text:
Brazilian literature

Brazilian literature is the literature written in the Portuguese language by Brazilians or in Brazil, including works written prior to the country's independence in 1822. Throughout its early years, literature from Brazil followed the literary trends of Portugal, gradually shifting to a different and authentic writing style in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the search for truly Brazilian themes and use of Brazilian forms. Portuguese is a Romance language and the sole official language of Brazil. Lyrically, the poet Olavo Bilac, named it " (...) desconhecida e obscura./ Tuba de alto clangor, lira singela,/ Que tens o trom e o silvo da procela,/ E o arrolo da saudade e da ternura! ", which roughly translates as "(...) unknown and obscure,/ Tuba of high blare, delicate lyre,/ That holds the frill and the hiss of the tempest/ And the singing of the saudade and of the tenderness!"

Brazil's most significant literary award is the Camões Prize, which it shares with the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world. As of 2016, Brazil has eleven recipients of the prize. Brazil also holds its own literary academy, the Brazilian Academy of Letters, a non-profit cultural organization pointed in perpetuating the care of the national language and literature.

Brazilian literature has been very prolific. Having as birth the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, the document that marks the discovery of Brazil, the country's literature has encompassed several significant writers. Major figures include novelists Machado de Assis, Guimarães Rosa, Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector and Graciliano Ramos; poets such as João Cabral de Melo Neto, Mário de Andrade, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Vinicius de Moraes, Ferreira Gullar and Manuel Bandeira; dramatists like Nelson Rodrigues and Augusto Boal, and literary critics and theorists as Antonio Candido and Otto Maria Carpeaux, among others.

Colonial period
One of the first extant documents that might be considered Brazilian literature is the Carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha (Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter). It is written by Pero Vaz de Caminha to Manuel I of Portugal, which contains a description of what Brazil looked like in 1500. Journals of voyagers and descriptive treatises on "Portuguese America" dominated the literary production for the next two centuries, including well-known accounts by Jean de Léry and Hans Staden, whose story of his encounter with the Tupi Indians on the coast of São Paulo was extraordinarily influential for European conceptions of the New World.

A few more explicitly literary examples survive from this period, such as Basílio da Gama's epic poem celebrating the conquest of the Guarany Missions by the Portuguese, and the work of Gregório de Matos, a 17th-century lawyer from Salvador who produced a sizable amount of satirical, religious, and secular poetry. Matos drew heavily from Baroque influences such as the Spanish poets Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo.

Neoclassicism was widespread in Brazil during the mid-18th century, following the Italian style. Literature was often produced by members of temporary or semi-permanent academies and most of the content was in the pastoral genre. The most important literary centre in colonial Brazil was the prosperous Minas Gerais region, known for its gold mines, where a thriving proto-nationalist movement had begun. The most important poets were Cláudio Manuel da Costa, Tomás António Gonzaga, Alvarenga Peixoto and Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga, all them involved in an uprising against the colonial power. Gonzaga and Costa were exiled to Africa as a consequence.

Romanticism
Neoclassicism lasted for an unnaturally long time, stifling innovation and restricting literary creation. It was only in 1836 that Romanticism began influencing Brazilian poetry on a large scale, principally through the efforts of the expatriate poet Gonçalves de Magalhães. A number of young poets, such as Casimiro de Abreu, began experimenting with the new style soon afterward. This period produced some of the first standard works of Brazilian literature.

The key features of the literature of the newborn country are exaggerated affect, nationalism, celebration of nature and the initial introduction of colloquial language. Romantic literature soon became very popular. Novelists like Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, Manuel Antônio de Almeida and José de Alencar published their works in serial form in the newspapers and became national celebrities.

Around 1850, a transition began, centered on Álvares de Azevedo. Azevedo's short story collection Noite na Taverna (A Night at the Tavern) and his poetry, collected posthumously in Lira dos Vinte Anos (Twenty-year-old Lyre), became influential. Azevedo was largely influenced by the poetry of Lord Byron and Alfred de Musset. This second Romantic generation was obsessed with morbidity and death.

At the same time, poets such as Castro Alves, who wrote of the horrors of slavery (Navio Negreiro), began writing works with a specific progressive social agenda. The two trends coincided in one of the most important accomplishments of the Romantic era: the establishment of a Brazilian national identity based on Indian ancestry and the rich nature of the country. These traits first appeared in Gonçalves Dias' narrative poem I-Juca-Pirama, but soon became widespread. The consolidation of this subgenre (Indianism) is found in two famous novels by José de Alencar: The Guarani, about a family of Portuguese colonists who took Indians as servants but were later slain by an enemy tribe, and Iracema, about a Portuguese shipwrecked man who lives among the Indians and marries a beautiful Indian woman. Iracema is especially lyrical, opening with five paragraphs of pure free-style prose poetry describing the title character.

Realism
The decline of Romanticism, along with a series of social transformations, occurred in the middle of the 19th century. A new form of prose writing emerged, including analysis of the indigenous people and description of the environment, in the regionalist authors (such as Franklin Távora and João Simões Lopes Neto). Under the influence of Naturalism and of writers like Émile Zola, Aluísio Azevedo wrote O Cortiço, with characters that represent all social classes and categories of the time. Brazilian Realism was not very original at first, but it took on extraordinary importance because of Machado de Assis and Euclides da Cunha.

Machado de Assis
Usually appointed as the greatest Brazilian writer of all times, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is also the most important writer of Brazilian Realism. Born in Rio de Janeiro City (by the time, imperial capital of Brazil), he was the natural son of a half-black wallpainter and a Portuguese woman, whose only education, besides literacy classes, was the extensive reading of borrowed books.

Working as typesetter at a publishing house, he was soon acquainted with most of the world's literature and became fluent in English and French. In his early career he wrote several best-selling novels (including A Mão e a Luva and Ressurreição) which, despite their overzealous Romanticism, already show his vivacious humour and some of his pessimism towards the conventions of society.

After being introduced to Realism, Machado de Assis changed his style and his themes, producing some of the most remarkable prose ever written in Portuguese. The style served as the medium for his corrosive humour and his intense pessimism, which was very far from the plain conceptions of his contemporaries.

Machado's most crucial works include:
 * Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), the fictional autobiography of a recently deceased man, written by himself "from beyond". It is entirely anti-Romantic and ridicules the society of Rio de Janeiro of the time. This book contains one of the most pitiless sentences about love ever written: "Marcela amou-me durante quinze meses e onze contos de réis; nada menos". (Marcela loved me for fifteen months and eleven thousand réis; nothing less.)
 * Dom Casmurro purports to be the autobiography of a lonely man who has left his wife and his only son after enjoying years of happy conjugal life. The novel is famous in the Portuguese-speaking world for its analysis of a (possible, but never proven or admitted) case of adultery.
 * Quincas Borba
 * O Alienista, the short story about a psychiatrist who founds a hospital for the mentally ill in a small town and later engages in profound investigations on the nature and the cure of mental illness, greatly upsetting the town's lifestyle.

Machado was also a minor poet, writing mostly casual poetry of extraordinary correctness and beauty. His reputation as a novelist has kept his poetry in print, and recent criticism has regarded it better than that of many of his contemporaries.

Pre-Modernism
The period between 1895 and 1922 is called Pre-Modernism by Brazilian scholars because, though there is no clear predominance of any style, there are some early manifestations of Modernism. The Pre-Modern era is curious, as the French school of Symbolism did not catch on and most authors of Realism still maintained their earlier styles and their reputations (including Machado de Assis and poet Olavo Bilac). Some authors of this time were Monteiro Lobato, Lima Barreto, Simões Lopes Neto and Augusto dos Anjos.

Euclides da Cunha
An acclaimed writer highly influenced by determinism, Cunha was always tormented by his family problems (he was killed by his wife's lover) and had to face political opposition because of his opinions. As a freelance journalist working for O Estado de S. Paulo he covered the Canudos War—a popular revolt with some egalitarian and Christian-fundamentalist traits that took place in Bahia in 1895-97. His stories, together with some essays he wrote about the people and the geography of the Brazilian North-East, were published in a thick volume called Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands).

In his work Cunha put forward the revolutionary thesis that the Brazilian state was a violent and foreign entity, rejected (but often tolerated) by the vast majority of the illiterate and dispossessed population, some of whom preserved beliefs and behaviours that had not changed in a thousand years or more. He discovered, for instance, that Sebastianism was then present in the Brazilian North-East and that many medieval Portuguese rhymes, folk-tales and traditions were still kept by the coarse people of the "sertões". This population did not accept secularism, the Republican government and, especially, justice or peace.

His trilogy Os Sertões is composed of three parts titled "The Land", "The Man" and "The fight". Such organization of the book reinforces the idea that the environment where a man was born, the social aspects of his residence and the man's culture may define what he will become. This principle is known as determinism, a way of thought that deeply influenced Brazilian literature during the mid- and late 19th century and the early 20th century.

Modernism
Modernism began in Brazil with the Week of Modern Art, in 1922. The 1922 Generation was a nickname for the writers Mário de Andrade (Paulicéia Desvairada, Macunaíma), Oswald de Andrade (Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar), Manuel Bandeira, Cassiano Ricardo and others, all of whom combined nationalist tendencies with an interest in European modernism. Some new movements such as surrealism were already important in Europe, and began to take hold in Brazil during this period.

Mário de Andrade
Mário de Andrade was born in São Paulo. He worked as a professor and was one of the organizers of the Week of Modern Art. He researched Brazilian folklore and folk music and used it in his books, avoiding the European style. His Brazilian anti-hero is Macunaíma, a product of ethnical and cultural mixture. Andrade's interest in folklore and his use of colloquial language were extremely influential.

Oswald de Andrade
Oswald de Andrade, another participant in the Week of Modern Art in 1922, worked as a journalist in São Paulo. Born into a wealthy family, he travelled to Europe several times. Of the generation of 1922, Oswald de Andrade best represents the rebellious characteristics of the modernist movement. He is the author of the Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) (1927), in which he says it is necessary that Brazil, like a cannibal, eat foreign culture and, in digestion, create its own culture.

30s generation
After the modernist critique there was a generation of writers which actually "regressed" in terms of "modernist" ideas of experimentation, and which instead focused on social criticism. In literary criticism however they are mostly regarded as a development within modernism and grouped within the term "Geração de 30"(30s generation).

Jorge Amado, one of best-known of modern Brazilian writers, tried with his novels to approximate his works to a proletarian literature, he himself was a member of the communist party which defended Socialist realism at the time.

Rachel de Queiroz, and José Lins do Rego were other important writers of this generation.

Post-Modernism
What defined Brazilian modernism were two main traits: experiments in language and an enhanced social consciousness, or a mix between the two - as was the case with Oswald de Andrade, who was briefly attracted towards the communist movement. The reaction to modernism, then, assumed the form of a mix between its most salient trait, the use of more formal literary language (as was the case of the so-called "generation of 1945", whose twin hallmarks were, firstly, the highly physical poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto, who opposed Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poetic modernism, and secondly the sonnets - on both the Italian and English model - of the early Vinicius de Moraes), followed by varying doses, according to the author considered, of subjectivism, political conservatism and militant Catholicism.

Two writers from that "school" that have published after the 1950s are without a doubt already inside the canon of Brazilian literature: Clarice Lispector, whose existentialist novels and short stories are filled with stream-of-consciousness and epiphanies, and João Guimarães Rosa, whose experimental language has changed the face of Brazilian literature forever. His novel Grande Sertão: Veredas has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses or Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz and featured in the Bokklubben World Library list of 100 best novels of all time. João Guimarães Rosa is considered by many to be the greatest Brazilian writer.

Following the wake of conservative subjectivism inaugurated by the militantly Catholic novelists-cum-polemicists Octavio de Faria, Lúcio Cardoso, Cornélio Penna and Gustavo Corção, Nelson Rodrigues made his career as a playwright and sports journalist. His plays and short stories - the latter mostly originally published as newspaper feuilletons - chronicled the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s; adultery and sexual pathologies in general being a major fixation of his. His sports writing describes the evolution of football into the national passion of Brazil. He was heavily critical of the young leftists who opposed the military dictatorship after the 1964 coup; for that he was penned as right-wing and conservative. For a time heavily pro-dictatorship, he had to suffer the tragic fate of having one of his sons being tortured and incarcerated for belonging to an underground guerrilla organization.

Contemporary
Contemporary Brazilian literature is, on the whole, very much focused on city life and all its aspects: loneliness, violence, political issues and media control. Writers like Rubem Fonseca, Sérgio Sant'Anna have written important books with these themes in the 1970s, breaking new ground in Brazilian literature, up until then mostly having dealt with rural life.

New trends since the 1980s have included works by authors such as Caio Fernando Abreu, João Gilberto Noll, Milton Hatoum, Bernardo Carvalho, João Almino, Adriana Lisboa, Cristovão Tezza and Paulo Coelho.

Poets such as Ferreira Gullar and Manoel de Barros are among the most acclaimed within literary circles in Brazil, the former had been nominated for the Nobel Prize.

In recent years, "marginal literature" has risen to prominence with authors and poets such as Sérgio Vaz and Ferréz making appearances at important events like Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty, Flipside and Bienal do Livro de São Paulo. Other poets such as Adélia Prado, Elisa Lucinda, Luis Alexandre Ribeiro Branco, are among the contemporary poets.

title: Brazilian literature


text:
MSC Armonia

MSC Armonia is a Lirica-class cruise ship owned and operated by MSC Cruises. Originally built in 2001 for, the now defunct, Festival Cruises as MS European Vision, she has been operating for MSC Cruises since 2004. At 58,600 gross tons, she can accommodate 2,065 passengers in 783 cabins and 760 crew members.

As European Vision
As European Vision, she was chartered for the 27th G8 summit (20 - 22 July 2001) in Genoa, Italy as a secure location to house world leaders. Terrorism fears were high leading up to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Al Qaeda was believed to be considering Genoa as a target. Although the ship was protected by a phalanx of anti-terrorism units including helicopters and missile launchers, U.S. President George W. Bush stayed at a dockside hotel instead.

As MSC Armonia
MSC Armonia has cruised around the Mediterranean Sea and the Eastern Atlantic. On 10 April 2018, MSC Armonia struck a dock at the port in Roatán. Damage to the ship was minor. After repairs were made to the ship, Honduran Port State Control authorities cleared the ship to continue her journey to Belize. No injuries to the passengers and crew on board were reported. The ships' homeport was in Havana until December 2018. She was re-located to Miami, offering cruises to Cuba and, later, to the Caribbean. In November 2020, she was moved to Tampa, Florida as homeport for the first time and sailed to the Caribbean.

COVID-19 pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC reported as early as 22 April 2020, that at least one person who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, was symptomatic while on board.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced fleet redeployments and MSC Armonia was moved to Miami and continued sailing from there through 2021.

On 15 December 2023, a passenger fell overboard and was never found.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: MSC Armonia


text:
The Mouse-Merized Cat

The Mouse-Merized Cat is a 1946 Warner Bros. cartoon in the Merrie Melodies series, directed by Robert McKimson. It is a sequel to 1945's Tale of Two Mice, with the Abbott and Costello characterizations ("Babbit and Catstello") cast as mice. A 1942 cartoon, A Tale of Two Kitties, cast Abbott and Costello as cats and introduced Tweety Bird. They are voiced by Tedd Pierce and Mel Blanc respectively. This cartoon marks the final appearances for Babbit and Catstello during the Golden age of American animation.

Plot
The cartoon opens in outer space, and moves in slowly on the planet Earth, the United States, and a fictional state called "Mouseachewsetts." The camera continues to move closer, to an overhead view of Fluger's Delicatessen, wedged in between two skyscrapers. The camera pans the interior of the deli, finally coming to Catstello waiting patiently at the entrance of a mouse hole. He addresses the camera and audience: "I thought you'd never get here." He alerts Babbit that the people/audience are here, but Babbit is angry. Catstello failed to gather food as directed, because he fears the cat.

After much resistance, Babbit hypnotizes Catstello and turns him, in turn, into Bing Crosby (voiced by Richard Bickenbach), Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Durante, Rochester (which is removed from Cartoon Network in the United States) and a chicken. Satisfied that his hypnotic powers work, Babbit then hypnotizes Catstello into believing he is a dog. He sends Catstello out to chase the cat away.

At first, Catstello's barking frightens the cat, who hides under a trash bin. But Catstello picks up the bin, and the cat is shocked to see Catstello, rather than a dog. Catstello comes out of his trance and flees back into the mouse hole, where Babbit hypnotizes him again. Catstello runs out barking to confront the cat, but the cat, with a hypnosis book, undoes Babbit's spell and Catstello flees back to Babbit. Then a battle begins between Babbit and the cat for control of Catstello. Like a ball in a tennis match, Catstello bounces back and forth several times between the hypnotic powers of Babbit and the cat.

Finally, Catstello produces two hand mirrors that reflect the hypnotic beams at Babbit and the cat. Then Catstello, hypnosis book in hand, turns the cat into a bronco and Babbit into a cowboy. They ride off together out of the deli, leaving Catstello happily eating cheese, reading the book Live Alone and Like It, and remarking "Oh — I'm a baaaaad boy!" (The book was written by Marjorie Hillis, the editor of Vogue, around 1936 for unmarried women.)

title: The Mouse-Merized Cat


text:
Talk:Dresser

Umm... should there be an article here about a piece of furniture, with a disambig link at the top of the page to Dresser Industries? -FZ 23:57, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

title: Talk:Dresser


text:
User:Cdosoftei

User no longer active.

title: User:Cdosoftei


text:
Mark Johnson

Mark Johnson may refer to:

Entertainment

 * Mark Johnson (musician) (born 1955), American banjoist
 * Mark Johnson (producer) (born 1945), American film producer
 * Mark Steven Johnson (born 1964), American film director and writer
 * Mark Johnson, played officer Luke Everett in In the Heat of the Night
 * Mark Johnson, creator of the multimedia music project Playing For Change

Politics

 * Mark Johnson (North Carolina politician) (active from 2016), American attorney, educator, and politician
 * Mark Johnson (Oregon politician) (born 1957), American politician
 * Mark Johnson (Minnesota politician), American lawyer, businessman and member of the Minnesota Senate
 * Mark Johnson (Ohio politician), Ohio state representative

Baseball

 * Mark Johnson (baseball coach), Texas A&M Aggies, Sam Houston State Bearkats
 * Mark Johnson (catcher) (born 1975), former professional baseball catcher
 * Mark Johnson (first baseman) (born 1967), former professional baseball first baseman
 * Mark Johnson (pitcher) (born 1975), former Major League Baseball pitcher
 * Mark Johnson (umpire) (1950–2016), professional baseball umpire

Other sports

 * Mark Johnson (announcer) (born 1966), British horse racing announcer
 * Mark Johnson (basketball), American basketball coach
 * Mark Johnson (boxer) (born 1971), American boxer
 * Mark Johnson (cricketer, born 1963), American cricketer
 * Mark Johnson (Yorkshire cricketer) (born 1958), former English first-class cricketer
 * Mark Johnson (curler) (born 1958), American-Canadian curler from Edmonton, Alberta
 * Mark Johnson (footballer) (born 1978), Australian rules footballer
 * Mark Johnson (golfer) (born 1954), American professional golfer
 * Mark Johnson (ice hockey) (born 1957), American gold medal winner at 1980 Winter Olympics
 * Mark Johnson (rugby league) (born 1969), South African wing
 * Mark Johnson (wrestler), American former Greco-Roman wrestler and coach
 * Mark "Slick" Johnson, professional wrestling referee

Other

 * Mark Johnson (philosopher) (born 1949), philosophy professor
 * Mark H. Johnson, developmental neuroscience professor
 * Mark W. Johnson, co-founder of Innosight
 * Mark A. Johnson, American physical chemist
 * Mark Johnson, chief meteorologist for WEWS-TV

title: Mark Johnson


text:
Share (P2P)

Share (シャレ(洒落),シェア) is the name for a closed-source P2P application being developed in Japan by ファイル倉庫, a pseudonym translating as 'file warehouse.' Share was developed to be the successor to Winny. Like Winny, Share functions using a distributed data store referred to as a cache with each computer acting as a node in the network. Netagent published a survey in June 2018 suggesting that Share was the third most popular p2p network in Japan after Winny and Perfect Dark (P2P) with approximately 10,000 nodes connecting each day over Golden Week, down from 30,000 in 2015.

Background
Share's logo refers to the Laughing Man, which is a fictional character from the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, as an anonymous hacker.

Share uses encryption to hide the identity of who is transferring or what they are transferring. It is non-centralized so it cannot be easily shut down and it supports multiple source "swarm" downloading. All files are transferred encrypted so they must be decrypted upon download completion. In the meantime they are stored in encrypted form in a "Cache" folder. This folder is also used to allow recently downloaded files to be shared among the network based on priorities.

Share also features a plugin system. The plugins and PDK are readily available through the Share network. The PDK is written in Delphi.

Unlike Winny, Share allows users to specify up to 255 Cluster Keywords, though only 5 can be active at once (Winny only allowed 3 cluster words, and its system was more confusing). These are used to connect to nodes that have also specified the same Cluster Keywords. This allows users to maintain connections with nodes that are sharing files they might be interested in, while disconnecting from nodes that share content they are not concerned about.

Users can specify auto-download triggers and auto-block filters. The network also appears to have some sort of a "forgery warning" system to warn people about possible falsified data/files.

Like Winny, Share uses « Trip IDs » to verify the identity of a person sharing a file. A « Trip ID » is a sort of encrypted key that identifies a person who they say they are. This allows users to decide whether or not they trust a person based on their previous sharing experience with them.

When a new version of Share becomes available, users are given a notice in the Share statusbar. When this happens, users can search for the new version on the Share network, and download it from a reliable source based on Trip.

Criticism
Share is highly popular in Japan, but in the West, some concerns have been raised.
 * In Japan, high speed Internet is more readily available than in most of Western Europe and North America. For this reason the minimum upload and download limits are set to 50 kB/s. Also, the cache system can use around 4 GB of free space at any given time to store cached downloads. This might be inconvenient for people with small hard drives.
 * As a closed source product, Share partially relies on security through obscurity.
 * Like many other P2P applications, Share downloads files in blocks. However, Share can only export partially downloaded files in sequential manner. For example, if a file has 100 blocks and block 51 is missing, Share will not be able to export block 52-100 even if they are already downloaded. Plugin developers have tried to overcome this limitation.

Download
Share can be downloaded from the Share P2P and P2P ファイル共有ソフトノード登録所 websites.

Language localizations
Unlike Winny, Share includes an option for language localisation changes (labeling of buttons, etc.). The locale.txt file contains the information for a particular language and resides in the Share directory.
 * An English localization for A82
 * An English localization for EX2 (TCP version)
 * An English localization for NT5 (UDP version)
 * More English localizations for Locate/Hint/Readme/Info
 * Spanish localization for EX2

Legal issues
On 9 May 2008, three Japanese people aged 21 to 41 were arrested in Kyoto, Japan for illegally uploading copyrighted files with Share. These were the first Share-related cases in Japan. Nevertheless, a research showed that there was no significant drop of on-line Share users after these arrests.

On 27 November 2008, another male Share user was arrested in Japan for illegally uploading Japanese TV drama with Share.

On 12 February 2009, two male Share users became the first to be arrested on charges of uploading Child pornography with Share.

On 30 September 2009, multiple Japanese media reported that two men were arrested for uploading Nintendo DS game software which include Square Enix's Dragon Quest IX. They are the first users arrested for uploading DS games.

On 30 November 2009, 10 Japanese men and 1 woman were arrested for sharing anime, music, movies, and games. Not all were the original uploaders.

On 31 March 2010, 62-year-old Seiji Sato was spotted by a new p2p surveillance software for sharing Avatar and other movies.

On 14 January 2011, 18 people were arrested for sharing movies, anime, music, games and software.

title: Share (P2P)


text:
Stepfather

A stepfather or stepdad is a biologically unrelated male parent married to one's preexisting parent.

A stepfather-in-law is a stepfather of one's spouse. Children from his spouse's previous unions are known as his stepchildren.

In fiction
Though less common in literature than stereotypical evil stepmothers, there are also cases of evil stepfathers, such as in the fairy tales The Gold-Bearded Man (in a plot usually featuring a cruel father) and The Little Bull-Calf. One type of such tale features a defeated villain who insists on marrying the hero's mother and makes her help him trick the hero and so defeat him. Such tales include The Prince and the Princess in the Forest and The Blue Belt, although the tales of this type can also feature a different female relation, such as the stepsister in The Three Princes and their Beasts.

In media, evil stepfathers include Claudius in Hamlet (though his role as uncle is more emphasized), Walter Parks Thatcher in Citizen Kane (though this is debatable), Murdstone in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, the King from the movie Radio Flyer, and Gozaburo Kaiba (who adopted Seto and Mokuba Kaiba) from Yu-Gi-Oh!. The Stepfather depicts an evil father who has murdered his family and subsequent families.

In his opera La Cenerentola, Gioacchino Rossini inverted the tale of Cinderella to have her oppressed by her stepfather. His motive is made explicit, in that providing a dowry to Cenerentola would cut into what he can give to his own daughters. An analogous male figure may also appear as a wicked uncle; like the stepmother, the father's brother may covet the child's inheritance for his own children, and so maltreat his nephews or nieces.

title: Stepfather


text:
Category:Bushrangers

Articles relating to bushrangers, originally escaped convicts in the early years of the British settlement of Australia who used the bush as a refuge to hide from the authorities. By the 1820s, the term had evolved to refer to those who took up "robbery under arms" as a way of life, using the bush as their base.

title: Category:Bushrangers