Womanhood in The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Mari

Womanhood in The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Mariana by Keats In the two poems "Mariana'' and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci'' and the extract from ''The Eve of Saint Agnes'' the poets portray three diverse perceptions of women. The reader distinguishes a woman as a temptress, a woman whom is vulnerable and is dependent on man, and a woman who is nubile and is innocently seductive. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is a ballad, written in 1819. In this ballad, the femme fatale deceives the Wretched Wright she meets. He falls in love with the Belle Dame instantly and is convinced that she too is in love with him; "She look'd at me as she did love". The Tempter is "beautiful, a faery's child"; the Belle Dame looks magnificent on the outer surface however beauty is only skin deep as there is an inner wickedness about her. Her "eyes were wild" and she enchants the Wretched Wright with "faery's song's". 'Faery's' were thought to be from 'another place'. Her love was weird but wonderful to the Wretched Wright, "And sure in language true she said, I love thee true." The Belle Dame is conveyed, as a temptress who knowingly destroys men's hearts, even from reading the title the reader knows this. The title is translated to mean 'A Beautiful Lady Without Merci'; this shows us that she is dangerous to men. "I saw pale kings, and princes too", the Belle Dame had intentionally starved more men before the Wretched Wright form love. This contrasts with "The Eve of St. Agnes" where the reader observes another type of temptress, Madeline, in the poem 'Mariana'. Madeline is unknowingly seductive to the weak Porphyro. Porphyro even sings to her, "La belle dame sans merci: Close to her ear" as ... ...ness by Keats, "Alone and palely loitering", we too connect this image with gloomy, suffering love. As if he is colourless like the "Pale warriors, death-pale were they all." Love had taken away all their cheerful colours along with leaving them weak and defenceless. In conclusion through these poems the reader explores the limitations of society and the influence of these restrictions on women. The reader also observes the power and beauty of love as well as the result it has on people. In all three poems the last line of the poems and the extract demonstrates this; "Oh God, that I were dead!" "For if thy diest, my Love, I know not where to go", "And no birds sing." I think that in all three endings Keats's and Tennyson some up the distress caused by love and the penalty of its addiction very admirably when looking into the poems not at first glance.

Impact Of Globalization On Urbane Culture

Culture has many meanings. As a practical human activity, it is an inherent part of both individual and collective development, from the education of a single child to the finest artistic expression of entire peoples and nations. Culture also refers to the customs of a given society, especially as reflected in its social institutions and practices, including social and political organization and religion. Even in the nineteenth century, cities at the centre of media, financial, and manufacturing networks led the global symbolic economy of the time.Cultural innovations in those days spread by means of exports of new products and models, and of images published in newspapers and magazines. It took weeks or months for these images to reach distant regions. Today, innovations travel at much greater speed via airplane, satellite and the internet. Easier import and export of culture helps ethnic groups living away from their homes to maintain their cultural identity, while exposing those i n their home countries to new cultural stimuli.In earlier years, people moved between the relatively simple spaces of home, work and neighborhood, all of which reinforced bonds based on ethnicity and social class. Networks and institutions of sociability directly shaped local cultures. Today, urban residents commute over great distances to go to work. Through television, film, the internet and popular magazines, rich and poor alike see images of affluence and modernity and compare them with their own lives.The inability to escape these multiple images and sources of information can be disconcerting and may sometimes lead to local resistance against what is termed â€Å"cultural globalization†. Access to more images and information also enriches the cosmopolitan culture of cities. The idea of using culture as a motor of urban economic growth reflects cities’ transition from manufacturing to more flexible, design and knowledge-based production.Since massive industries li ke steel and automobiles based on standardized mass production have fallen, one by one, to competition from low-cost locations, attention has focused on cultural industries – flexible industries that value knowledge, information and technology. Most cultural industries are located in cities. A dense population and concentration of skills allow them to draw upon tangible human resources, and a city’s usual history of tolerance and social diversity offers intangible sources of inspiration and experimentation. What is expected of the new global city?As noted earlier, globalization has introduced new cultures as well as fusion of old and new ones in cities. Already evident in many cities in advanced economies, these new urban cultures are likely to emerge more and more in the developing world. They provide new forms of what we may term â€Å"consumption spaces†, including fusion in their design and architecture, partly under the influence of intensified shopping all over the world. A feature of these new spaces is their enclosure, which tends to reinforce social exclusion within cities. They also, increasingly, signal the transition of a city’s status to global. Impact Of Globalization On Urbane Culture Culture has many meanings. As a practical human activity, it is an inherent part of both individual and collective development, from the education of a single child to the finest artistic expression of entire peoples and nations. Culture also refers to the customs of a given society, especially as reflected in its social institutions and practices, including social and political organization and religion. Even in the nineteenth century, cities at the centre of media, financial, and manufacturing networks led the global symbolic economy of the time.Cultural innovations in those days spread by means of exports of new products and models, and of images published in newspapers and magazines. It took weeks or months for these images to reach distant regions. Today, innovations travel at much greater speed via airplane, satellite and the internet. Easier import and export of culture helps ethnic groups living away from their homes to maintain their cultural identity, while exposing those i n their home countries to new cultural stimuli.In earlier years, people moved between the relatively simple spaces of home, work and neighborhood, all of which reinforced bonds based on ethnicity and social class. Networks and institutions of sociability directly shaped local cultures. Today, urban residents commute over great distances to go to work. Through television, film, the internet and popular magazines, rich and poor alike see images of affluence and modernity and compare them with their own lives.The inability to escape these multiple images and sources of information can be disconcerting and may sometimes lead to local resistance against what is termed â€Å"cultural globalization†. Access to more images and information also enriches the cosmopolitan culture of cities. The idea of using culture as a motor of urban economic growth reflects cities’ transition from manufacturing to more flexible, design and knowledge-based production.Since massive industries li ke steel and automobiles based on standardized mass production have fallen, one by one, to competition from low-cost locations, attention has focused on cultural industries – flexible industries that value knowledge, information and technology. Most cultural industries are located in cities. A dense population and concentration of skills allow them to draw upon tangible human resources, and a city’s usual history of tolerance and social diversity offers intangible sources of inspiration and experimentation. What is expected of the new global city?As noted earlier, globalization has introduced new cultures as well as fusion of old and new ones in cities. Already evident in many cities in advanced economies, these new urban cultures are likely to emerge more and more in the developing world. They provide new forms of what we may term â€Å"consumption spaces†, including fusion in their design and architecture, partly under the influence of intensified shopping all over the world. A feature of these new spaces is their enclosure, which tends to reinforce social exclusion within cities. They also, increasingly, signal the transition of a city’s status to global.

B.C. (or BC) - Counting and Numbering Pre-Roman Time

The term BC (or B.C.) is used by most people in the west to refer to pre-Roman dates in the Gregorian Calendar (our current calendar of choice). BC refers to Before Christ, meaning before the putative birth year of the prophet/philosopher Jesus Christ, or at least before the date once thought to be that of Christs birth (the year AD 1). The first surviving use of the BC/AD convention was by the Carthaginian bishop Victor of Tunnuna (died AD 570). Victor was working on a text called Chronicon, a history of the world begun by Christian bishops in the 2nd century AD. BC/AD was also used by the British monk the Venerable Bede, who wrote over a century after Victors death. The BC/AD convention was probably established as early as the first or second century AD, if not widely used until much later. But the decision to mark years AD/BC at all is only the most prevalent convention of our current western calendar in use today, and it was devised only after some tens of thousands of years of mathematical and astronomical investigations. Calendars BC The people who likely devised the earliest calendars are thought to have been motivated by food: the need to track seasonal  growth rates in plants and migrations in animals. These early astronomers marked time by the only way possible: by learning the motions of celestial objects such as the sun, moon, and stars. These earliest calendars were developed all over the world, by hunter-gatherers whose lives depended on knowing when and where the next meal was coming from. Artifacts that may represent this important first step are called tally sticks, bone and stone objects which bear incised marks that may refer to the numbers of days between moons. The most elaborate of such objects is the (somewhat controversial of course) Blanchard Plaque, a 30,000-year old piece of bone from the Upper Paleolithic site of Abri Blanchard, in the Dordogne valley of France; but there are tallies from much older sites that may or may not represent calendrical observations. The domestication of plants and animals brought an additional layer of complexity: people were dependent on knowing when their crops would ripen or when their animals would gestate. Neolithic calendars must include the stone circles and megalithic monuments of Europe and elsewhere, some of which mark the important solar events such as solstices and equinoxes. The earliest possible first written calendar identified to date is the Gezer calendar, inscribed in ancient Hebrew and dated to 950 BC. Shang dynasty oracle bones [ca 1250-1046 BC] may also have had a calendrical notation. Counting and Numbering Hours, Days, Years While we take it for granted today, the crucial human requirement of capturing events and predicting future events based on your observations is a truly mind-blowing problem. It seems quite likely that much of our science, mathematics, and astronomy are a direct outgrowth of our attempts to make a reliable calendar. And as scientists learn more about measuring time, it becomes clear how enormously complex the problem truly is. For example, youd think figuring out how long a day was would be simple enough--but we now know that the sidereal day--the absolute chunk of the solar year--lasts 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds, and is gradually lengthening. According to growth rings in mollusks and corals, 500 million years ago there may have been as many as 400 days per solar year. Our astronomical geek ancestors had to figure out how many days there were in a solar year  when the days and years varied in length. And in an attempt to know enough about the future, they did the same for a lunar year--how often did the moon wax and wane and when does it rise and set. And those kinds of calendars arent migratable: sunrise and sunset occur at different times at different parts of the year and different places in the world, and the moons location in the sky is different for different people. Really, the calendar on your wall is a remarkable feat. How Many Days? Fortunately, we can track the failures and successes of that process through surviving, if patchy historical documentation. The earliest Babylonian calendar reckoned the year to be 360 days long--thats why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 60 minutes to an hour, 60 seconds to the minute. By about 2,000 years ago, societies in Egypt, Babylon, China, and Greece had figured out that the year was actually 365 days and a fraction. The problem became--how do you deal with a fraction of a day? Those fractions built up over time: eventually, the calendar that you were relying on to schedule events and tell you when to plant became off by several days: a disaster. In 46 BC, the Roman ruler Julius Caesar established the Julian calendar, which was built solely on the solar year: it was instituted with 365.25 days and ignored the lunar cycle entirely. A leap day was built in every four years to account for the .25, and that worked pretty well. But today we know our solar year is actually 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds long, which is not (quite) 1/4 of a day. The Julian calendar was off by 11 minutes per year, or a day every 128 years. That doesnt sound too bad, right? But, by 1582, the Julian calendar was off by 12 days and cried out to be corrected. Other Common Calendar Designations A.D.B.P.RCYBPcal BPA.H.B.C.E.C.E. Sources This glossary entry is part of the About.com Guide to Calendar Designations and the Dictionary of Archaeology. Dutka J. 1988. On the Gregorian revision of the Julian calendar. The Mathematical Intelligencer 30(1):56-64. Marshack A, and DErrico F. 1989. On Wishful Thinking and Lunar Calendars. Current Anthropology 30(4):491-500. Peters JD. 2009. Calendar, clock, tower. MIT6 Stone and Papyrus: Storage and Transmission. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Richards EG. 1999. Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sivan D. 1998. The Gezer Calendar and Northwest Semitic Linguistics. Israel Exploration Journal 48(1/2):101-105. Taylor T. 2008. Prehistory vs. Archaeology: Terms of Engagement. Journal of World Prehistory 21:1–18.