In order to establish the views on suffering held by the nineteenth-century (1821-1881) Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it is first necessary to determine the viewpoint of his age. In general, it was an age of humanitarianism-- the age of "compassion for the suffering of human beings," the age of optimism, of faith in a morality established by science and reason." Humanitarianism itself was an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century intellectual movement which emphasized reason. This age of reason reflected the progress in science, which had weakened the hold of the Church and of faith on men's minds. Dostoyevsky's rejection of socialism made it necessary for him to reject the corollary of socialism: the elimination of human suffering. Thus he was forced to evolve a personal interpretation for the suffering that he would not let be abolished. Critics generally consider Siberia to be the turning point in Dostoyevsky's life, both from a personal and a literary standpoint. Before his imprisonment, Dostoyevskyts values were too immature for him to develop a significant theory illuminating the problem of suffering. It took Siberia to teach Dostoyevsky the meaning of metaphysical suffering-- the search for the meaning of God and reality. This …

Whatever are the other merits of Macbeth, it must be classed as one of the most penetrating studies of conscience in literature. Shakespeare does not attempt to describe in the drama how the ordinary criminal would react to evil, but how Shakespeare himself would have felt if he had fallen into crime. 1 The ramifications of this conflict between the conscience of a man of genius and the supernatural forces of wickedness, therefore, assume immense dimensions. "Macbeth leaves on most readers a profound impression of the misery of a guilty conscience and the retribution of crime . . . But what Shakespeare perhaps felt even more deeply, when he wrote this play, was the incalculability of evil--that in meddling with it human beings do they know not what."2 This drama displays an evil not to be accounted for simply in terms of the protagonist's will or his causal relationships to evil. It is an agency which is beyond the power of Macbeth's will; and his conscience, as powerful and imaginative as it is, can only warn him that he is involving himself in a force which will cause him unexpected and hideous mental pain. If there is a moral in …

The real purpose of this study has been to learn something of the nature of evil as perceived by these adolescents, and to discover something of the American reaction to it as perceived by their creators.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the politics of Byron as they are related to his age. Necessarily, a part of this work will deal with ideas that are somewhat conjectural, largely because of the limitations of time and space as well as the lack of accurate information--particularly that which concerns Byron and the Whig circle.