Freedom in Various Aspects of Life Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Freedom in Various Aspects of Life - Essay Example This volume consists of over 274 authors and works that offer a variety of issues for analysis ranging from freedom to democracy to the changing times and everything in between! To begin with, the paper will define freedom. From there, it will take random features that have been strongly asserted in individual works of literature from the said volume in order to meet various objectives. The first of these will be to see the changing character of freedom and what it has meant at different time periods throughout history. This volume assists the author in doing so by presenting the works of authors and writers from various periods throughout history. Another objective will be to study the parameters within which the ways of defining and obtaining freedom have been portrayed by the various authors and their work within this volume. Further, this paper will seek to draw of the conclusion of how important freedom really is in the context of the works that have been studied from the volume . The interesting part about defining freedom is the fact that it has no definition per se. Freedom means different things to different people as well as different periods of time and history. In modern times it has meant freedom of expression and before that, for many people and their countries, freedom from oppression, colonization and various other such factors. In today's world, it depicts the freedom to choose peace and your own leader. Freedom, in a nutshell, is an expression of what a person, a nation, a society and other such entities, really want from life. The French Revolution was an upheaval that was marked by the formal birth of what we call nationalism. This has been demonstrated by the work contained on the Romantic Period within the volume. The authors here have used a variety of themes to showcase the period including the French Revolution, Women's Rights in the 18th century, the Gothic and many others. Spanning over a decade (1789 to 1799), this Revolution had a strong socio-political dimension to it as far as writing goes. This may be seen in the work titled "Democracy" by Thomas Carlyle. In this work, the embodiment of nationalism in various revolutions arose as a matter of its ability to define the elements that would support the construction of a democratic society free of feudal patterns. This was described in context of the citizens from every quarter of the French society, who wanted to break free of the double standards that were being imposed on their way of life in the form of the Church's intervention and the dictato rship of the aristocratic class. In the book, the revolution was an eye opener for the rest of world as regards rights and duties that must be equally distributed among the citizens of a nation irrespective of religion or socio-economic standing. This in itself was a new definition of nationalism and freedom, where earlier the same concept had been seen as a word that was used to describe the national character through its history and artistic work. By virtue of being a social movement, the French Revolution contributed greatly to the formation of a systematic body of knowledge known as nationalism. This is owing to the fact that a social movement is one that is punctuated with a highly idealistic environment with realistic parameters that set the stage for immediate results and the emergence of future trends that will go onto dominate the structure and functioning of that particular society for generations to come.