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The Beginning Of The 21st Century

Better Essays

The 21st Century, the time period that we all live in today, smothered in continuous social, economic and political issues. An interesting era for films of this genre is the late 1930’s to early 1940’s which we see reflections in the literature today. War World 2 was a turning point in history and was a time of sheer horror in many places such as Spain, Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe. In today’s age, contemporary literature writers often draw their inspiration and ideas from the writers that have gone before them. As a result, many works of 21st literature face the events and movements from the past in order for them to make sense of the present. The two connections that are very apart in all four of my texts is power and control and the theme of hope. The way that each of these connections have been linked throughout the late 1930’s time period based texts show how important they are into understanding what is still happening in the 21st century. The texts that I have chosen to study are “The Book Thief”, “Pan’s Labyrinth”, “The Pianist” and “Defiance”. The reason I have chosen to study these are to shed light onto why 21st century literature quite often seem to take ideas from the past to help make sense for the future as “you have to know the past to understand the present.”

As stated by James Meade “In the 1930’s one was aware of two great evils - mass unemployment and the threat of war.” The late 1930’s was a time of war, a time of distress and a time of loss.

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