All cultural products contain a mixture of two elements: conventions and inventions. Conventions are elements which are known to b...oth the creator and his audience beforehand--they consist of things like favorite plots, stereotyped characters, accepted ideas, commonly known metaphors and other linguistic devices, etc. Inventions, on the other hand, are elements which are uniquely imagined by the creator, such as new kinds of characters, ideas, or linguistic forms.... Convention and invention have quite different cultural functions. Conventions represent familiar shared images and meanings and they assert an ongoing continuity of values; inventions confront us with a new perception of meaning which we have not realized before. Both these functions are important to culture. Conventions help maintain a culture's stability while inventions help it respond to changing circumstances and provide new information about the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He with cowslips pale, Primrose, and purple lychnis, decked the green... Before my threshold, and my shelving walls With honeysuckle covered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Green, green is El Aghir. It has a railway station, And the wealth of its soil has borne many another fruit:... A mairie, a school and an elegant Salle de Fetes. Such blessings, as I remarked, in effect, to the waiter, Are added unto them that have plenty of water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men like my father cannot die. They are with me still, real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever. How green... was my valley then.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am packing my belongings in the shawl my mother used to wear when she went to the market. And I am going from my valley. But thi...s time I shall never return. I am leaving behind me my 50 years of memory--memory. Strange that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment has passed and yet hold clear and bright the memory of what happened years ago of men and women long since dead. Yet who shall say what is real and what is not. Can I believe this all gone when their voices are still a glory in my ears. No. And I will stand to say no and no again, for they remain within my mind. There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can go close my eyes on my valley as it is today and it is gone. And I see it as it was when I was a boy--green it was and possessed of the plenty of the earth. In all Wales there was none so beautiful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In those days, the blag slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the side of our hill. Not enough to mar the coun...tryside nor blacken the beauty of our village. For the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers between the green.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »