Corporate finance Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 6

Corporate finance - Essay Example Company’s capital structure can comprise of majority of equity or debt component, an equal combination of both or only one of them. Each approach includes its own advantages as well as disadvantages. The hypothesis on capital structure from the Modigliani & Miller is considered as one of the significant developments or progress in the area of corporate finance (Miller, 1988). The report will highlight the main foundations and implications of Modigliani & Miller approach towards the capital structure. It will also focus on how this theory is related to the purpose of weighted average cost of capital (WACC) for a company. Further, the report will take into consideration the practical applicability and usefulness of the theory in real life business. There are five assumptions of this approach which involves: no taxes; transaction price/cost for selling and buying securities and also the cost of bankruptcy is nil; there is evenness of information which means that the investor will have the right to use the similar information that the corporate would and it also means that the investors are required to behave rationally; the borrowing cost is same for companies as well as investors; and financing of debt does not involve any effect on the firm’s earnings before interest and tax (EBIT). The approach of Modigliani & Miller signifies that the value of leveraged company (i.e. the company having the mixture of equity and debt) is similar to the unleveraged company’s value (i.e. the company which is completely financed by means of equity) if the future prospects and the operating profits are same. It further explains that if the investor buys leveraged firm’s share, it would rate him on the same scale as purchasin g the unleveraged firm’s share (Casamatta, 2003). The theorem of Modigliani & Miller makes the basis of contemporary corporate finance. It defines that this

THE bcci, bank of credit comerce, white collar crime Essay

THE bcci, bank of credit comerce, white collar crime - Essay Example But, success was not the only step for BCCI’s fate. Price Waterhouse was asked to carry inquiry in March, 1991. It was 24th June, 1991 when they submitted the Sandstorm Report to Bank of England stating that BCCI had engaged in fraud case. Main capital base to BCCI were virtual oil-rich Arab leaders who acted to be the investor but, in reality they were working as nominees. Bank since its beginning attracted people to deposit their funds by pretending that they have more capital which in reality was not true. It used to use the deposits in order to meet the expenses. Even it forced its own shareholders to participate in this drama. Major actions that resulted into frauds by BCCI were enlisted by New York District Attorney. According to them the important points are: Middle East personalities included their names and funds to BCCI as an investor which in effect turned to be flaw because their funding was based on guaranteed no-risk return instead of actual sponsor at risk. After getting the request from Bank of England, Price Waterhouse presented its report on BCCI known as Sandstorm Report. As per the report, BCCI committed several mistakes and did many unofficial activities that are out of one company’s ethics. Price Waterhouse persons collected records from banks of various countries, reviewed them and interviewed in some cases, finally formed one draft keeping all key points there. During their scrutiny they found that BCCI did not record $600 million of BCCI’s deposit. It first knocked the Price Waterhouse audit persons. Among the other types of frauds described by audit include: manipulation of their account at the time of non-performing loan, fabricated profit, hidden losses, setting up of untrue loans for repurchasing shares, cheating of deposits, unreal transactions and charges, showing nominees as capitalists, illegal repurchasing platform for shareholders, bad investment,

Magazine article on E-books Essay Example for Free

Magazine article on E-books Essay Cassettes-sidelined! DVDs –gathering dust! VHS-retired! Technology mutates and evolves leaving redundant platforms in its place. Much of the time technology is beneficial and change is good, however occasionally change is not so auspicious and we do not realise what we have lost until it’s truly gone. The book. The Bible, The odyssey and The Gruffalo (and that’s not even mentioning the poets). All books which have stood the test of time and are still being read as much today as the moment they were published; with these texts societies were bound and broken; lessons were learned and empires fell; all to the humble book. However the brazen veteran; the book; is endanger of being stripped of its crown by the young and brash E-book. In the words of Northrop Frye books are the only piece of technology which has not become socially defunct–Yet! They have stood firm whilst DVDs, tapes and vinyl like empires, rose and fell. However the frog like e-book with its dull boring features and its fabulously annoying Wifi connectivity could be the bane of books. E-books are vastly growing in nature, like a weed; multiplying on every train, beach and plane you see them they are growing in number and his suggested by 2016 there will be nearly 10 billion of these dastardly devices roaming the world. Even the mere existence of E-books has created a whole new type of piracy where people are ripping off hard working authors and publishers by getting counterfeit e-books online for free. This illegal practice was consummated by the emotionless e-book. These characterless devices rob the tangible nature you get from books. The feel of the paper the smell of the ink all contribute to the sensation we get from reading. E-books rob this from us and sadly soon children will not understand this interaction as they will be more familiar with the blistering headache the monotonous e-book provides.

Real Existing Socialism and State Socialism in Romania

Real Existing Socialism and State Socialism in Romania â€Å"Real existing socialism in the GDR and State Socialism in Romania:  A Comparison Introduction Over the course of the last two decades, following the collapse of communism in Russia and other Eastern Bloc states, there has been a considerable amount of debate in academic and political circle relating to the re-definition of socialism, which as a political ideology then became separated from communism. In its purist form, socialism is perceived as the organisational concept within a society whereby the means of production, including factories and farms, is deemed to be held in ownership terms by the whole of a particular community or nation (Caldwell 2003, p.17). Thus, in theory every worker and citizen should benefit equally from his or her share of that ownership. However, as with every other political ideology, in practice such purism does not exist. However, as with other forms of political ideology, a perfect form of socialism does not exist within any national state. As has been witnessed in the Eastern Bloc countries in Europe, there is a significant difference in the way that socialism manifests itself in individual cultures and nations, and this depends upon the prevailing political structure and cultural environment. For example, whilst there are democratic and dictatorship led countries that exercise a socialist agenda, this does not equate to the method of state socialism practiced in other states, even those within the same region. The purpose of this study is to compare two distinct forms of socialism; at the same time seeking to distinguish between the ways that each is operated in their respective societies. To assist with this objective, it is intended to use two nations that have experienced differing political structures. These are GDR[1], which operates a system known as â€Å"real existing socialism† and Romania, which enjoys a state socialism political environment. Socialism There has been a substantial amount of literature produced that has concentrated upon the study of socialism. Much of this has concentrated upon the various divergent forms of the ideology that have emerged within and outside of a communist environment. Although there is still some debate about terminology for these divergent forms of socialism, the vast majority have adapted the two most prominent as being â€Å"real existing socialism† and â€Å"state socialism.† Real existing socialism The studies that have led to the defining of real socialism only really commenced following the breakdown of socialism in areas such as the former communist block (Von Hirschhausen 1995, p.8). From this it has been found that the foundations of real socialism bore no resemblance to the â€Å"planned economy† message that was being projected by the state, and thus cannot be measured or compared with the political systems that exist within the democratic regimes of the western world. Despite it’s similarity to state socialism, the real existing version has none of the unique elements of capitalism. For example, individual property rights, commodity markets, freedom of capital and labour do not exist. Economics was dominated by politics and the two were therefore closely interwoven. This in itself can be seen as part of the cause for their being a lack of planning within these economies, which resulted in problems in three main areas. Firstly, monetary controls and restraints did not exist in the sense that we know in the West. Instead, paper money formed only a part of issues such as workers salaries, with basic goods at low prices or rationed, as can be witnessed by the fact that the price of bread in 1987 had not changed for over fifty years (Von Hirschhausen 1995, p.9), and the higher priced goods were used as rewards for merit rather than available to the citizen as a right. Secondly, there was no attempt to aim for maximum or optimum output from the countries industrial plants as these formed just a part of the party’s objectives, along with welfare and house and a raft of other priorities. Unlike commercial corporations, those within this socialist environment paid little attention to profit and success. Similarly, the idea of plant closure was contrary to the countries socialist identity and beliefs. In itself, this proves the case that there was no economic basis for the nations industrial production and output. The final aspect is planning. As has been discovered since the fall of communism, the official documents issued by the regimes, which purported to be official plans, none of these where implemented or controlled within the industrial environment. This was partially due to the fact that these plants lacked the basic equipment needed to do so, and also because the state showed little interest in the results (Von Hirschhausen 1995, p.9). State Socialism There are many who would argue that state socialism is actually a misnomer. The reason for this is that in this type of socialist community, although there is a limited recognition of private capitalism, the state itself is the centre of power. This power not only includes their ownership of the â€Å"means of production† mentioned earlier in this paper, but also extends to other significant areas as well. For example, their ownership and control extends to the media, transport and communications and, in addition, to the workers, police and military. Similarly, the state uses its power to control dissidents and â€Å"so-called† reactionaries. During the communist era in Eastern Europe, what stopped the nation that followed â€Å"state socialism† from being described more appropriately as bureaucratic regimes was the fact that the state itself was controlled by the communist party, which was essentially determined as a party for the people and thus their representatives. Case Study GDR and Romania The GDR and Romania have been chosen as a comparison case study for this paper as they operate within the two different areas of socialism being discussed, with GDR following the route of real existing socialism and Romania being a state socialism environment. GDR Prior to its reunification with West Germany, the German Democratic Republic was run by a communist regime and operated a system that has latterly become known as belonging to the â€Å"real existing socialism† The economy was controlled and planned centrally by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, who also strictly controlled prices within the economy, particularly those of a basic nature such as basic foodstuff and housing. In these cases the party heavily subsidised production to ensure that prices remained low and manageable for the ordinary citizen. As has been indicated to be the case with such political structures, virtually all of the production process were centrally owned and controlled. Even in the small private sector (around 2.8%), these were subjected to oppressive regulations and taxation, sometimes with the latter exceeding 90%. In essence, at least in the early years, and to a large degree up until a few years short of the fall of the Berlin wall, one of the central intentions of the states plan was the â€Å"total governance† of society (Caldwell 2003, p.2). However, this centralisation of control provided an ideal breeding ground for corruption, with many managers within the publicly owned business sector lining their own pockets and those of party officials, thus creating an even worse economic situation in terms of the production output of their factories. In an attempt to address some of these issues GDR ruling party moved to a more autonomous level of social control (Caldwell 2003, p.15). They adopted the slogan of â€Å"real existing socialism† as a way of showing that, although there was still a large degree of state control, the lives of the individual was said to be, to a large degree, independent and autonomous to the state, which stated that its regime allowed their citizens to live unfettered lives in private, although dissidents claimed that this pretence of â€Å"normalcy† was just an attempt to cover up the high levels of repressions that existed (Maier 1999, p.22). In reality the individual’s emancipation was against wishes of the state but by allowing it to occur it had the opposite effect to that which could have been expected, this being a tendency towards more the creation of more conflict and unrest. However, as Maier (1999, p.42) later shows, the lack of substance in the opposition by ordinary citizens was probably quelled by the measures taken by the state to repress their citizens. Whilst in some cases, such as the media, this was achieved by s strict process of censorship, as far as ordinary citizens a â€Å"stick or reward† policy was operated. For example, rationing and the reward system in terms of luxury goods, which were always accompanied by the threat that the benefits gained through these measures, tended to opposition voice down to a muted level (Maier 1999, p.49). Similarly, the dispersal of the states secret police force led to a situation where fear of neighbours replaced trust as many people responded to the implied threat by showing a willingness to report opposition in secret. This was not only done to curry favour but also to avoid becoming embroiled with the police on a personal level. Thus, as Maier (1999, p.42) states â€Å"real existing socialism thus rested on a double distortion. It transformed the public sphere into one of negotiated bargains, while it twisted the idea of a private sphere into a domain of complicity and secrecy.† Similarly, as has been evidenced within the performance of the state, despite its repressive measures, is more closely linked to the ideals that were previously expressed by Mark (2004). Perhaps the one benefit that East Germany has derived from the real existing socialism that has become inherent within the culture, particularly in terms of the previous movement towards members of the public having an element of a certain degree of autonomy to their lives, is that this has made it easier for the nation to become integrated within the larger German nation following its reunification with the Federal Republic of German (Crow 2001). Romania In certain respects the Romanian socialist structures is similar to that of the GDR. This is certainly true in the case of the party’s control of the media, which has yet to find an independent voice and the state ownership of a large number of commercial assets. However, following the fall of the communist regimes in the Eastern Block, this country has retained a communist political regime, which observers feel results from the fact that the general public are reluctant to involve themselves in politics in a direct manner (Carey 2004, p.10). When compared with the GDR it is found that the population of Romania is distinctly different to those of neighbouring countries. The culture is much more centralised in its thinking. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that most citizens within the Romanian society have a bias towards â€Å"paternalistic protection of authoritarian institutions† rather than being concerned with their own democratic freedom and values (Carey 2004, p.14). A similar situation exists within the business sector. At the present time the state controls and owns most of the production organisations and, in addition, all of the financials institutions are in public ownership. It would be difficult to sell the latter, because of the problem of non-recoverable loans and other debt crisis. Similarly, although many of the countries vast production plants are inefficient and losing money, the ethos of the ruling classes is such that closure of these organisations is an unacceptable option (Carey 2004, p.17). Furthermore, there is a reluctance to allow these to move into private ownership. Even if the state were prepared to look at this option, as Carey shows within his research (Carey 2004, p.18), the vast majority of business and other citizens in Romania are of the opinion that â€Å"the privatisation† process was dishonest. The overwhelming preference within the country and its culture is in favour of state control, particularly in resp ect of what are considered to be the most important issues, these being â€Å"prices and wages.† However, despite the views of the population, the state does have to address the issue of corporate control and, although some attempt has been made in this area, this has yet to lead to a stable environment. One of the problems they have in this respect is that the workers are union controlled and, with the current wish for central state control of wages, negotiating a productivity based working environment would, at present, be very difficult to achieve. It is anticipated that it will take some time for Romania to be able to convert either its political structure to a more democratic cultural base or its production and manufacturing industries to a situation of optimisation and a success based agenda (Carey 2004, p.229). Conclusion It is clear that socialism is still in the process of undergoing radical change, particularly following the collapse of communism in areas such as Russia and the former Eastern Bloc countries. However, as has been seen from the case study of the German Democratic Republic and Romanic, the cultural impact of this varies between nations. For example, prior to the 1989 revolutions the GDR was already experiencing a significant amount of unrest, which was being generated â€Å"from below,† in other words from a groundswell of public opinion and active opposition (Kornai 1992). This country is therefore moving rapidly towards a culture of democratic rights and away from their former position of being subject to real existing socialism. Conversely, in the state of Romania, the movement away from state socialism has yet to begin in earnest. For example, the current ruling party is still based upon a communist stance and, despite the fact that it retains control over areas such as production and the media, which in some cases can be seen to be repressive, there is little will amongst the populace to effect a change at this time (Federal Research Division 2004). However, one area that has certainly added to the differential between the two countries in terms of their movement towards a democratic culture and political environment is the location and structural differences. For example, East Germany (GDR) is situated adjacent to a Western democracy, albeit it with socialist tendencies, whereas Romania was previously surrounded by communist and socialist states. In addition, Romania has become an independent whilst the GDR has lost its independent identity within the enlarged German nation. To this extent for the GDR the dissolution of the communist based socialist environment has been a much smoother transition (Maier 1999). References Brie, Michael (1991). The General Crisis of Administrative Centralised Socialism: A Sketch Towards a Theory of Reproduction. Available: http://www.ceeol.com/aspx/getdocument.aspx?logid=5id=15370fa8-8415-4f96-8ae7-a4580ee58991 Caldwell, Peter C (2003). Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK. Carey, Henry F (ed.) (2004). Romania since 1989: Politics, Economics and Society. Lexington Books. Langham, US. Crow, Graham (2001). Social Solidarities: Theories, Identities and Social Change. Open University Press. Buckingham, UK. Federal Research Division (2004). Romania: A Country Study. Kissinger Publishing. New York, US. Kornai, Jà  nos (1992). The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Clarendon Press. Oxford, UK Maier, Charles S (1999). Dissolution, the Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany. Princeton University Press. New Jersey, US. Nove, Alex (2001). Marxism and Really Existing Socialism. Routledge. London, UK. Von Hirschhausen, Christian (1995). Five years after the collapse: The socialism debate revisited, and the limits of economic thought. CERNA. Paris, France. Available: http://www.cerna.ensmp.fr/Documents/CVH-WP95.pdf 1 Footnotes [1] German Democratic Republic

Measuring the Macroeconomic Impact of Monetary Policy Essay -- Economi

Monetary policy is the method by which the government, central bank, or monetary authority controls the supply of money, or trading foreign exchange markets. This policy is usually called either an expansionary policy, or a contractionary policy. An expansionary policy multiplies the total supply of money in the economy, and a contractionary policy diminishes the total supply. Expansionary policy is used to tackle unemployment in an economic decline by lowering interest rates, while contractionary policy has the goal of elevating interest rates to fight inflation. Monetary policy reposes on the relationship between the rates of interest in an economy and the total dispense of money. Monetary policy uses a diversity of tools to dominate exchange rates with other currencies and unemployment. This is done in order to influence outcomes like economic growth and inflation. A policy is called contractionary if it diminishes the size of the money supply or increases the interest rate. An expansionary policy raises the size of the money supply, or lowers the interest rate. Monetary policies are accommodative if the interest rate is intended to stimulate economic growth, neutral if it is intended to neither encourage growth nor fight inflation, or tight if its aim is to reduce inflation. There are several monetary policy tools available to achieve these results. The Fed has three of these tools. Open market operations, reserve requirements and discount window lending. Open market operations are the most important tool of monetary policy used by the Fed. These operations involve the Fed buying and selling prior issued U.S. government securities. Reserve requirements are the percentages of precise kinds of deposits that banks mus... ...sitive as well as a negative effect on everyday people. This can be manifested primarily through a shift in employment status. The government, however, has many tools in order to help the situation. These tools at time can improve or even deteriorate the dilemma. They are made to bring the economy out of crisis. But there is no doubt that monetary policy has a tremendous effect on macroeconomic factors as GDF, unemployment, inflation, and interest rates. References Anonymous (2013). Money what it is how it works. Retrieved February 18, 2014, from http://wfhummel.cnchost.com/monetarypolicy.html McConnell, C.R. & Bruce, S.L. (2012). Economics: Principles, problems and policies. (18th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. North, Gary (2012). Interest Rates and Monetary Policy. Retrieved February 18, 2014, from http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north492.html Measuring the Macroeconomic Impact of Monetary Policy Essay -- Economi Monetary policy is the method by which the government, central bank, or monetary authority controls the supply of money, or trading foreign exchange markets. This policy is usually called either an expansionary policy, or a contractionary policy. An expansionary policy multiplies the total supply of money in the economy, and a contractionary policy diminishes the total supply. Expansionary policy is used to tackle unemployment in an economic decline by lowering interest rates, while contractionary policy has the goal of elevating interest rates to fight inflation. Monetary policy reposes on the relationship between the rates of interest in an economy and the total dispense of money. Monetary policy uses a diversity of tools to dominate exchange rates with other currencies and unemployment. This is done in order to influence outcomes like economic growth and inflation. A policy is called contractionary if it diminishes the size of the money supply or increases the interest rate. An expansionary policy raises the size of the money supply, or lowers the interest rate. Monetary policies are accommodative if the interest rate is intended to stimulate economic growth, neutral if it is intended to neither encourage growth nor fight inflation, or tight if its aim is to reduce inflation. There are several monetary policy tools available to achieve these results. The Fed has three of these tools. Open market operations, reserve requirements and discount window lending. Open market operations are the most important tool of monetary policy used by the Fed. These operations involve the Fed buying and selling prior issued U.S. government securities. Reserve requirements are the percentages of precise kinds of deposits that banks mus... ...sitive as well as a negative effect on everyday people. This can be manifested primarily through a shift in employment status. The government, however, has many tools in order to help the situation. These tools at time can improve or even deteriorate the dilemma. They are made to bring the economy out of crisis. But there is no doubt that monetary policy has a tremendous effect on macroeconomic factors as GDF, unemployment, inflation, and interest rates. References Anonymous (2013). Money what it is how it works. Retrieved February 18, 2014, from http://wfhummel.cnchost.com/monetarypolicy.html McConnell, C.R. & Bruce, S.L. (2012). Economics: Principles, problems and policies. (18th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. North, Gary (2012). Interest Rates and Monetary Policy. Retrieved February 18, 2014, from http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north492.html

Prenatal Diagnostic Tests and the Social, Legal, and Ethical Implicatio

Prenatal Diagnostic Tests and the Social, Legal, and Ethical Implications Introduction Jackie and Michael are expecting their first baby. Jackie is 32 years old and is in good health. She is 15 weeks pregnant and wants to do everything possible to ensure a healthy baby. Even though they do not have risk factors within their families, she and Michael decide to have an amniocentesis. The results indicate that their baby is a female with Turner Syndrome. This condition is caused by a missing X chromosome and results in short stature, ovarian failure, and medical problems involving the heart, thyroid glands, and kidneys. Some of these conditions can be treated and managed with great success. The question that arises after diagnoses is whether or not they will choose to terminate the pregnancy with an abortion or carry the child to full term. The availability of methods that determine the genetic predisposition of a fetus gives rise to a whole array of questions and issues that must be confronted as we develop policies to deal with genetic testing. In this essay, I will present current and future methods for prenatal diagnosis, ethical concerns and related problems dealing with this new technology, my personal opinion on the issue, and finally, future goals in the science of genetics. All of us are potential carriers of several deleterious recessive genes that could be lethal to our offspring if combined with another recessive allele carrying the same fate (IOM 1994). The chances of a genetic disease being passed on are 1 in 100 Americans born today (March of Dimes 1997). Because of the risks involved, many people are having prenatal tests to examine the genetic makeup of their fetuses. For many couples, this option... ...able to cure diseases we never dreamed possible, and the lives of humans will be improved eminently. References Cited Arc. Genetic Discrimination. Obtained from WWW 10/09/97: http://www.the.arc.org/depts/gbr03.html Botkin, Jeffrey R. Fetal Privacy and Confidentiality. Hastings Center Report, Sept.-Oct. 1995:32-39. Institute of Medicine. Assessing Genetic Risks. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C. 1994. March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation. Genetic Testing and Gene Therapy: What They Mean to You and Your Family. Obtained from WWW 10/09/97: http://ubeclu.unibe.ch/insel/GENETEST.HTML Mattei, Jean-Francois. Prenatal Diagnosis. World Health, No. 5, Sept.-Oct. 1996:22-23. Morejon, Diana Punales. Commentary. Hastings Center Report, May-June 1996:21-22. Weatherall, D.J. The New Genetics and Clinical Practice. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Eugene O’Neill Essay

INTRODUCTION 1. 1. Origin and Development of American Literature A fundamental difference subsists between American literature and proximately all the other major literary traditions of the world: it is essentially a modern, recent and international literature. The American continent possessed major pre-Columbian civilizations, with a deep heritage of culture, mythology, ritual, chant and poetry. Many recent American writers, especially recently, have looked to these sources as something essential to American culture, and the extraordinary variety and vision to be found there contribute much to the complexity  and increasing multiethnicity of Contemporary American experience. But this is not the originating tradition of what we now call American literature. That originated from the meeting between the land and usually despised Red Indians and the discoverers and settlers who left the developed, literatre cultures of Renaissance Europe, first to explore and conquer, then to populate, what they generally considered a virgin continent – a â€Å"New World† already promised them in their own mythology, now discovered by their own talent and curiosity. Owing to the sizably voluminous immigration to Boston in the 1630s, they brought their conceptions of history and the world’s purport; they brought their languages and above all , the book. The book was both a sacred text, the Bible (to be reinvigorated in the King James Authorized Version of 1611), and a general instrument of expression, record, argument, and cultural dissemination. In time, the book became American literature, and other things they shipped with it — from European values and prospects to post-Gutenberg printing technology– shaped the lineage of American writing. So did the early records kept of the encounter and what they composed of it. Of course a past was being ravaged as well as an incipient present gained when these travelers/ settlers imposed on the North American continent and its cultures their forms of interpretation and narrative, their Christian history and iconography. This American when first came into existence out of writing – European writing – and then went on to demand a new writing which fitted the harshness and grandeur of its landscape, the mysterious potential of its seemingly boundless open space. But â€Å"America† existed in  Europe long before it was discovered, in the speculative writings of the classical, the medieval and the then the Renaissance mind. â€Å"He invented America; a very great man †. Mademoiselle Nioche says about Columbus in Henry James’ The American (1877). 1. 1. 1. Periods of American Literature The division of American literature into convenient historical segments, or â€Å"periods,† lacks the consensus among literary scholars. The many syllabi of college surveys reprinted in Reconstructing American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter (1983), and the essays in Redefining American Literary History, ed. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward (1990), demonstrate how variable are the temporal divisions and their names, especially since the beginning of efforts to do justice to literature written by women and by ethnic minorities. 1607-1775 : This era, from the founding of the first settlement at Jamestown to the outbreak of the American Revolution, is often called the Colonial Period, in which writings were for the most part-religious, practical, or historical. William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Cotton Mather are the notable writers. The period between 1765 and 1790 is sometimes distinguished as the Revolutionary Age. It was the time of Thomas Paine’s influential revolutionary tracts; of Thomas Jefferson’s â€Å"Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom,† â€Å"Declaration of Independence,† and many other writings. The years 1775-1828, the Early National Period, ending with the triumph of Jacksonian democracy in 1828, signalized the emergence of a national imaginative literature, including the first American stage comedy (Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, 1787), the earliest American novel (William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, 1789), and the establishment in 1815 of the first enduring American magazine, The North American Review. Washington Irving achieved international fame with his essays and stories; Charles Brockden Brown wrote distinctively American versions of the Gothic novel of mystery and terror; the career of James Fenimore Cooper, the first major American novelist, was well launched. The span 1828-1865 from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War, often identified as the Romantic Period in America, marks the full coming of age of a distinctively American literature. This period is sometimes known as the American Renaissance, the title of F. O. Matthiessen’s influential book (1941) about its outstanding writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson,  Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; it is also sometimes called the Age of Transcendentalism, after the philosophical and literary movement, entered on Emerson, that was dominant in New England. In all the major genres except drama, writers produced works of an originality and excellence not exceeded in later American literature. Emerson, Thoreau, and the early feminist Margaret Fuller shaped the ideas, ideals, and literary aims of many contemporary and later American writers. It was the age not only of continuing writings by William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fennimore Cooper,  but also of the novels and short stories of Pow, Hawthorne, Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the southern novelist William Gilmore Simms; of the poetry of Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the most innovative and influential of all American poets, Walt Whitman; And of the beginning of distinguished American criticism of Poe, Simms, and James Russell Lowell. 1865-(1914) The cataclysm of the Civil War and Reconstruction, followed by a burgeoning industrialism and urbanization in the North, profoundly altered American self-awareness, and also American literary modes. The years 1865-1900 are often known as the Realistic Period, by reference to the novels by Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, as well as by John W. DeForest, Harold Frederic. These works, though diverse, are often labeled â€Å"realistic† in contrast to the â€Å"romances† of their predecessors in prose fiction: Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Some realistic authors grounded their fiction in a regional milieu; these include (in addition to Mark Twain’s novels on the Mississippi River region) Bret Harte in California, Sarah Orne Jewett in Maine, Mary Wilkins Freeman in Massachusetts, and George W. Cable and Kate Chopin in Louisiana. Chopin has become prominent as an early and major feminist novelist. Whitman continued writing poetry up to the last decade of the century, and was joined by Emily Dickinson; although only seven of Dickinson’s more than a thousand short poems were published in her lifetime, she is now recognized as one of the most distinctive and eminent of American pets. Sidney Lanier published his experiments in versification based on the meters of music; the African-American author Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote both poems and novels between 1893 and 1905; and in the 1890s Stephen Crane, although he was only  twenty-nine when he died, published short poems in free verse that anticipate the experiments of Ezra Pound and the Imagists, and wrote also the brilliantly innovative short stories and short novels hat look forward to two later narrative modes: naturalism and impressions. The years 1900-(1914) although James, Howells, and Mark Twain were still writing, and Edith Wharton was publishing her earlier novels—are sometimes discriminated as the Naturalistic Period, in recognition of the powerful although sometimes crudely wrought novels by Frank Norris, Jack  London, and Theodore Dreiser, which typically represent characters who are joint victims of their instinctual drives and of external sociological forces. (1914)- 1939. The era between the two world wars, marked by the trauma of the great economic depression beginning in 1929, was that of the emergence of what is still known as â€Å"Modern literature†, which in America reached an eminence rivaling that of the American Renaissance of the mid-nineteenth century; unlike most of the authors of that earlier period, however, the American modernists also achieved widespread international recognition and influence. Poetry magazine, founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, published many innovative authors. Among the notable poets were Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. E. Cummings— authors who wrote in an unexampled variety of poetic modes. The literary productions of this era are often subclassified in a variety of ways. The flamboyant and pleasure-seeking 1920s are sometimes referred to as â€Å"the Jazz Age†, a title popularized by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). The same decade was also the period of the Harlem Renaissance, which produced major writings in all the literary forms. Many prominent American writers of the decade following the end of World War I, disillusioned by their war experiences and alienated by what they perceived as the crassness of American culture and its â€Å"puritanical† repressions, are often tagged ( in a term first applied by Gertrude Stein to young Frenchmen of the time) as the Lost Generation, a number of these writers became expatriates, moving either to London or to  Paris in their quest for a richer literary and artistic milieu and a freer way of life. 1939 to the Present, the Contemporary period. World War II, and especially the disillusionment with Soviet Communism consequent upon the Moscow trails for alleged treason and Stalin’s signing of the Russo-German pact with Hitler in 1939, largely ended the literary radicalism of the 1930s. A final blow to the very few writers who had maintained intellectual allegiance to Soviet Russia came in 1991 with the collapse of Russian Communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For several decades the New Criticism—dominated by conservative southern writers. The Agrarians, who in the 1930s had championed a return from an industrial to an agricultural economy—typified the prevailing critical tendency to isolate literature from the life of the author and from society and to conceive a work of literature, in formal terms, as an organic and autonomous entity. The eminent and influential critics Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, however—as well as other critics grouped with them as the New York Intellectuals, including Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Dwight McDonald, and Irving Howe—continued through the 1960s to deal with a work of literature humanistically and historically, in the context of its author’s life, temperament and social milieu and in terms of the work’s moral and imaginative qualities and its consequences for society. The 1950s, while often regarded in retrospect as a period of cultural conformity and complacency, was marked by the emergence of vigorous anti-establishment and anti-traditional literary movements: the Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; the American exemplars of the literature of the absurd; the Black Mountain Poets? Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan; and the New York Poets, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. It was also a time of confessional poetry and the literature of extreme sexual candor, marked by the emergence of Henry Miller as a notable author. The counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s continued some of these modes, but in a fashion made extreme and fevered by the rebellious youth movement and the vehement and sometimes violent opposition to the war in Vietnam. Important American writers after World War II is Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, R P. Warren, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and many others. 1. 2 RISE OF AMERICAN DRAMA â€Å"In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? † -Sydney Smith, The Edinburgh Review (1820). This was the most profoundly preconceived thought around the world before the epoch of American Drama among many literary critics as well as the literate people, half of those harsh comments were due to impediment and the remaining were sort of ill-treatment. â€Å"There is not, and there never has been, a literary institution,  which could be called the American Drama† †¢ Dion Boucicault This statement provoke very little argument from most American critics more than a hundred years later. In fact, the neglect of American drama is so pervasive that Ruby Cohn, in her history of twentieth-century drama for the Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), begins with the observation: â€Å"Given the chokehold on drama of a misnamed Broadway, given the lure of Hollywood, and given the power of some small-minded reviewers in the daily press, it is a virtual miracle that American drama merits admission to a history of American literature†. Despite its segregation from the main corpus of American literature, American drama has never been written in a vaccum. It has mirrored peculiarly American social, political, and historical issues in traditional as well as challenging forms and experimental styles. It has been the forum for a plurality of American voices. American drama has always responded to national and regional problems, either in reifying prevailing sentiments or by challenging dominant ideologies. Like other forms of American literature, drama embodies the American struggle. For decades scholars and critics of American literature, engaged in establishing discipline with  canonical hierarchies and feeling embattled in the face of longer-lived English literary studies, have practiced generic hegemony; as a consequence, American drama historically has been the most devalued and overlooked area in American literary studies. Besides all these, there was great theatrical activity during the 19th century a time when there were no movies, TV, or Radio. Every town of any size had its theater or â€Å"opera house† in which touring companies of actors performed. However, no significant drama was performed in this century, with audiences preferring farce, melodrama, and vaudeville to serious efforts. European drama, which was to influence modern American drama profoundly, matured in the last third of 19th century with the achievements of three playwrights: Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov. Ibsen who was profoundly influenced by psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, tackled subjects such as guilt, sexuality, and mental illness. Strindberg brought to his characterizations a unprecedented level of psychological complexity. And Chekhov shifted the subject matter of drama from wildly theatrical displays of external action and emotions to the concerns of everyday life. These trio presented characters and situations more or less realistically chiefly known as â€Å"slice-of-life† dramatic technique. Soon after the beginning of the 20th century, realism became the dominant mode of American drama. Very soon after the little theaters off Broadway succeeded with realistic plays. In 1916 and 1917, two small theater groups in New York (the Provincetown Players and the Washington Square Players) began to produce new American plays. They provided a congenial home for new American playwrights like Eugene O’Neill, whose first plays were produced by the Provincetown Players in MA. These small play groups would produce any play, in any style, that commercial theater would not touch. These groups were the beginning of modern American dramatic theater. The post- World War II years brought two important figures to prominence in American drama : Arthur Miller (((1916))-2005) and Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). They remain the dominant figures of the second half of the 20th century. Miller and Williams represent the two principal movement in modern American drama: realism, and realism combined with an attempt at something more imaginative. From the beginning, American playwrights have tried to break  away from the strict realism of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov and to blend it with a more poetic form of expression. Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949),Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1944) and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) are some of the best examples of this style of writing. Contemporary American Theater In the mid 19th century, realism in drama was conceived as a revolt against crude theatricalism. Currently there is a revolt against realism itself and a move toward more theatricalism, with its emphasis on stage effects and imaginative settings. Once again, American  drama is changing to reflect the changing attitudes of American theater-going audiences. Dramatists today have the freedom to express their deepest feelings, whatever they may be, in any form they choose- provided that their approach can be made comprehensible to an audience and touch their emotions. 1. 3 LIFE AND CAREER OF EUGENE O’NEILL â€Å"I was born in a hotel and, damn it, I’ll die in a hotel†- Eugene O’Neill Eugene Gladstone O’Neill (16- October- 1888 to 27- November-1953), the son of James O’Neill and Ella Quinlan was born in an up-town family hotel, named Barret House on broadway at 43, Street, New York. James O’Neill, was a successful touring actor in the last quarter of the 19th century whose most famous role was that of the Count of Monte Cristo in a stage adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel. Ella accompanied her husband all the times except for the birth of her first son, James Jr,. and for Eugene. His parents were ardent follower of Catholicism. Ella was exceptionally beautiful woman. She loved music and practiced a curled hand-writing. As he was born in a hotel, he spent his childhood in hotel rooms, on trains and backstage. This filled him with a sense of instability and insecurity. O’Neill later deplored the nightmare insecurity of these early years experience and blamed his father for the tragedies that happened in the life of O’Neill. â€Å"Wherever he (O’Neill) lived, the houses he bought were always big, as if their very size would ensure stability: the other side of the picture is, of course, to be seen in his restless experimentation, which ever allowed him exactly to repeat a way of writing he had once essayed. † O’Neill was educated at boarding schools such as Mt. St. Vincent in the Bronx and Betts Academy in Stamford, Conn. His summers were spent at the family’s only permanent home, a  modest house overlooking the Thames River in New London. He attended Princeton University for one year (1906-07), after which he left school to begin what he later regarded as his real education in â€Å"life experience. † The next six years very nearly ended his life. He shipped to sea, lived a derelict’s existence on the waterfronts of Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New York City, submerged himself in alcohol, and attempted suicide. Recovering briefly at the age of 24, he held a job for a few months as a reporter and contributor to the poetry column of the New London Telegraph but soon came with tuberculosis. Confined to the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium in Wallingford for six months then he confronted himself soberly and seized the chance for what he later called his â€Å"rebirth†. O’Neill’s first efforts were awkward melodramas, but they were about people and subjects—prostitutes, derelicts, lonely sailors, God’s injustice to man—that had, up to that time, been in the province of serious novels and were not considered an apt subjects for presenting on the American Stage. In the autumn of (1914), O’Neill entered G. P. Baker’s Academy at Harvard to take lessons in playwriting, because of a theatre critic suggestion to his father. O’Neill’s first appearance as a playwright came in the summer of 1916, in the quiet fishing village of Provincetown, where a group of young writers and painters had launced an experimental theater. In their tiny, ramshackle playhouse on a wharf, they produced his one-act sea play Bound East for Cardiff. The talent inherent in the play was immediately evident to the group, which that fall formed the Playwright’s Theater in Greenwich village. Their first bill, on 03-November-1916, included Bound East for Cardiff—O’Neill’s one-act sea plays, along with a number of his lesser efforts. By the time his first full length play, Beyond the Horizon? was produced on Broadway, staged in Morosco Theater, when the young playwright already had a small reputation. In 1918 he married Agnes Boulton, and they lived for several summers at Peaked Hill, a reconditioned life-saving station near Provincetown. During the rest of the year, they lived in other places. They had two children before separating in 1827. His third wife, Carlotta Montercy, accompanied him on many long journeys, to Europe, to Asia, to the American West. They were to be frequently on the move during the rest of O’Neill’s life, and they were to experience many  painful things including the suicide of Eugene O’ Neill Jr. O’Neill’s last years were marked by physical suffering ( his hands paralysed so that he could no longer write), by increasing isolation, by family trouble and dissension. He died on 27 November, 1953. 1. 4 O’Neill’s contribution to American Drama In his own life-time, O’Neill was established as the leading American dramatist. He was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and Long Days Journey into Night ( he received the highest international recognition in the award of the  Nobel Prize in Literature; a considerable number of books and articles have been devoted to his work since the nineteen-twenties, and in recent years the sign of interest has grown markedly pronounced. His plays are quite popular in the English-speaking world. Despite some critical effort to depreciate O’Neill, he remains America’s outstanding playwright, the only one to win international fame and recognition, and the Novel Prize. He not only built up the American theatre, but also put it on the world map, where now it has a dynamic and distinguished place beside the European and continental theatre—Arthur Miller and  Tennessee Williams helping to sustain that edifice. Unlike Shakespeare, whom popular fancy depicts as a wild bird who sat on the bough and warbled his wood-notes wild, O’Neill had the theatre in his blood and made a lifelong strenuous conscious effort to achieve glory in this field and leave foot-prints on the sands of time. Also, unlike Shakespeare, O’Neill was a highly personal writer, in whose case the partions that divide autobiography and objective reality are very thin paper thin so that his dramatic works constitute a series of personal obsessions, ending up with the most personal of them all- Long Day’s Journey into Night. Full-length plays †¢BREAD AND BUTTER, (1914) †¢SERVITUDE, (1914) †¢THE PERSONAL EQUATION, (1916) †¢NOW I ASK YOU, 1916 †¢BEYOND THE HORIZON, 1918 – PULITZER PRIZE, (1920) †¢THE STRAW, (1919) †¢CHRIS CHRISTOPHERSEN, (1919) †¢GOLD, (1920) †¢ANNA CHRISTIE, (1920) – PULITZER PRIZE, (1922) †¢THE EMPEROR JONES, (1920) †¢DIFF’RENT, (1921) †¢THE FIRST MAN, (1922) †¢THE HAIRY APE, (1922) †¢THE FOUNTAIN, (1923) †¢MARCO MILLIONS, (1923–25) †¢ALL GOD’S CHILLUN GOT WINGS, (1924) †¢WELDED, (1924) †¢DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS, (1925) †¢LAZARUS LAUGHED, (1925–26) †¢THE GREAT GOD BROWN, (1926) †¢STRANGE INTERLUDE, (1928 – PULITZER PRIZE) †¢DYNAMO, (1929) †¢MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, (1931) †¢AH, WILDERNESS! , (1933) †¢DAYS WITHOUT END, (1933) †¢THE ICEMAN COMETH, (WRITTEN 1939, PUBLISHED 1940, FIRST PERFORMED 1946) †¢HUGHIE, WRITTEN (1941, FIRST PERFORMED 1959) †¢LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, (WRITTEN 1941, FIRST PERFORMED 1956 – PULITZER PRIZE 1957) †¢A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, (WRITTEN 1941–1943, FIRST PERFORMED 1947) †¢A TOUCH OF THE POET, (COMPLETED IN 1942, FIRST PERFORMED 1958) †¢MORE STATELY MANSIONS, (SECOND DRAFT FOUND IN O’NEILL’S PAPERS, FIRST PERFORMED 1967) †¢THE CALMS OF CAPRICORN, (PUBLISHED IN 1983) One-act plays The Glencairn Plays, all of which feature characters on the fictional ship Glencairn—filmed together as The Long Voyage Home: †¢BOUND EAST FOR CARDIFF, ((1914)) †¢IN THE ZONE, (1917) †¢THE LONG VOYAGE HOME, (1917) †¢MOON OF THE CARIBBEES, (1918) Other one-act plays include: †¢A WIFE FOR A LIFE, (1913) †¢THE WEB, (1913) †¢THIRST, (1913) †¢RECKLESSNESS, (1913) †¢WARNINGS, (1913) †¢FOG, (1914) †¢ABORTION, (1914) †¢THE MOVIE MAN: A COMEDY, (1914) †¢THE SNIPER, (1916) †¢BEFORE BREAKFAST, (1916) †¢ILE, (1917) †¢THE ROPE, (1918) †¢SHELL SHOCK, (1918) †¢THE DREAMY KID, (1918) †¢WHERE THE CROSS IS MADE, (1918) †¢EXORCISM (1919) 1. 5 His Themes.