Showing posts with label Essay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Essay. Show all posts

Walking / Henry David Thoreau

Title: Walking 
Author: Henry David Thoreau
Subjects: Essay; Lecture 

Walking is a transcendental essay in which Thoreau talks about the importance of nature to mankind, and how people cannot survive without nature, physically, mentally, and spiritually, yet we seem to be spending more and more time entrenched by society. 

The Souls of Black Folk / W. E. B. Du Bois

Title: The Souls of Black Folk 
Author: W. E. B. Du Bois 
Subjects: Classic; Non-Fiction; Essays 

Each chapter of the book begins with a pair of epigraphs: text from a poem, and Bois describes it as "some echo of haunting melody." It is a seminal work in the history of sociology. It is one of the early works in the field of sociology. Must read for sociology students and interested in the subjects.

A Modest Proposal / Jonathan Swift


Title: A Modest Proposal 
      For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public - 1729 
Author: Jonathan Swift 
Subjects: Fiction; Essay; Satire; Humor 

It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabbin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex,

Children in Prison and Other Cruelties of Prison Life / Oscar Wilde

The circumstance which called forth this letter is a woeful one for Christian England. Martin, the Reading warder, is found guilty of feeding the hungry, nursing the sick, of being kindly and humane. These are his offences in plain unofficial language.

This pamphlet is tendered to earnest persons as evidence that the prison system is opposed to all that is kind and helpful. Herein is shown a process that is dehumanizing, not only to the prisoners, but to every one connected with it.

Martin was dismissed. It happened in May last year. He is still out of employment and in poor circumstances. Can anyone help him?

February, 1898.

Sir,

I learn with great regret, through an extract from the columns of your paper, that the warder Martin, of Reading Prison, has been dismissed by the Prison Commissioners for having given some sweet biscuits to a little hungry child. I saw the three children myself on the Monday preceding my release. They had just been convicted, and were standing in a row in the central hall in their prison dress, carrying their sheets under the arms previous to their being sent to the cells allotted to them. I happened to be passing along one of the galleries on my way to the reception room, where I was to have an interview with a friend.

Impressions of America / Oscar Wilde

I.
LE JARDIN.
The lily’s withered chalice falls
Around its rod of dusty gold,
And from the beech trees on the wold
The last wood-pigeon coos and calls.

The gaudy leonine sunflower
Hangs black and barren on its stalk,
And down the windy garden walk
The dead leaves scatter,—hour by hour.

Miscellaneous Aphorisms / Oscar Wilde

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.

Women are made to be loved, not to be understood.

It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. Moren than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

Women, as someone says, love with their ears, just as men love with their eyes, if they ever love at all.

Shorter Prose Pieces / Oscar Wilde

Contents:

Phrases And Philosophies for the Use of The Young
Mrs. Langtry as Hester Grazebrook
Slaves of Fashion
Woman's Dress
More Radical Ideas upon Dress Reform
Costume
The American Invasion
Sermons in Stones at Bloomsbury
L'Envoi

Selected Prose / Oscar Wilde

Contents:

Preface by Robert Ross
How They Struck a Contemporary
The Quality of George Meredith
Life in the Fallacious Model
Life the Disciple
Life the Plagiarist
The Indispensable East
The Influence of the Impressionists on Climate
An Exposure to Naturalism
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright

London Models / Oscar Wilde

PROFESSIONAL models are a purely modern invention. To the Greeks,
for instance, they were quite unknown. Mr. Mahaffy, it is true,
tells us that Pericles used to present peacocks to the great ladies
of Athenian society in order to induce them to sit to his friend
Phidias, and we know that Polygnotus introduced into his picture of
the Trojan women the face of Elpinice, the celebrated sister of the
great Conservative leader of the day, but these GRANDES DAMES
clearly do not come under our category. As for the old masters,
they undoubtedly made constant studies from their pupils and
apprentices, and even their religious pictures are full of the
portraits of their friends and relations, but they do not seem to
have had the inestimable advantage of the existence of a class of
people whose sole profession is to pose. In fact the model, in our
sense of the word, is the direct creation of Academic Schools.

Lecture to Art Students / Oscar Wilde

IN the lecture which it is my privilege to deliver before you to-
night I do not desire to give you any abstract definition of beauty
at all. For we who are working in art cannot accept any theory of
beauty in exchange for beauty itself, and, so far from desiring to
isolate it in a formula appealing to the intellect, we, on the
contrary, seek to materialise it in a form that gives joy to the
soul through the senses. We want to create it, not to define it.
The definition should follow the work: the work should not adapt
itself to the definition.

Art and the Handicraftsman / Oscar Wilde

PEOPLE often talk as if there was an opposition between what is
beautiful and what is useful. There is no opposition to beauty
except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or ugly, and
utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing, because
beautiful decoration is always on the side of the beautiful thing,
because beautiful decoration is always an expression of the use you
put a thing to and the value placed on it. No workman will
beautifully decorate bad work, nor can you possibly get good
handicraftsmen or workmen without having beautiful designs. You
should be quite sure of that.

House Decoration / Oscar Wilde

IN my last lecture I gave you something of the history of Art in
England. I sought to trace the influence of the French Revolution
upon its development. I said something of the song of Keats and
the school of the pre-Raphaelites. But I do not want to shelter
the movement, which I have called the English Renaissance, under
any palladium however noble, or any name however revered. The
roots of it have, indeed, to be sought for in things that have long
passed away, and not, as some suppose, in the fancy of a few young
men - although I am not altogether sure that there is anything much
better than the fancy of a few young men.

The English Renaissance of Art / Oscar Wilde

AMONG the many debts which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty
of Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in
terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in
its special manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the
honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any
abstract definition of beauty - any such universal formula for it
as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century -
still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is
incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem
affects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out
to you the general ideas which characterise the great English
Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as
far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as
that is possible.

The Rise of Historical Criticism / Oscar Wilde

CHAPTER I

HISTORICAL criticism nowhere occurs as an isolated fact in the
civilisation or literature of any people. It is part of that
complex working towards freedom which may be described as the
revolt against authority. It is merely one facet of that
speculative spirit of an innovation, which in the sphere of action
produces democracy and revolution, and in that of thought is the
parent of philosophy and physical science; and its importance as a
factor of progress is based not so much on the results it attains,
as on the tone of thought which it represents, and the method by
which it works.

The Truth Of Masks -a Note On Illusion / Oscar Wilde

In many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been
made on that splendour of mounting which now characterises our
Shakespearian revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly
assumed by the critics that Shakespeare himself was more or less
indifferent to the costumes of his actors, and that, could he see
Mrs. Langtry's production of Antony and Cleopatra, he would
probably say that the play, and the play only, is the thing, and
that everything else is leather and prunella.

The Soul Of Man Under Socialism / Oscar Wilde

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of
Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us
from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the
present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost
everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.

Pen, Pencil, And Poison - A Study In Green / Oscar Wilde

It has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists
and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and
completeness of nature. As a rule this must necessarily be so.
That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is
the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode
of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of
form nothing else seems of much importance. Yet there are many
exceptions to this rule. Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe
as state councillor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell.

The Decay Of Lying: An Observation / Oscar Wilde

A DIALOGUE. Persons: Cyril and Vivian. Scene: the Library of a
country house in Nottinghamshire.

CYRIL (coming in through the open window from the terrace). My
dear Vivian, don't coop yourself up all day in the library. It is
a perfectly lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is a
mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go
and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.

De Profundis / Oscar Wilde

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by 
seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. 
With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to 
circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a 
life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable 
pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel 
at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron 
formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in 
the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate 
itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence 
is ceaseless change.

The Critic As Artist / Oscar Wilde

THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING


A DIALOGUE. Part I. Persons: Gilbert and Ernest. Scene: the
library of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.

GILBERT (at the Piano). My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?

ERNEST (looking up). At a capital story that I have just come
across in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your
table.

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