Natalie Lewis – författare

'READ IMMEDIATELY' Claudia Winkleman'Hilarious. The season's must have' Minnie Driver'An addictive, glorious romp' Clare Pooley'Lifts the lid on the mad world of fashion' Anya HindmarchMeet Frankie Marks: the last person you would expect to work in fashion.Frankie is desperate for a job. Any job. So when she lands a role at the prestigious GGC agency, she's thrilled. She'll be assisting on the publicity for luxury, super-expensive fashion brands and big high street names. Frankie doesn't know the first thing about designers or dress sizes, but how hard can it be?Her family, friends and long-suffering boyfriend don't think Frankie will last five minutes and she's determined to prove them wrong, no matter what it takes.But first, she needs to learn the difference between velour and velvet . . .A brilliantly witty and laugh-out-loud look behind the scenes of the glitz and glamour of the fashion world, written by a true industry insider. Fans of The Devil Wears Prada and Crazy Rich Asians will be hooked from the very first page.Readers love Don't Believe the Hype:'Deliciously addictive' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review'Hilarious' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review'Laugh-out-loud funny' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review'Extremely entertaining' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review'Juicy' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1 (A), University of Wurzburg (Institute for Anglistics/ American Studies), course: American Female Writers, language: English, abstract: IntroductionAlice Walker's short story "e;Everyday Use"e;, from the collection In Love and Trouble published in 1973, was written during the heyday of the Black Power movement, when African Americans were trying to reach more than mere racial equality and insisted on self-determination and racial dignity. The tracing of ancestral African roots, the slogan Black is Beautiful, and the Afro hair style arose. African American short stories of this period were often concerned with problematic issues of integration, separation, redefinition of the past, distant African heritage, and immediate family history. In "e;Everyday Use"e;, the contrast between two sisters and the domestic struggle over old hand-made quilts reveal the use and misuse of the concept of heritage and different attitudes towards one's familiar traditions and cultural background. Alice Walker not only explores a disturbed intrafamily relationship between three black women of the South, but represents a severe conflict within America's black society, where new radical views and misperceptions of the word heritage collide with traditional black rural life style. A singular general meaning of the term heritage does not exist. Dictionaries mostly carry several definitions. For example, the Reader's Digest Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary gives the following two entries:1. Property that is or can be inherited; an inheritance. 2. Something other than property passed down from preceding generations; a legacy; a tradition. (Rattray 789)[...]

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), Free University of Berlin (JFK-Institute), course: Hauptseminar: Humor in Women's Literature, language: English, abstract: The Harlem Renaissance, an African American cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s, also refered to as New Negro Renaissance, marked the first time that black literature and arts were seriously recognized by American publishers, critics and intellectuals. Participants in the movement attempted to refute the negative racist stereotypes of black life deeply imbedded in white popular as well as high culture. In a time when many black middle class intellectuals shamefully distanced themselves from their cultural heritage, artists of the Harlem Renaissance showed a strong sense of racial pride in exploring the African and Southern roots of black experience and experimenting with elements of traditional African American folk culture in different genres. One of the most significant figures emerging from this literary period was the anthropologist and fiction writer Zora Neale Hurston. After her college education, she engaged in extensive anthropological field research on rural black tradition in her all-black hometown Eatonville in Florida as well as the Carribean region and published the collected tales, sermons, songs and jokes in f olklore collections, e.g. Mules and Men. As a novelist, she made use of her extensive knowledge of African American Southern rural dialect and oral culture by texualizing it in the dialogues of her fictional characters. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the first black writers to give an acurate depiction of African American humor. She demonstrated that humor is a crucial element of speech within the black community not only for establishing communal bonds through laughter but also because it plays an important role in the assertion of one s voice. Hurston s second and best-known novel Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on the black woman s place in society. The protagonist and story-teller Janie presents her quest for self-fulfillment and struggle against ve rbal oppression, over two decades and three marital relationships; as she gains experience by experimenting withdifferent roles, she learns how to assert her voice within the community and to humor life.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0 (B), Free University of Berlin (Institute for English Philology), course: Second Language Aquisition, language: English, abstract: In most speech communities, the speech act of complimenting is a well established politeness strategy. While the giving of and responding to compliments can be regarded as rather universal across different languages and cultures, the form, frequency and function of compliments and compliment responses significantly varies. In the following chapters, I would like to compare English compliment responses to realizations of the same speech act in Chinese and German. Since the 1970s, sociolinguists have turned towards research on communicative competence, thereby focussing on native speaker's performance of speech acts (e.g. compliments, apologies, requests, complaints etc.). In the last three decades, the speech event of complimenting and compliment responding has been one of the major areas on which sociolinguistic research has focussed on. There are extens ive studies on this respective speech act in American English (e.g. Pomerantz 1978, Manes and Wolfson 1980) as well as comparative cross-cultural research on complimenting behavior, examining the differences in speech act realization between variants of English (American /Irish , e.g. Schneider 1999; American /South African, e.g. Herbert 1989), and between English and other languages (Chinese, e.g. Chen 1993; German, e.g. Golato 2002). These studies of communicative competence make apparent that communicating effectively and efficiently in a language requires more than just linguistic knowledge; the ability to use this linguistic knowledge appropriately in the given sociocultural context is also essential. Learners with insufficient pragmatic knowledge frequently transfer patterns from their native language into the foreign language. Second language teaching profits from studies in communicative competence because it provides teachers with information on realization strategies concerning certain speech acts in different languages.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), Free University of Berlin (Institute for English Philology), course: The Pre-Raphaelites in Art and Literature, language: English, abstract: In 1848, at the peak of British industrialism and urbanization, a group of artists founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement which revolted against contemporary academic art. Searching for new themes of a higher truth and purity, the group did not only turn to artistic and literary sources of the Medieval Ages, the Renaissance and Romanticism but also to the poetic work of the contemporary Victorian Alfred Lord Tennyson. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the poet laureate shared a poetic affinity with medieval literature and culture. The Middle Ages provided an ideal counter world of romance, chivalry, simple order, and religious faith. In an era of modern science, Darwinism, and religious scepticism, Tennyson found his sources of inspiration in Arthurian legends and Shakespearian drama. Between the mid 19th century and the end of World War I, Pre-Raphaelite artists produced a great number of paintings and illustrations, ie. the illustrated Moxon Edition of Poems (1857), based on the work of Alfred Tennyson. Significant thematic fascination was directed towards early romantic maiden poems, i.e. "e;Mariana"e; and "e;The Lady of Shalott"e;, both published in 1832 and revised in 1842. This research paper will examine the structure, atmosphere, and symbolism of these Tennysonian ballads and analyze the corresponding paintings of John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and John William Waterhouse.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7, Free University of Berlin (JFK), course: American Culture of the Sixties, language: English, abstract: In 1965, one of America's most controversial authors, Truman Capote, published his non-fiction novelIn Cold Blood,an account of the 1959 murder of four members of a Kansas farming family. The work does not only give a broad panoramatic description of the world of the victims and their killers but also captures the image of a society standing on the verge of unknown challenges and threats. The American post-war decade was marked by a stable economy, widespread prosperity, social mobility and conformity. As President Eisenhower pursued the Cold War abroad, American society was concerned with security at home. The young generation of the 1950s conformed to traditional family values; marriage and birth rates reached a record high. Many citizens could now afford to obtain the American dream: a house in the suburbs, at least one car and a television set. The ideal middle class family, as it was epitomized in the media, consisted of a providing father, a cheerful homemaker and mother, and disciplined children. In the 1960s, a climate of rebellion, confrontation and upheaval altered the consensus which had dominated the nation throughout the Eisenhower era. The country suddenly found itself in an ongoing crisis. Social reform movements challenged established traditions and moral values. American culture was profoundly transformed as the 1960s created a more open society in which social structures were questioned, trust in the government dispelled, free expression expanded and counter-cultural life styles emerged. In his novelIn Cold Blood,Capote questioned the essence of American society, its judicial system and the way in which crime and criminals are dealt with. He effectively used the non-fiction novel as an instrument of implicit social criticism. By applying literary techniques to non-fictional material, the author looked beyond the surface of given facts and turned the Clutter case into an allegory of American social life.In Cold Bloodexposed the fragility of American family values and revealed the ambiguity of the American way of life by contrasting middle class affluence with an economic underworld of deprived Americans.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Free University of Berlin, course: Writing the City: Representations of London, language: English, abstract: In 1997, Zadie Smith, a young talented graduate from Cambridge, set out to write a novel about a simple white working-class Londoner who lives a good life throughout the 20th century by accident. Three years later, the author published her fictional debut,White Teeth, which gives its readers a panoramatic view of multicultural British society. The plot evolves around three families of different ethnic origins living in north-western London. In contrast to other initial works of contemporary Black British novelists, Zadie Smith's first novel is not the usual account of Black youth experience in Britain written from an autobiographical perspective. On more than 500 pages, the Anglo-Jamaican author explores a wide range of themes such as Second World War experiences, first-generation migrant life in the diaspora, recent British youth culture, intergenerational family conflicts, radical religious fanatism and biogenetical engineering. Despite its numerous discourses, diverse characters and multiple time-layers, all of the novel's addressed issues center around the problem of the individual person forming an authentic identity in a multicultural society and the establishment of a new national identity in postcolonial Britain. Zadie Smith explores the characters' identity conflicts before the background of their family history. However, while genetic inheritance, cultural origins and prehistory seem to play an important part in the individual's development, chance and personal choice are deceisive factors which have the potential to overrule any apparently predetermined life path. History and fate are constantly intermingled throughout the narrative, which is at the same time a migrant novel, bildungsroman and family saga.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Free University of Berlin, course: American Literature in the 18th Century -Early American Novel, language: English, abstract: The beginnings of an independent American prose fiction lie in the post-revolutionary era of the early American republic. In the process of claiming its political freedom from Great Britain and displacing the old patriarchal order, the nation had asserted the principle of individualism. According to the Declaration of Independence, the chief task of a democratic government was to secure each man's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. However, despite this stable foundation of revolutionary ideals, the United States faced severe political and social struggles in achieving a balance between the interests of the individual citizen and public welfare. During the 1780s and 1790s, America underwent a remarkable socioeconomical transformation. In the face of an expanding liberal market capitalism, a controversy between agriculture and industry began to develop. A traditional land-based class stood in opposition to a newly emerging liberal, money-based society. Popular interests drifted apart and manifested themselves in the bitter party struggle between Federalists and Republicans. While the first argued for governmental control of individualism and encouraged the growth of commerce and manufacturing, the latter favored an agrarian ideal and aimed at limiting governmental intervention to promote personal freedom and individualism.

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, Free University of Berlin, course: Whiteness in American Cinema, language: English, abstract: The adventure-fantasy film King Kong, directed by Merion C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack in 1933, has deserved its place in classical Hollywood cinema for its spectacular special effects, which were completely new at the time and its introduction of the female scream to the horror picture. After more than 70 years, the movie has lost little of its fascination and film scholars have not grown tired of examing the metaphorical meaning of the ape-monster and the representation of blackness and whiteness in this Beauty and the Beast fable. In his article "e;Humanizing the Beast"e;, Thomas E. Wartenberg focusses on King Kong's transgression from the stereotypical racist representation of the Black male sexual monster of Skull Island to the romantic hero in the New York sequence. He argues that the film reverts the racism constructed in its first half and uses the second half to propagate that "e;it is a mistake to see Black men as sexual monsters because they are human beings like all of us"e; (Wartenberg 175). Rather than rating the ape's personality in the New York sequence as a positive depiction of Black masculinity, I would argue that the stereotypical representation of the sexually aggressive black male was merely transformed into another stereotype, namely the non-threatening, desexualized noble negro; the latter no longer possesses any evil character traits but is nonetheless destructed in his inferior weakness in order to restore white womanhood to its pedestal and reinforce white capitalist male power structures.