Abstract
Generally, European poetry from the Romantic period is characterized by the following poetic features: a belief in the innate goodness of human nature; individualism; a reverence for nature and primitivism; philosophical idealism; a (somewhat paradoxical) preference for free thought and religious mysticism; rebellious with political authority and social customs (and note the class bias, of course); a celebration of physical, sensual passions; the active cultivation of emotion, and sensitivity, as values in-themselves. Romantics tended to believe that to be human meant being an emotional, sensitive, and rational person.

Abstract
In this article, the writer studies the book 'Massacre of the Dreamers' by the novelist, poet, and Chicana activist, Ana Castillo. The writer notes that Castillo offers an explicitly nationally and ethnically based form of feminism for Latina women that the author calls Xicanisma. The writer discusses that over the course of Castillo's historiography of the Chicana and feminist movements, Castillo combines personal as well as historical testimony to create a political and spiritual manifesto for Latina women today. Further the writer shows that Castillo condemns both the racism and negative assumptions that have limited Latina women from assuming power within their culture, even while she pays tribute to the considerable successes and accomplishments of Latinas in various Mexican activist movements.

From the Paper
"Castillo is equally unsparing when condemning the misogyny of Mexican culture, even in its most radical forms, such as the American Chicano Movement. Beyond the ideologies of Catholicism and Communism that have denied the gender imbalance within the Mexican community and society, Castillo believes Chicana women must band together to articulate and find ways of healing and addressing their unique difficulties as a community. Only then will the feminine principle as well as machismo endemic to contemporary Mexican life once again find its space within Latino culture and spirituality."
"Castillo, however, does not deny the common assertion of the American women's movement that the personal is political. She states she had to look within herself to get beyond the dichotomies of masculine and feminine that hampered her ability to see herself fully as an activist, sexual being, and a spiritual female being."

Tags:Latina, women, Xicanisma, Mexican, culture

Abstract
This is a brief book review of Hart's book about the man behind the artist, Leonardo da Vinci. The paper explains that da Vinci had several other interests besides art work; he was a scientist, he managed to dream up methods of flight, and was also enthralled by engineering.

From the Paper
"Leonardo's work as a scientist is too well known, nowadays, to say that reading Hart's book for a contemporary student of the period fundamentally shakes his or her conceptions of Leonardo as an artist alone. However, rather than merely reinforcing the image of Leonardo as a quintessential master of all the disciplines, the reader emerges with a more balanced perspective of the Renaissance integration of science, theology, and art in the mind of Leonardo an integration that in today's highly specialized times seems enviable."

Tags:renaissance

Abstract
This paper analyzes and contrasts two sonnets written respectively by the British WWI poets Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon: "The Soldier" and "Dreamers". The writer discusses how both poets modified the traditional structure of the sonnet to accomplish their poetic ends. Brooke's poem is elegiac in tone, focusing on national identity and acquiescing in death as a doorway to eternity, while Sassoon's is a bitter and ironic protest against the injustice and inhumanities of war.

From the Paper
"Sassoon writes in a voice of protest, not acquiescence, unlike Brooke, despite his use of the sonnet form. "Dreamers" begins with a striking image, the image of soldiers going off to war, presumably by train to the front lines, rather than in the middle of an internalized thought like Brooke's poem. Brooke's poem focuses on an individual soldier who will be remembered, Sassoon's the vast, nameless masses of men who will die and be forgotten. Some of Sassoon's dreamers are good, some are bad, all have different problems and jealous conflicts at home, but they are in the process of being blended into one in the form of a purposeless army whose cause they can little understand."

Tags:loss, identity, imagery, spiritual, glory, normalcy

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to introduce, discuss, and analyze two works, "The Chrysanthemums" by John Steinbeck and "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather. Specifically, it discusses a thematic connection between the two stories. It looks at how both short stories highlight the themes of loneliness, unfulfilled desires, and dreams and how both main characters have dreams of something better that are never realized; they live tragic and unfulfilled lives because of this. It also discusses how, although these stories might not seem related, underneath two very different characters is the same basic problem, a dreamer's soul that is unfulfilled and desperately unhappy with real life.

From the Paper
"The theme of loneliness, unfulfilled desires, and dreams is woven throughout this entire story, and it leads to the inevitable conclusion that often comes from living in a dream world. Paul's dreams outweigh his life, and he can never live up to the dreams he has set up for himself. He cannot cope with his real life; he finds it ugly and depressing. "He approached it tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had when he came home" (Cather ). Once he leaves his home in Pittsburgh, he can never return, because he has lived the good life, and he can never return to the drab life of his family. There is something inside Paul that can never be satisfied with second best or second rate, which is why he loves the theater and the fantasy of it so much."

Tags:paul, loneliness, desires, dreams, elisa

Abstract
The paper discusses the title character of Emma Bovary in "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert. Emma is a dreamer with an unrealistic empassioned view on the world. The paper notes that the discrepancy between the world of beauty and the high society Emma longs for, and the reality of her middle-class country life, are the driving plot force in this novel. Emma is an example of early feminism. Most of the women of the nineteenth century were taught to obey their husbands and mind their homes. The paper comments that Madame Bovary rebels against societal norms, becoming an adulteress and squandering her husbands wealth behind his back. The paper notes that although this doesn't show her moral values in the best light, it does show that, in addition to personifying romanticism, Emma Bovary is also a strong female character and could possibly be considered one of the first feminists in literature.

From the Paper
"The ball comes to signify the life Emma feels she was cheated out of. Emma sees the beautiful refinery at the ball and believes she was supposed to be one of these fine women. This makes her resent Charles because she feels he is a "nobody" and that no one at the ball notices him. What Emma fails to realize is that she, too, is not important to the people at the ball. Emma is asked to dance with an important man at the ball, and she takes this banal event, and almost construes it into a love affair. She later saves a cigar box as a memento of the ball, and even names her daughter after the ball. After noticing the grayness of her own middle-class life in comparison to that of the garish lifestyle enjoyed by those at the ball, Emma begins to borrow money from Lehreux, the local merchant. Emma spends the money on gaudy and expensive furnishings for her home. This again shows her unrealistic attitude towards her own life and her inability to accept her place in the middle class. It also shows her strength and independence ad a female character, gaining Charles' power of attorney so that she can continue to spend his money. During this same time period, Emma begins her fist encounter with Leon. As they are both cliched romantics, they talk about love, life, and books. Unfortunately, Leon leaves soon after and Emma feels that she was cheated out of something. Soon after, a man named Rodolphe comes to town. He begins to "court" Emma, and because Emma is so idealistically romantic, she does not see that he is scamming her and simply wants to use her. Emma finally feels the passion and romance she has been longing for for so long. The irony is, of course, that it is a facade much like Emma's notions of romanticism. Emma's romantic ideals are also what destroys this relationship - as she pushes for Rodolphe to run away with her, Rodolphe ends his relationship with Emma. Emma is devastated and thinks about killing herself. "

Tags:love, personality, religious, life

Abstract
This paper is about Sigmund Freud's concept of 'unconscious' and its relevance in the arts. The author discusses how Freud is commonly recognized as having invented the concept of the "unconscious". The author explains that the subordination of the "pleasure principle" by the "reality principle" is done through a mental process that Freud refers to as sublimation. According to Sigmund Freud, dreams and fantasies (or phantasies) are the symbolic expression and fulfillment of wishes and desires that as a result of sublimation by the "reality principle" cannot be fulfilled through daily life and are consequently repressed into the "unconscious." To Freud, "the motive forces of fantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single fantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality" (Freud 485). Freud affirms that dreams are disguised, hallucinatory fulfillment's of repressed wishes. He concludes that if expressed in undisguised form, they would be so disturbing that it would wake the dreamer from sleep. Freud's fundamental assumption is that the sublimation of the artist's unsatisfied libido is responsible for producing all forms of art and literature whether it be painting, sculpting, or writing. David H. Richter notes in his introduction to "Sigmund Freud" that Freud was once criticized by Carl Gustav Jung, a fellow psychoanalytic theorist, for insinuating that artists were diseased individuals creating art out of their own personal neurotic needs. The writer feels that Freud insinuates that art is primarily an escapist method, that "in an ideal world in which everyone had matured sufficiently to replace the pleasure principle by the reality principle, there would be no need for art" (Storr 103).

From the Paper
"The historical tradition of scholarly theory has been one in which literary texts are subjected to scrutiny regarding whether they are either implicitly or explicitly ideological in nature. Arguably so, nothing reflects a society's fears, hopes, and desires about gender, class, and power more than what the society maintains about art and artists. A literary text is credible of fully reflecting the culture in which it was written, that is to say, it has the potential to embody certain sociological assumptions presented in the dichotomy between "normal" and "abnormal." Sigmund Freud, the patriarch of psychoanalysis, is associated with Charles Darwin and Karl Marx as being "one of the three original thinkers who have most altered man's view of himself in the twentieth century" (Storr 145). Yet, even literary theorists, including Freud, realized that "any comprehensive vision of human nature such as he provides must have implications for the nature of happiness, and for the relation of man's natural capacities to his normal or ideal state" (Sousa 196). That is, numerous later theorists and critics believe that Freud's own theories about the function and nature of the mind uncovered some fundamental truths about how an individual's notions of "self"are formed and how culture and civilization operate and are affected by these notions. Coinciding with Freud's own account, the significance of everyday action is determined by motives that are far more numerous and complex than people are aware of or commonsense understanding takes into account. The most basic and constant of motives that influence our actions are those of the unconscious, moreover, those that are difficult to acknowledge or avow. Freud's conception of the unconscious and his rediscovery of the importance of dreams encouraged painters, sculptors and writers to pay serious attention to their inner world of dreams; to find significance in thoughts and images they previously would have dismissed as absurd or illogical. Therefore it is plausible that notions of art and literature as described by Sigmund Freud, are created through the ramifications of the unconscious or the sublimation of an unsatisfied carnal appetite.""

Tags:conscious, dreams, fantasies, phantasies, pleasure, principle, reality, unconscious

Abstract
This paper takes a look at James Joyce's "Ulysses" which was transformed from a novel into an opera. It analyzes the impact that each of these art forms has on the work and how the format changes. It provides a background of James Joyce's life and the background to his writing the novel. Within the novel itself, the "Siren Song" chapter is analyzed.

From the paper:

"Historians with idle time on their hands occasionally may indulge in moments of wishful revisionism. "What if," they say, "That young dreamer named Adolph Hitler had been accepted into art school? Wouldn't the world be different?" History is littered with celebrities who, for better or worse, had as youngsters fervently wished to be doing something different than their allotted role. Among them was one James Joyce, who, as it so happened, wanted to be a musician. If Hitler had been an artist instead, he probably would have been drawing propaganda posters for a second World War that would have persisted without his figure head. If James Joyce has been a musician, would he still have created Ulysses? At first glance, of course one must say not. This book is, after all, celebrated as one of the best modern examples of the novel -- not an opera. However, if what we look for in Ulysses is not its obviously visible shape, but rather, its messages, its rhythms and stories and symbolisms, then it is entirely possible that it would be the same creation if it were suddenly transmutated into music."

Tags:music, overture, critic, artist, prose, culture, rhythm, dance, abstract, classical

Abstract
This paper describes the life of the Underground Man in Dostoevsky's work, "Notes from the Underground". It analyzes his ways of thought from a naturalist perspective. The paper shows how the Underground Man is a romantic dreamer, living in a fantasy world and unable to make his own decisions.

From the Paper
"Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground is a critical commentary and rebellion from the traditional romantic view that had been so popular in previous eras. Dostoevsky belongs to the naturalist and realist school of thought, which emphasize the idea that life is hard and complex, and we must deal with it. This contrasts with the romantic thoughts regarding life as simple, beautiful and correlated to nature. In his work Dostoevsky uses each of these conflicting views to build the mindset of the protagonist known as the Underground Man (UM). The UM is a very intricate individual. While he is very shy and reserved, he deeply craves attention. He desperately wants to succeed, but is constantly setting himself up for failure. He feels superior to others by recognizing he own inferiority. It seems that the UM's life is full of contradictions and it is this life that are meant to represent human nature."

Tags:cowardice, Liza, brotherhood

Abstract
The paper examines the issue of racism in Mark Twain's
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". It discusses the controversy which has surrounded this novel for some time, largely because of the setting--the South--and the inclusion of the black man Jim, a slave who is seen by some as a stereotyped house slave always ready to do the bidding of white masters. The paper argues that this is a wrong reading of the book, which is structured in a way that brings Jim into equal prominence with the main character, Huckleberry Finn, and elevates him in terms of native intelligence about the dreamer and romantic, Tom Sawyer. It shows that there is no doubt that Twain is depicting a racist society, for that is what he saw when he looked around at the South of his day. He suggests this through several different characters who are found along the journey undertaken by Huck and Jim. The fact that the novel includes racism does not make it racist itself. The paper shows that another reason why some charge that the book is racist is because of the use of the word "nigger" throughout the book. The author of the paper summarizes that whether the book is seen as combating or reinforcing racist attitudes depends on how much understanding the reader brings to the task of reading the book.

From the Paper
"This contrast persists in terms of racial attitudes as well. At first, Huck accepts the way society views slaves. However, the more he travels with Jim down the river, the more he comes to see Jim as a human being. This causes the boy great pain because of the way he has been raised, and here Twain shows graphically how racist attitudes are passed down through the generations. Nichols shows in his essay that Twain saw society as a force that could overcome the natural innocence and goodness Twain believed Americans possessed. Nichols suggests that the book says much that is valuable about the society of the time even though it also exaggerates other elements."

Tags:Widow, Douglas, Miss, Watson, Negro