Summary: The rebellious artist, the attraction to the dark side, love and death, and the primacy of nature-all of these are themes that suffused the artistic and ideological revolution known as Romanticism. This program vividly conveys how new ways of thinking and seeing reshaped the humanities in the 18th and 19th centuries. The writings of Holderlin, Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Byron, Wordsworth, and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: It is a creative impulse as old as humanity itself: to depict life faithfully, accurately, in words or images. This program shows how that impulse led to Realism—a widespread artistic movement, born in the latter half of the 19th century, which rejected pretense, distortion, and sentimentality. Incorporating interviews with art historians and literary scholars, the program explores the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: The ideas and ideals of three American Transcendentalists-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller-initially given expression through The Dial continue to shape the discourse of literature, philosophy, and religion worldwide. This program, hosted by James H. Bride II and divided into eight chapters, traces the origins and defines the concept of Transcendentalism. It also...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: This overview of the life and literature of Emily Dickinson from the Famous Authors series offers an insight into the reclusive author of 1,775 poems and a valuable collection of letters. The video depicts Dickinson's story as that of an individual in a society that smothers individuality and discusses the struggle of a female poet among male contemporaries. She did, however, know of and admire...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: This introduction to Herman Melville's life and work from the Famous Authors series begins by introducing the city of New York, Melville's hometown, and the influence living in the busiest maritime port in the world had on his work. Melville eventually left home to work on a sail boat, and soon went to New Bedford, Massachusetts to become a crew member on a whaling ship, an experience that he...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: This is the widely heralded adaptation of the short story by Kate Chopin, the late-19th-century writer whose work is only now receiving the major recognition it deserves. The setting is Kate Chopin's own world-the world of the upper-class Creole society that dominated New Orleans in the 1870s, a world with a strict code of behavior, one of whose strongest tenets required a wife to subordinate...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This program from the Famous Authors series provides an overview of Mark Twain's life and work, starting with life in nineteenth century Hannibal, Missouri, Twain's childhood home and a major influence on his writing, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain started writing as a newspaper employee in Hannibal, and he joined a militia group there early...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: This classic tale of revenge and murder depicts a victim lured to his doom by the false promise of riches-in this case, a highly prized cask of vintage wine. Pomerleau portrays both victim and villain with consummate skill as greed is punished with inescapable and eternal imprisonment.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: In this introduction to Edgar Allan Poe's life and work from the Famous Authors series, the viewers follow Poe's early life and fortunate adoption by the Allans. Poe's relationship with Frances Allan was tender, but he and John Allan did not get along. His stepfather sent him away to university and then cut him off completely. In response, Poe went to Boston and joined the army, but persisted...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. So speaks Montresor in this faithful rendition of Edgar Allan Poe's chilling story of a murderous trap irresistibly baited with fine wine and flattery. Strong performances and outstanding cinematography make this classic program-an object of considerable critical acclaim at film...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: This program consists of five versions of the same short story, "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin, who scandalized American readers in the late 19th century by questioning the social and marital mores of her time. The story examines the behavior and feelings of a woman on the day she is informed of her husband's death. The program includes a reading of the story by Zoe Wanamaker, plus...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Few works in American literature address issues as timeless as those explored in Mark Twain's controversial novel, Huckleberry Finn. In this program, three scholars, including noted Twain biographer Justin Kaplan, examine the work and its various themes-race, cruelty, consequences of greed, meaning of civilization, and the nature of freedom. The author's life is traced from his days as a...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: A generation after Americans had freed themselves politically and economically from Britain, it would be up to Ralph Waldo Emerson to carry the Revolution to individual men and women by exhorting them to a freedom of the spirit as well. Through a detailed recounting of Emerson's life, this program traces his vision of the ideal in America from its genesis to its flowering as the principles of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: While many of her literary peers achieved notoriety, "the woman in white" remained virtually unknown-by choice. The self-imposed obscurity of Emily Dickinson is just one of many aspects of her life that this program explores. Blending daguerreotypes, paintings, manuscripts, excerpts from Dickinson's letters, and readings from nearly a dozen of her poems, this program presents the biography of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This is Melville's sardonic and symbolic story of a copyist at a Wall Street law firm who refuses to conform, responding to all requests with, "I prefer not to." Autobiographical in its despair over the public's failure to understand the writer, prophetic in its foreshadowing of 20th-Century Absurdism, "Bartleby the Scrivener" provides a window into the work of Melville and a convincing...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: If "The Raven" is not the best-known American poem, then "Annabel Lee" is. Both have endured because they successfully illustrate Poe's esthetic theories of poetics; they use natural, comprehensible language whose music weaves a spell that underscores and heightens the language. These two poems and "The Dream within a Dream" are performed (not merely read!) as Poe himself might have recited...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Here is Poe weaving a web of psychological terror as a murderer recounts the bizarre details of his crimes against "the old man with the evil eye. The intensity and emotion build as the murderer becomes unhinged, a victim of his own crime. Again, the strength of Pomerleau's performance enables the audience to feel the power of Poe's macabre imagination.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: This confessional monologue depicts the decay of one man as a result of his addiction to alcohol. Pomerleau's portrayal brings to vivid life that character as he evolves from a lover of animals and a caring husband to a demon facing the ultimate horror.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Touted as one of the first major feminist writers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman spent her life fighting to liberate women from the yoke of domesticity. This is a stunning BBC dramatization of Gilman's autobiographical account of a woman driven to madness by the repressive mores of Victorian culture. Stephen Dillon as the husband, John, and Julia Watson as the despondent heroine give stellar...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Filmed on location in and around Concord, Cambridge, and Cape Cod, this delightful program brings Henry David Thoreau's Walden and "Civil Disobedience" to life through the captivating delivery of Thoreau impersonator Jeffrey Hyatt. Long passages, as expressed by Hyatt, capture the energy and intensity of Thoreau's words, while presenter James H. Bride II and Thoreau specialists Lawrence Buell,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Was there evil lurking in the gloomy New England woods the night that young Goodman Brown went on his secret errand? Or did he bring the evil with him, locked within his own heart? This program features an outstanding adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale-shot on location in historic Salem-that deftly captures the story's mystery and menace. In addition, a discussion of the life of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: The naive young Miss (Jodhi May) is hired to care for two children at the request of their charming and manipulative uncle (Colin Firth). The story takes a sinister turn, however, as Miss worries that the children will be corrupted by two ghostly figures who seem to haunt the house and its occupants. A faithful adaptation of Henry James' Turn of the Screw, this film's outcome is just as...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: A self-styled sketch runs, "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos." He could have added journalist, carpenter, nurse, and one of the greatest poets in English. This program presents a unique literary biography, tracing Whitman's childhood, various careers, and the evolution of the masterpiece that proved his lifelong work, Leaves of Grass. A collage of photos, paintings, and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: This introduction to the life and poetry of Walt Whitman from the Famous Authors series begins by contextualizing the writer's early life in nineteenth century Brooklyn and Long Island, New York. Whitman took a trip to New Orleans in an attempt to start a newspaper, but he was deeply opposed to slavery and did not fare well in the south. While Leaves of Grass was illiciting both praise and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011