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Language
English
Description
Although the United States began to emerge from recession in 1983, poverty was still a major problem in many areas, such as rural West Virginia, where unemployment hovered around 30 percent. Remedial measures, such as President Reagan's 1983 Jobs Bill, did little to alleviate the problem. A major facet of the bill involved funding for public works projects, little of which had any practical applications in such remote, underdeveloped areas of the...
2) Oxyana
Language
English
Description
Once a thriving mining community, now a destitute hinterland ravaged by its addiction to a prescription painkiller: the West Virginian town of Oceana is a portentous glimpse of the American dream, collapsed. It is home to high-school girls with
3) Mrs Dalloway
Language
English
Description
Award-winning writer Alexandra Harris shows how Virginia Woolf's classic work Mrs. Dalloway completely re-imagined what a novel might be. Woolf came of age as an author after Europe had been shattered by the First World War. 'Everything was going to be new,' says Harris of Woolf's literary ambitions. 'Everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial'. The result was a new, free-form style of writing that responded to the post-war climate...
Language
English
Description
This overview of Virginia Woolf's life and work from the Famous Author's series introduces the writer's upperclass family and their many literary friends who cultivated her talents and later inspired characters. The film takes a look at Woolf's response to the early loss of her mother and sister and her mental health struggles thereafter. Woolf secured an important position in London literary circles, and was part of the famous Bloomsbury group, and...
Language
English
Description
In 1607, 105 Englishmen crowded onto three ships to cross the Atlantic and make a new life for themselves in North America. They built a fort at Jamestown and established trade with the indigenous people, but things quickly turned bad: the Native Americans became hostile, the land proved unforgiving, and disease broke out. How did Jamestown, long thought to be a near-failure due to the colonists' apparent incompetence, manage to survive to become...
Language
English
Description
Virginia Woolf pushed the boundaries of the novel as a tool for psychological inquiry through her experimentation with subjective and relativistic perceptions of time and events. This program intercuts scenes from a compelling dramatization of Mrs. Dalloway with a portrayal of Virginia Woolf-played by actress Eileen Atkins-who, based on entries from her diary, explicates the story. Literary critic Hermione Lee addresses topics in the novel such as...
Language
English
Description
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. So spoke Virginia Woolf in 1929 as she discussed the problems of the writer and of women in general. Woolf's talk represents perhaps the most persuasive of all her writings on liberty, literature, and the role of women in her society. Woolf spoke not only about writing, but about writing as a woman-speaking in an age when women were deprived of virtually every possibility of...