William Blake's “Little Black Boy,” Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market,” James Joyce's “The Dead,” and Sarah Kane's Blasted each demonstrate how the use of language part of a writer can give us intimate access to the time period which in turn informs the writer's choices. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Emerging from a period when writers were creating anti-slavery literature, Blake's "Little Black Boy" goes beyond a critique of physical abuse to examine the subtle ways people normalize racist attitudes. A child's malleable mind provides the perfect breeding ground for these attitudes. In the poem, the boy's mother explains the color of his skin by telling him "and we are given on earth a little space/ that we may learn to bear these rays of love." / and these black bodies and this tanned face / are but a cloud, and like a shady grove” (Blake 14-16). The narrator uses references to the sun and clouds to naturalize racial differences. The words chosen – “learn,” “rays of love,” “a little space” – take on the patient, instructive tone of a mother teaching her child a lesson in a form that is both simple and comforting. The narrator demonstrates how language is used not only to promote but also to internalize oppression. Rossetti's “Goblin Market” uses lilting, beautiful language to buffer the provocative content. Although stylistically the poem adheres to Victorian literary conventions, it radically challenges cultural conventions. The poem uses the fairy tale genre to imagine a female-centered utopia. In a time when women actually had to negotiate their lifestyle through men, Rossetti demonstrates the power of language to bring social criticism into the mainstream. The sisters in the poem resist patriarchal culture through their intense intimacy that makes marriage unnecessary, an intimacy demonstrated in lines such as “Golden head on golden head, like two pigeons in a nest, folded in each other's each other's wings, they lie down in their tented bed” (Rossetti 84-88). The pigeon metaphor naturalizes what might be labeled a “deviant” act, thus reducing the likelihood that the casual reader will interpret the relationship between the women as incestuous or homosexual. Lines like “cheek to cheek and breast to breast, locked together in a nest,” along with images of nature, bring purity and innocence to their interactions. The pleasant, rhythmic language, elaborate imagery, and repetition resemble that of a bedtime story, lulling the reader into poetry. In this way, Rossetti “disinfects” the eroticism of the poem so that readers do not see these acts as dirty and shameful but rather as something beautiful to embrace. “Goblin Market” uses fairy-tale language to separate acts of love from the stigma associated with labels such as “homosexual” and “incestuous,” labels that the hegemony relies on to assert its authority. During the modernist period, the “culture wars” in England revolved around the books that were taught in school and promoted the use of “proper English” over the type of English spoken by the working class. In “The Dead,” characters embrace this homogenization of language by carefully modulating their words to meet certain social expectations. By centering the story on Gabriel's extreme self-consciousness regarding his verbal expressions, Joyce reveals how language can imprison our minds. The.