In his essay titled "Influence of Darwin on Literature," critic William Irvine describes the effect that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory cast upon the age: "it undermined the argument for benevolent design in nature, explaining evolution according to principles which seemed, even to many biologists, a combination of change, blind mechanism, and ruthless cruelty"(621). In response to Irvine's assertion, explain, in a well-articulated essay, how and to what extent two of the authors below seem to support or reject this Darwinist influence on humanity:
? Jean-Jacques Rousseau
? Giovanni Verga
? Friedrich Nietzsche
? Pablo Neruda
? Albert Camus
David Baker argues in his essay, "The Sublime: Origins and Definitions," that the imagination of a Romantic poet possesses "a valorization of nature over the social text," as well as "a reference for the experience of the individual over the group, or subjectivity over cultural wisdom;" but above all it contains "a tone of high seriousness--melancholy being the 'sublimist' tone"(306). Explain, in a well-articulated essay, how and to what extent two of the authors below seem to embody the sublime goals of the Romantic Imagination as outlined by David Baker:
? Lord Byron
? John Keats
? Friedrich Holderlin
? Walt Whitman
? Arthur Rimbaud
The essay, "Baudelaire and Eliot: Interpreters of Their Age," by Wallace Fowlie, centers its argument upon the idea that "Baudelaire's art represented an awareness of man's situation in the modern world"(294). Fowlie traces Baudelaire's poetic focus upone the "problem of good and evil" in order to, within the context of his poems, make the necessity of religious values "felt in the modern world"(265). Ultimately, for Baudelaire, "all great poetry must have a moral basis...[and] reflect the problem of good and evil"(308). Explain, in a well-articulated essay, how and to what extent two of the authors below seem to support or reject Baudelaire's poetic mission:
? William Blake
? Percy Bysshe Shelley
? Novalis (Friedrich Von Hardenberg)
? Anna Petrova Bunina
? T.S. Eliot