Word: themes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...bruised and put-upon Alihodja sounds the elegiac theme of Andrić's book. He watches gloomily as the bustling Austrians destroy the "sweet tranquillity" of Visegrad. They busily replace the outmoded fountains with new " 'unclean' water which passed through iron pipes so that it was not fit to drink"; they industriously built a railroad to the border that finally puts an end to the centuries-old traffic over the Drina Bridge. The book's last chapters take place in the first months of World War I, with Visegrad being shelled impartially by Austrian and Serbian...
...Much Ado is an uneven work; it shows Shakespeare at his strongest and at his weakest. The basic story deals with jealousy-inspired treachery--a serious theme the playwright would later return to in Othello and Cymbeline. But at this time, Shakespeare was just casting about for a convenient skeleton to flesh. The whole business of the tragic slandering and the ensuing deception he took from older sources, and clearly wasted little effort on; his treatment of them is decidedly thin. The greatness of the play lies in what Shakespeare himself invented: the dazzing comedy of Beatrice and Benedick...
Inevitably, the clash of races is one of the great themes of 20th century fiction. Almost too familiar by now, the theme often bogs down in sentiment or sociology. One of the few writers who easily rise above these dangers is South African Novelist Dan Jacobson, and he proves it once again in his first volume of short stories. As in his novels (The Trap, A Dance in the Sun), Jacobson's writing is skilled, hard and sun spare. He uses the tensions between Negroes and whites as he would if they were the tensions of love...
...Blomdahl and performers a 15-minute ovation, and Stockholm's critics lathered their reviews with praise. Composer Blomdahl, 43, would own to only one temporary misgiving about his first popular success: during the two years he spent writing it, he feared that before it was finished its interspatial theme would already have become...
Frequently the authors hold up a little flag bearing the legend: "See, we can underestimate dangers and be optimistic, too." But recurrently they hark back to a theme which Douglass Cater recorded as part of a 1946 address by Joseph Alsop to the Signet Society. At that time, "the older member of the partnership" as he styles himself, compared the nations of the West to Leonidas' troops at Thermopylae and suggested that they "comb their golden hair in the sunlight and prepare to die bravely." A little bit of this sort of Everett Dirksen brand eloquence goes an awfully long...