Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted environment. This is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby. However, human joy is not excluded thanks to 'Mr Sleary's Horse Riding'…
In Hard Times, says George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens means to show us "that it is not our disorder but our order that is horrible; that it is not our criminals but our magnates that are robbing and murdering us ..."
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi'…
This novel presents a thick and intimate nature and the social cultural background of Kerala. But at the same time, this novel plunges a sharp humanitarian suit against the values held by the people of Kerala. This novel shows that communism and religion which teach human equality apparently did not change the discriminatory and patriarchal system of human differentiation, which for centu…