates the discussion, however, as a seminal figure among the many evil women in the novels. Psychoanalytical and socio-historic readings grounded in Nineteenth century conceptions of womanhood provide background material for this thesis. Though useful and informative, however, these areas of study are not sufficient in themselves. The theory that shapes the arguments of this thesis is defined by Steven Cohan, who argues strongly that the demand for psychological coherence as a requisite of character obscures the imaginative power of character as textual construct, and who both refutes and develops character theory as it is argued by Baruch Hochman. Cohan’s theory is also finally closer to that outlined by Thomas Docherty, who provides a complex reading of character as ultimately “unknowable”.

 

Click here to read this thesis from Rhodes University

 

 

“There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.”

- Charles Dickens