Modern City as the Source of Tragedy in Thomas Hardy’s Major Novels

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 57-68
Author(s):  
Asst. Prof. Dr. Azad Hamad Sharif

     This study examines the perpetual suffering of the farmers, agricultural workers, and peasants who were forced to abandon their habitat from Wessex and settle in big industrial cities of England. This forced migration was due to the industrialization and mechanization of the rural areas of Wessex which finally led to the environmental destruction during the critical period of the nineteenth century in the history of England. The peasants and farmers, who lost all sources of living, were heading towards the big cities in the hope of finding a new opportunity and a better way of living. As a result of this displacement, the moral and the social values of the English peasantry changed greatly. The life of the displaced farmers, agricultural workers, and peasants underwent powerful transformations as a result of the social change in the cities. There, they faced unforgettable social problems that destroyed the dreams and aspirations of most of them in life. The anguish and the agonies of the afflicted group of the farmers, agricultural workers, and peasants are vividly reflected in Thomas Hardy’s major novels. The Mayor of Casterbridge focuses on the tragic plight of the English peasantry when they come into contact with the people from the cities.  Jude the Obscure (1895) portrays the disappointment and the tragedy of the ambitious countrymen who think that the glitter of the industrial cities offers them more happiness than the simple beauty of the rural society.

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (15) ◽  
pp. 3162-3177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pinelopi Vergou

Global challenges and recent changes in conflict areas in the Middle East, Asia and Africa are reasons for the contemporary forced migration into European countries, which have become places of destination or transit posts for a great number of refugees. Cities have become the focus of the socio-spatial debate, as the main units for receiving refugees, either in state camps or in social housing in city centres. In this article, the focus is on the social-spatial configuration of refugee accommodation in local communities and the way these formations generate urban and school segregation. We argue that the placement of urban refugees in large, camp-like structures with low housing standards, mainly in areas outside cities or in rural areas, provides ground not only for social exclusion and ‘territorial stigmatisation’ but also for de facto school segregation. Furthermore, the attempts to house refugees in small cities, through United Nations and NGO-supplied houses, may also raise concerns about the way dispersal policies are implemented, with the distribution of refugee children in specific schools as a result of territorial social-spatial segregation. In both cases, the school segregation of refugees is connected not only with the implications of immigration and education policies but also with the social practices of local communities and the social-spatial characteristics that determine school education. The empirical material of this study is based on information on the socio-economic profiles of neighbourhoods at the census tract level and on qualitative research, through in-depth semi-structured interviews in two different cities in Greece.


2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gareth Fisher

This article explores factors contributing to a boom in Buddhist temple construction in contemporary mainland China. In contrast to recent studies focusing on struggles between religious believers and the state over the revival of local temples and churches, this article examines the culture of merit making and morality building that leads clergy and lay practitioners to form translocal networks with the aim of constructing temples in rural areas where they have few or any cultural ties. The author explores how temple building is driven by differing moral visions within the urban Buddhist community, but with little consideration for the culture and history of the people in the localities where the temples are constructed.


1949 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Easton

In the decline of his life, a disappointed man might well ask himself what destiny would have held in store for him if at some crucial juncture of his maturity he had accepted the earnest advice of a solicitous friend or even of a keen-sighted foe. Today liberalism is confronted with a similar question. It is on the defensive in all parts of the Western world except in the United States. Even there its position is deceptive. Perhaps it survives tenuously under the artificial protective canvas of postwar inflation. Today one can hardly question this threatened eclipse of liberalism. Because of this foreboding, disturbing questions haunt the liberal. What deficiency in liberalism is leading to the abandonment of its tenets throughout Europe? Was there counsel offered and ignored in the past which might have retarded the infirmities of age?The answer to the first question has long been apparent. Yet in practice contemporary liberalism, both of the progressive and nineteenth-century varieties, has never assimilated its essential meaning. Following the French Revolution and the English Reform Act, liberalism began its long history of divorcing theory from practice. In the splendor of Victorian industrial success, this separation was not driven into the consciousness either of the intellectual leaders or of the people. But with the tension, domestic and international, of the eighties, liberals themselves, like T. H. Green and then Hobhouse, undertook the task of correcting some of the glaring discrepancies between the doctrine and the reality. In the light of the basically abstract character of liberalism, these collectivist renovations now appear like amateurish tinkering with a vastly complex apparatus.Liberal doctrine had indeed long been suffering from a negative attitude toward the state. But this was simply a diagnostic symptom of an even deeper defect: liberalism's unconscionable indifference to the material conditions of society, and its ensuing failure to put its theories to the test of the social reality.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria Orrego Hoyos

AbstractThe article below, which is written by Gloria Orrego Hoyos, presents an overview of the Inter-American Human Rights System, its main instruments, its organs for the protection and promotion of human rights in the Americas and the available tools for the academic research and the activism in the vindication for human rights in the region. This information is presented from the contextualization of the system within a history of violation of human rights in the region, and the role of both the Inter-American Convention and the Inter-American Court in the transformation of the social, political and institutional realities of the people of the continent.


1978 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kemal H. Karpat

Population movements have always played a dynamic role in the transformation of human society throughout history. Indeed, there is not a single phase of history anywhere in the world which has not been related in some way to low or high rates of birth and mortality, to migration and settlement and to their social, cultural, economic, and political effects. The history of the Middle East supplies excellent examples to support this contention. The Muslim calendar begins with an act of migration, that is the hejira of a.d. 622. Migrants going from the countryside to urban centers or fleeing from areas hostile to Islam have always exerted a crucial influence upon the social and political destiny of Muslim countries. The refugees from Spain to North Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the forced migration of Muslims from Russia (the Caucasus and Crimea) in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the shift of population in India, Pakistan, and Palestine in the 1940s, to cite just a few examples, have been major factors accounting, at least in part, for the social transformation of the Muslim world in general, and of the Middle East in particular.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Pamela Vincer

The people of Africville, Nova Scotia were removed from their homes and had their community razed in the 1960s during an era of urban renewal. Africville, Nova Scotia will be explored as an example of forced resettlement in Canada. Specifically, this case study will display the extreme racism Black people in Nova Scotia have endured upon settlement and onward. This paper will trace their migration, while highlighting the exclusion from the dominant society – by the colonial government of Nova Scotia, through lack of access to quality land, hence denial of their livelihoods. The racialization of space and the dominance of whiteness theories will be applied to the case of Africville and Blacks in Nova Scotia. The migration of Black people to Nova Scotia is unique, in that they arrived in Canada during the same time as the early European settlers, yet are still treated as the Other.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Gerda De Villiers

This chapter examined the concept of ‘Ecodomy’ – life in its fullness – as it unfolds in the Book of Ruth. The book is dated to the post-exilic period in the history of Israel, and is read as narrative critique against the Moabite paragraph in Deuteronomy 23:3–5, and against the way that this text is interpreted and implemented in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Naomi, Ruth and Boaz, the protagonists in the narrative, become paradigmatic of the situation in post-exilic Israel. Their stories, dealing with loss and the actions they take in order to heal the brokenness become indicative for the post-exilic community. As the narrative plot develops, the chapter aims to indicate how ‘life in its emptiness’ is changed into ‘life in its fullness’ by the courage and creative initiative of individuals, even if it meant overstepping boundaries and challenging the social conventions of the time. Against the exclusivist policy of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Book of Ruth argues that foreigners may be included in the community of YHWH and that their solidarity with Israel is to the benefit of all the people. The point that the chapter wishes to make, is that life in its fullness cannot be taken for granted, but requires effort.


2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
Damien Carraz

RESUMO: As ordens militares, como senhores eclesiásticos, exerceram a justiça temporal sobre populações das quais elas estavam encarregadas. A historiografia, se ele se interessou pelos conflitos de jurisdição que opuseram os poderes soberanos às comendadorias, subestimou, salvo exceções, as atividades judiciárias destas últimas. Os ricos arquivos das ordens do Hospital e do Templo, no Midi Francês, fornecem belas séries de atas da prática judiciária – clamores, inquéritos criminais, processos verbais de condenações... O caso dos dois senhorios templários de Lansac e de Montfrin e as comparações oferecidas pela importante jurisdição hospitalária de Manosque, recentemente e notavelmente estudada, autorizam uma contribuição sobre o papel dos irmãos guerreiros na difusão dos usos jurídicos e no controle social. O pessoal empregado no serviço destas pequenas justiças senhoriais, os procedimentos utilizados pela justiça criminal, a repressão da delinquência ordinária que assolava estes castra da Baixa Provença e, enfim, os limites opostos ao poder coercitivo do Templo pela organização das comunidades e pelo reforço do Estado foram sucessivamente evocados. O funcionamento, os ideais almejados, assim como a ação repressiva, pouco evidenciam a especificidade desta justiça da Igreja que não recusava o exercício do merum imperium e a aplicação das penas aflitivas. Centradas sobre o século XIII, período de transição na história do procedimento, estas primeiras observações desejariam ser prosseguidas para os dois séculos seguintes: a originalidade da justiça do Hospital, com a instauração de uma ordem moral, mais do que cívica, apareceria mais, tanto que seria necessário avaliar a resistência destes senhorios às reconquistas jurisdicionais do Estado principesco. ABSTRACT:The military orders, as ecclesiastical gentlemen, exercised the temporal justice over populations which they were in charge of. The historiography, if he got interested about the jurisdiction conflicts that have opposed the sovereign powers to the commanderies, underestimated, with some few exceptions, the judicial activities of these last ones. The rich archives from the orders of the hospital and the temple, at the French Midi, provide beautiful series of the judicial practices - clamors, criminal investigations, verbal processes of condemnations... The case of the two templary landlords of Lansac and of Montfrin and the comparisons offered by the important hospitaller jurisdiction of Manosque, recently and notably studied, authorize an contribution over the role of the warrior brothers on the difusion on the juridical uses and on the social control. The people who ar e employed on the service of those small stately justices, the procedures used by the criminal justice, the repression of the ordinary delinquency that plagued those castra of the Low Provence and, ultimately, the limits opposed to the coercive power of the temple for the organization of the communities and for the reinforcement of the state were successively evoked. The operation, the desired ideals, just like the repressive action, do not show at all the specificity of the church's justice which wouldn't refuse the exercise of merum imperium and the application of the afflictive feathers. Centered over the 13th century, period of transaction on the history of procedure, these first observations would desire to be pursued for the two following centuries: the originality of the hospital's justice, with the establishment of a moral order, more than civic, would appear so much more that it would be necessary to evaluate the resistance of tho se landlords to the court re-conquests of the princely State.


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