Values Resonance / Literature

Examples of Values Resonance in Literature.

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• The Adventures of Pinocchio, the children's novel from 1883, has prompted many computer scientists nowadays to see parallels between Pinocchio, a man-made being who wants to become a "real boy", and artificial intelligence, decades before other such media like I, Robot.
• The morals of most, if not all, of Aesop's Fables are timeless and deal with fundamental aspects of human nature.
• The sentiments of Siegfried Sassoon's poem "Aftermath" resonate just as strongly today as they did immediately following World War I, perhaps even more so given all that's happened since it was written in 1920. This is, in fact, true of many of the anti-war poems that came out of the First World War.
• In its portrayal of a young woman trying (and failing) to handle misbehaving children who their wealthy parents are ignoring, Agnes Grey feels resonant with the difficulties that modern teachers and childcare employees have to go through.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has a strong female character as its protagonist; she's allowed to make mistakes, and call herself out on her own faults. Also, there is not-so-subtle lampooning of the stodgy, authoritarian manners of teachers, as well as of the obligatory moralizing of children's literature. Instead, the story suggests that a warmer and more empathetic approach to childhood is what should be taught, not endlessly pushing manners and/or morals on children.
• All Quiet on the Western Front has actually been said to resonate with some people more than the more modern War Is Hell novels do. It's required reading in many schools in both the US and Germany. Its general War Is Hell message works particularly well with the anti-military values transmitted by the German education system ever since the end of World War 2. Also, it teaches teenagers not to blindly follow authority, especially not jingoistic adults who tell them that it's "glorious" to fight and die for one's country.
• Animal Farm teaches when fighting for social change, take care that you do not become as bad as, if not worse than, those you fight against.
• Annie on My Mind is a book about two high school girls who are lesbians and fall in love, with a heavy emphasis on pro-acceptance. This kind of book featuring gay characters is pretty common these days, but remember, this was published in 1982, just after the AIDS crisis began and homophobia was incredibly rampant. Some people even burned the book in public for daring to have sympathetic lesbian characters who got a happy ending, and weren't cured, made villains, or killed. It helps that the author was a lesbian who had difficulty accepting herself and being accepted by others and wrote the book based on her own experiences. The Gay Aesop is one certain people still can't get through their heads today, but its messages are just as important now as they were in the 80s.
• Arthur:
  • The books depict Arthur as having multiple teachers - some due to Early-Installment Weirdness, but some were presumably in the past. Arthur is at most in the third grade, and these teachers were male, and nobody in-universe mentioned anything about it. In fact, at the end of "Teacher Trouble", Mr. Ratburn mentions he intends to teach kindergarten the next year - the only one who responds is D.W, who is very likely to be in his class. In Real Life, men are often discriminated against in positions such as teaching younger children.
  • Arthur's father is shown to be taking care of the baby just as much as if not more than his wife is while also apparently taking care of cooking. At a time when men largely were assumed to have been out working and keep their hands away from the housework because Men Can't Keep House.
  • "Arthur's Computer Disaster" also depicts Arthur's mother being able to work from home - which became way more common in The New '20s.
• Judy Blume's book Blubber is a book about bullying. This was written in 1974. Its grimly realistic outlook and lack of sugarcoating made it the target of Moral Guardians, but with an increased focus on the effects of bullying and the growing anti-bullying movement, it's as relevant as ever.
• Brave New World (1931) still manages to resonate. Some have argued that it's actually more relevant today than it was in its time, as people seem increasingly willing to give up their rights in the name of immediate pleasure and entertainment. It also predicted greater drug use and looser sexual mores, though in the book this went much further than reality. Aldous Huxley himself began dreading his nightmare vision of the world was coming true a lot sooner than he predicted.
• John Brunner:
  • Stand on Zanzibar, written by in 1968 and set in 2010, describes among other things people being overwhelmed by information, which is provided at all times in small, sensational chunks and is also personally tailored to them.
  • The Sheep Look Up, written in 1972 and set in unspecified future, deals with environmental problems, famine in underdeveloped countries, lack of corporate responsibility — as well as the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. All still valid concerns today.
• By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benét is a post-apocalyptic short story about a primitive man exploring Ruins of the Modern Age. Despite being written in 1937, it might well have been an archetypal post-nuclear story from the 1950s or 1960s.
• A Canticle for Leibowitz revolves around the efforts of a post-apocalyptic abbey of monks to preserve the wisdom and literature of the pre-war world for posterity in the wake of a backlash against intellectuals known as the 'simplification'. In some places in the world today, the Catholic clergy are still doing this.
• A Confederacy of Dunces:
  • In the beginning, Ignatius goes into a rant on how corrupt New Orleans has become, listing off all the vices and crimes going on there. Among things like drug addicts, prostitutes, and gamblers, he lists "sodomites" and lesbians. Arch-conservative that he is (or thinks he is), he would probably say the same thing today. Part of this is because Ignatius is supposed to be an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist who thinks civilization took a wrong turn at the Renaissance, so having his views become slightly more out of date doesn't really change his characterization at all.
  • Burma Jones's experiences with racism as a black man in 1960s Louisiana are pretty relevant in the present. Not just the blatant discrimination he suffers from the police and in the workplace, but the casual racism he faces from the more sympathetic white characters. Ignatius's sham rally of Levy Pants's black workforce shows how social justice movements can either be ineffective or also be manipulated for selfish reasons.
• Daddy's Little Girl's calling-out of the elite who use their wealth and influence to cover up or get away with horrible things seems just as resonant now as in 2002, particularly in the Me Too era. Although Rob's not accused of sexual assault, the way he and his family cover up his scummy behavior by paying people off or threatening them, and them spinning a sob story about how his life got ruined by his murder conviction, sounds all too familiar. There can also be parallels drawn to the Westerfields' attempt to discredit Ellie by portraying her as a vindictive hysterical woman and suggesting Andrea (Rob's victim) courted jealousy by being sexually loose.
• One of the most famous stories in The Decameron is about Abraham, a Jewish businessman who goes to Rome on a business trip and witnesses all sorts of depravities firsthand, but converts to Christianity despite and because of this. He reasoned that despite the clergy, whom he initially thought to be the foundation of the Church, doing their best to remove Christianity from the earth with their sins, Christianity has not only lasted but also continued to spread, meaning that it is not the clergymen, but rather the Holy Spirit that is the foundation thereof. Some Christian authors like G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Ronald Knox, and others completely agree with Abraham on this regard.
• The oeuvre of Charles Dickens frequently comments on the plight of the disadvantaged, perhaps best known in his works A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities. As income inequality continues to widen in many parts of the world, these themes remain just as relevant as ever.
  • A Christmas Carol is also an interesting case in that it helped in creating its own Values Resonance; the wholesome, family and generosity-centric Christmas it presents actually wasn’t the mainstream way Christmas was celebrated at the time, until that point being mostly a strictly religious holiday or an excuse for adults to get drunk. While forcing workers to work on Christmas may be presented as a Kick the Dog moment among a long string of them from Scrooge, at the time it would have been fairly common (in the ending, Scrooge never asks if the butcher's shop is open, only if they still have the prize turkey, indicating that he considers the fact that they'll be open on Christmas day a matter of course). Exploitative bosses forcing their employees to work even on holidays is probably something that still resonates with many people, especially those in retail.
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld series was published over a span of 32 years, from 1983 to 2015. While it certainly tackled topics of the day as it went on, even 30-year-old entries show remarkable resonance with today's topics and values. This is because one of the foundational tenets of the series is that people are people. They may be bastards, they may be saints, but above all, they are people, and the core of many sins and crimes is to treat people as things.
• The Divine Comedy:
  • Even after seven centuries that saw Christian society change radically, The Divine Comedy continues to be admired throughout the Church for its genius portrayal of a life that begins in sin and misery, strives to do better, and ultimately finds rest in Love. It is difficult to find a better endorsement for an author than to have the Pope call you a "prophet of hope" when your poem sets a few Popes on fire.
  • Although he affirms his respect for the Papacy and the Church's authority, Dante spares no venom when cutting down the corruption in the priesthood and religious orders, and has no problem using the Saints as mouthpieces for the sake of this condemnation. Hearing this from the greatest Catholic poet of all time earned the work special appreciation from the Protestants who sought to reform the Church and those struggling with faith in the wake of the clergy sex abuse scandal.
• Don Quixote’s satire will live as long as the justice system will be made of human judges capable of corruption that let criminals go for a price. Or as the people who direct The Government only care about ruling the people without making any effort to enhance the lives of his subjects. Or while the Moral Guardians are useless because of his own Condescending Compassion. Or while there are people who fanatically defend any kind of entertainment work no matter its faults. Those examples are only a few...
• Duke Nukem Does the Internet is an instructional book released in 1996, in which Duke Nukem himself helps the reader set up an internet connection and teaches them how to safely browse the web (yes, it's real). Although most of the advice in the book is obviously outdated, one notable passage has him warn the reader that Usenet's accessibility, combined with its valorization of free speech over everything, led to some parts of it becoming a haven for Nazis, racists, homophobes, and other unsavory types. While modern internet users might be left scratching their heads about what the hell Usenet even is, many other modern-day social media platforms, such as Reddit and Twitter, are commonly used by bigots, so the message about avoiding parts of these sites where these groups congregate and watching out for trolls who share their hateful rhetoric in unrelated spaces is even more important nowadays than it was in The '90s.
• Earth's Children: The Valley of Horses (published in 1982) and The Plains of Passage (published in 1990) both contain scenes where a man, namely Jondalar, is sexually harassed by women, and rather than it being Played for Laughs, downplayed or portrayed as a 'seduction', it's Played for Drama and condemned. Jondalar being surrounded and groped by a group of women despite his protests greatly upsets him and culminates in him pushing one woman to the ground; he regrets hurting her but she is also told to apologize to him for her unwanted overtures. Shamud points out that no one ever wants sex to be forced on them and that there's a huge difference between encouraging someone and forcing them. Later, when Jondalar finds out Attaroa has been known to offer captive men freedom in exchange for having sex with her, he's repulsed and calls Attaroa out, saying it's a perversion of "the Mother's Gift".
• Vilhelm Moberg's four book suite collectively referred to as The Emigrants is almost more topical today than when it was originally written in the 1940s and 50s. The story is set in the mid-19th century and follows a group of people in Småland, Sweden, who become the first in the parish to emigrate to America. The first book ("The Emigrants") follows the characters until they have landed on American soil and the following three ("The Immigrants", "The Settlers" and "The Last Letter Home") chronicles how they build a new life in their new homeland and stays with the characters until most of them are dead. Among the group of emigrants are Karl Oskar Nilsson, a farmer who can't provide for his family at home and dreams of the vast farm land of North America, and his wife Kristina, who doesn't want to emigrate but agrees after their oldest child dies of starvation. Karl Oskar prospers in the New World but Kristina spends her life plagued by homesickness and never becomes "Americanized" or even learns the language. While the Swedish mass-emigration to the US isn't exactly an ongoing thing, the core of the story is very, very topical as of this post being written in 2015. The number of refugees worldwide today from impoverished third world countries, the debates on whether or not they should be allowed to enter the countries they flee towards, and the growing anti-immigrant sentiment on the right and pro-immigrant on the left, makes the story feel very modern and relevant. The characters in the novel are all so well-written and fleshed out and their various hardships so relatable that even though they are 19th-century peasants from Protestant Sweden they can easily be recognized in people of all origins and faiths in modern times. In particular, their voyage across the ocean in the first book is almost uncomfortable to read about (and watching it in the movie) today when there are so many people still risking their lives on the seas to escape to a better life. Sweden itself is today oftentimes hailed as a land of milk and honey in the countries that see a lot of its citizens fleeing there, which comes off as ironic as the character Robert constantly hails America that same way in the first two novels.
• The titular heroine of Jane Austen's Emma learns that interfering in others' love lives is wrong, and nobody has any right to assume they know everyone else and their circumstances well enough to arrange their destinies for them, especially when it comes to romance. 200 years later, and we still haven't learned that lesson. The novel was made into a film that moved the setting to '90s California. Aside from updating the dialogue and characters to fit the setting, nothing else had to be changed. That film? The teen comedy classic Clueless.
• Fahrenheit 451 predicts iPods, earbuds, flatscreen TVs, Video Games, the decline of quality in public schools, prescription drug abuse, people abandoning books and their loved ones for new media, and everyone living in fear over war. The book's plot imagines a world where people have become so averse to complex thought and discomfort that they have censored all books to avoid offense and spend all their time fixated on insipid entertainment. This has become even more relevant today, with the propagation of "outrage culture" policing what people can and cannot say to avoid causing offense, as well as the rise of simplified and bite-sized avenues of expression through social media. The 2018 film adaptation updates the setting to highlight social media and emojis, showcasing the continuing relevance of the story.
• Gone with the Wind, published in the 1930s, actually Deconstructed the stereotypical Southern Belle and many tropes concerning the antebellum South. The heroine Scarlett O'Hara also commented on how she was disapproved of for running her own business in order to take care of her dependents, which is even more relevant in modern society now that more women take on jobs.
• The Great Gatsby as a critique of the emotionally and morally vacuous upper class of America. It's really no wonder it received another film adaptation in 2013.
• The Handmaid's Tale, originally written in 1985, fell into this following the release of the 2017 television series. Much of the book's themes of sexism and religion creeping into politics seem just as relevant today as they did 30 years ago. Handmaids became a staple of left-wing protests nowadays, especially those dealing with women's rights (particularly abortion).
• Hayy ibn Yaqzan was first written sometime in the 1100s, but its story of a man who discovers great truths through rational thought resonated so strongly with readers in The Enlightenment that the first English translation became a bestseller.
• While it's debated whether The Howling's depiction of rape needed to be so graphic to get the point across, the emotional and psychological impact of the rape on Karyn gets explored with a fair bit of depth and nuance. Karyn's trauma is depicted pretty realistically (such as recurring nightmares, difficulties being intimate with her spouse, flashbacks, feeling constantly on-alert, disconnected from her body, that there's something 'wrong' with her or that she'll never be 'normal' again, and getting triggered by her friend touching her unexpectedly even though she logically knows he wouldn't hurt her). She's also portrayed completely sympathetically, while her husband is increasingly portrayed as a jerk for not being more understanding and expecting her to 'get over' it in a few months. It stands out given the novel was published in the late 1970s - when there was still an on-going social movement to get wider society to take sexual violence and its impact on victims more seriously, and to show more compassion for victims - and it still resonates today.
• When Invisible Man was written by Ralph Ellison in 1952, white racism was a topic scarcely touched upon in the mainstream culture. Invisible Man discusses that a lot... and it also discusses black racism, liberal guilt, the Black Power movement...
• Jennifer Government takes place in a libertarian dystopia where, among other things, corporations can sue you if you resign and your replacement is less productve. When released in 2003 it was an absurdist satire. In The New '20s, following the Great Recession of 2008 and the damage it did (Sky high cost of living, persistent underemployment, extreme wage disparity, prohibitive healthcare costs, increasing poverty rates even when unemployment is low and consolidation of economic power by a small number of MegaCorps) it comes across as eerily prescient and a dire warning of what is to come.
• John Putnam Thatcher: Not all of the series has aged well in the decades since its release, but some parts may especially resonate with modern readers.
  • Death Shall Overcome shows how, even in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, institutional racism by non-government actors can still have a worrying impact on people's personal and professional lives (a concern still relevant today) by examining a black banker's efforts to get a Stock Exchange Seat.
  • Pick Up Sticks and Brewing Up a Storm both have sympathetic characters be dismissive of the idea that marijuana is a dangerous and addictive drug.
  • Some of the problems with absentee slumlords and their treatment of working class tenants that are discussed in Ashes to Ashes still cause concern.
  • In Something in the Air, the wife of a prominent CEO continues happily working as a news anchor without anyone even hinting at Stay in the Kitchen attitudes, with it even being suggested that her husband might give up his job or at least reduce his responsibilities (albeit not happily) at the end of the book after she gets a better job offer in another city.
• Upton Sinclair's own novel The Jungle may have led to the creation of the FDA and food safety laws, but many workers and immigrants, especially in non-unionized workplaces, are still suffering as much as in the novel over a century later.
• Land of Oz: The Marvelous Land of Oz introduces Tip, aka Ozma, a heroic and sympathetic character who was born and accepts publicly identifying as female, yet lived several childhood years as male without any major issue, that has been subjected by both fan (e.g. Yellow Brick Ramble) and official adaptations (e.g. Emerald City) to portrayals as both a trans girl and trans boy. In 1904.
• Many Catholic readers and figures, like Joseph Pearce, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis, have hailed Lord Of The World by Robert Hugh Benson as prophetic of modern times, citing how secularism and humanism have increasingly supplanted traditional morality, how religious doctrine is not tolerated in the name of tolerance, and more. Pope Francis in particular routinely recommends the book and praises it for depicting "the spirit of the world which leads to apostasy almost as if it were a prophecy."
• The Mag Force 7 series, written in 1996, has a transgender woman, Darlene Mohini, as its Deuteragonist. Rather than use an Easy Sex Change as a sci-fi series potentially could, it mentions her having gone on hormone replacement therapy as part of her transition. It portrays her as having been a deeply depressed and troubled person before her transition who, after she finally came out, became much more happy with her life while still remaining fundamentally the same person, and even includes moments such as characters reminding an old friend of her to call her by her preferred name. She's also a programmer and Playful Hacker, a job that has aged well—"trans woman programmer" is an affectionate stereotype that has become more well-known outside the LGBTQ community in the 2020's. In the first book, she is mostly viewed through the eyes of her old best friend Xris, who doesn't really understand at first and thinks she's under some kind of deep cover—but the instant she explains to him that she is, in fact, trans, he's immediately accepting and wonders why she didn't tell him sooner. (With the reasoning also being a fairly realistic "Even she hadn't totally figured it out yet.")
• In his 1907 novel Le Meraviglie del Duemila ("The Marvels of the Year 2,000"), Emilio Salgari imagined a world in which every country had renounced war due to all of them having access to what amounts to nuclear weapons, anticipating Mutually Assured Destruction and its fear.
• Les Misérables is sadly resonant with society today, seeing men persecuted simply for their past reputation, families dividing over petty issues as political fanaticism, officials emphasizing rules over care and consideration, and scoundrels abusing their position of 'caretaker' simply for the money. Victor Hugo's urging that these ills must be faced is every bit as relevant today as they were in post-Revolutionary France. This is acknowledged by Upton Sinclair in his preface to the novel: "...so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless."
• Macdonald Hall: In "Macdonald Hall Goes Hollywood", Mr. Sturgeon refusing to let a vital member of the hockey team keep playing after he gets a concussion resonates far more than it did in 1991 after the increase in information about traumatic brain injury (TBI), which athletes can suffer when they are concussed multiple times in a row.
• The E.M. Forster story "The Machine Stops" must have seemed wildly far-fetched when it was published in 1909. Now, aspects of the story make one wonder if Forster had done some time-traveling to the early 21st century.
• Maurice was written in 1913 but wasn't published until 1971 because it had the weirdo idea that homosexuals could actually have happy endings that didn't involve death or being cured of their mental illness (yes, once upon a time, homosexuality was considered a mental problem — in fact it was listed as such until 1973 in the US).
• Nineteen Eighty-Four was thankfully not an accurate prediction of The '80s. Yet its message of extreme surveillance became even more prevalent in the following years, particularly once The War on Terror led to a bump in government-endorsed CCTV and wiretaps. It says something that once Edward Snowden leaked NSA's surveillance info, the book's sales skyrocketed.
• Northanger Abbey was written in the Regency period, but its plot follows a young woman's coming-of-age as she gets enmeshed in a toxic relationship with a Gold Digger family. Learning how to recognize false friends, getting manipulated into bad behavior for the sake of the "friendship", and the pain of realization and disentanglement from the relationship are lessons that are just as relevant in the 21st century as they were in the 19th.
• In Sir Walter Raleigh's The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd the nymph rejects all the riches promised to her by the shepherd, claiming these things get old after a while. It reads like an indictment of consumerism and materialism in the era of Wal-Mart and Costco.
• Oliver Button Is a Sissy, a children's picture book published in 1979, stars a boy who doesn't enjoy sports and prefers singing and tap dancing. Even though the other boys make fun of him for it (the title comes from a mocking message written on the wall of his school), he keeps doing what he loves. In the end, he finds validation after performing at a talent show and then coming back the next day to find that the graffiti, instead of "Oliver Button is a Sissy," now reads "Oliver Button is a Star!" The book's message is especially meaningful in the 21st century, when it's become much more accepted for boys to enjoy things perceived as feminine, or girls to enjoy things perceived as masculine.
• The Once and Future King: Mordred's conception is portrayed in a particularly disturbing manner, with Arthur's seduction by his half-sister Morgause being presented as sexual assault by an older woman towards an inexperienced man, completely averting Double Standard Rape: Female on Male and not in any way being played for laughs. Arthur is treated sympathetically for this and not at all at fault, being taken advantage of. With growing awareness of the effects of sexual assault on men in the 21st century this comes across as a much more positive message.
• While H. P. Lovecraft's Out Of The Aeons is a shining example of his notoriously antiquated racial politics one thing that does ring truer than ever today is that it also showcases Lovecraft's utter disgust towards sensationalistic tabloid journalism and the kind of people who are attracted to it.
• Poetic Edda: Knowledge is a good thing and worth pursuing. Make the effort to stay in touch with old friends. Don't get drunk around people you don't trust. Don't go places where there might be trouble. Make sure people have good memories of you, because the are the only part of you that remains when you die. All pretty solid life advice, both now and in 11th century Scandinavia.
• Another Jane Austen classic, Pride and Prejudice, aside from its perpetually relevant moral of not prejudging others or thinking too highly of yourself because of your status, showcases the perils of marrying for convenience or looks and elevates the notion of marrying for love, an ideal that would have been considered rather quixotic at the time. Many of its characters will also be eerily familiar to modern readers, both in real life and in contemporary fiction: Mrs. Bennet, the crass gossip and social climber; Mr. Bennet, the distant husband who openly mocks his wife and daughters for kicks; Lydia, the bratty, reckless teenager who sees nothing wrong with her irresponsible behaviour and ultimately ends up screwing up her own life; Jane, who is so nice and self-effacing that she endangers her own happiness; Wickham, who fools everyone with his charm but is in fact a mid-functioning sociopath; Caroline and Lady Catherine, the Rich Bitches; and Elizabeth, the intelligent, perceptive, quick-witted protagonist with a playfully snarky sense of humor. The characters resonant enough today that a modern-day adaptation in the form of a video blog, which for the most part did not change the main characters' personalities and struggles, was frequently thought to be a real video blog by many first-time viewers (apparently fewer people have read Pride and Prejudice than one would like to think).
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was a brilliant look at psychology and the use of religion to excuse yourself while denouncing everyone else. It was written in 1824 by a poor Scottish farmer.
• Robert "Rabbie" Burns' poem Holy Willie's Prayer, written in 1785 about a hypocritical church elder who condemns others for perceived transgressions, whilst giving spurious justifications about his own. Compare with the various evangelists caught out and their own justifications for their behavior today.
• The Secret Garden:
  • The book is written in the early 1900s but contains a rather progressive attitude towards classism and racism. Mary displays racism towards her servants in India and gets violent with them if they don't do her bidding — and it's used to show her as a brat. Martha likewise calls Mary out for her anger at Martha assuming she'd be "a native". And it's illustrated that bringing such a young girl up to think she's inherently superior to everyone around her — just because of her birth status — is what made Mary so dysfunctional in the first place.
  • The book criticizes the hell out of neglectful parenting too. Mary's parents were distant and just foisted her into the care of various servants, which is what led to her becoming so cold and sour, to begin with. It also shows that non-malicious neglect can still be damaging; Colin's father doesn't neglect him out of laziness or cruelty — he's just broken by his wife's death. But the story goes out of its way to show that children need love and care from their parents. This is from an era where upper-class children were handed off to nannies and governesses, treated more like heirs to hand the property over to than actual human beings.
• Sherlock Holmes
  • The story "The Adventure of the Yellow Face": The sympathetic treatment of interracial marriage, which in its time was (consciously) controversial, now comes across as proper and endearing.
  • Overall the original Sherlock Holmes stories are either Fair for Its Day or this trope when it comes to race or gender. The Ku Klux Klan makes an appearance as a deadly effective but unsympathetic terrorist organization — which it was for most of its existence but was not universally perceived as such until long after its demise.
  • Some modern readers interpret Holmes himself as a high-functioning autistic avant la lettre and appreciate his sympathetic portrayal.
  • A Scandal in Bohemia probably deserves special mention, as Watson notes Holmes being dismissive of womens' intellect and then being bested by Irene Adler — not merely because she is really good at what she does, but more importantly because Holmes makes truly asinine mistakes merely because he does not expect her to act intelligently (with a principal mistake being that Holmes does not immediately seize upon the photograph once he has tricked Adler into revealing its whereabouts but leaves it for later, giving Adler time to not just make her exit but also figure out the truth behind Holmes's trick). Watson then goes on to note that that episode was the end of Holmes's misogynism.
  • One of the key motivations behind Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' revamping of the character when creating Sherlock was their realization that Dr. Watson's backstory as a wounded and invalided veteran of a British military campaign in Afghanistan was, in light of The War on Terror, just as relevant at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it had been at the end of the nineteenth when the stories were first being written.
  • Sherlock Holmes is what would be known today as asexual and aromantic, as his total lack of romantic/sexual interest is consistently presented; while this was probably written into his character to emphasize how dedicated he is to logical pursuits, he's also never accused of or implied to be sociopathic or otherwise mentally ill, and aside from one dehumanizing "he's like a machine" comment from Watson, Holmes' staunch bachelorhood is neither made fun of, nor is it treated as a saintly, unattainable ideal. This was in an era and place were people were generally expected to get married, as marriage was an important part of forging connections, cementing your place in the social ladder, and producing heirs for any fortune you might have. He's just a human who is accepted for who he is. Original ACD Holmes, that is — most adaptations tend to ignore or overlook this (though this is Values Dissonance in it of itself, as until fairly recently asexuality wasn’t too well known as an actual orientation, with most characters such as Holmes being perceived as simply Chaste Heroes). The 1984-1994 Granada Sherlock Holmes largely follows the ACD portrayal (including the glimpses of Holmes' empathy that are often downplayed in modern interpretations like House and Sherlock), as does the BBC radio series starring Clive Merrison that was broadcast throughout the 1990s and 2000s — though it is also possible to interpret some Ho Yay in Holmes and Watson’s relationship as well.
  • There's also a lesser-known non-Holmes mystery short story by Arthur Conan Doyle with the title The Man with the Watches, which is remarkably gay-positive or at least advocating for tolerance. Alright, the narrator is a homomisiac/transmisiac jerk, the story still ends in tragedy, and the gay couple are criminals (card sharps) willing to use violence, but the narrative supports the reading that the tragedy wouldn't have happened if the narrator hadn't been such a bigoted bully, and the surviving partner of the pair (who'd been presented as a "seducer of the innocent" by the narrator up to that point) is explicitly shown to not be evil or inhuman. And for a mainstream author in the Victorian era, writing this story for the family-friendly, middle-class The Strand magazine, a story that not only shows the "love that dare not speak its name" in fairly unmistakable ways at all, but also invites the reader to sympathize with the gay characters, is pretty amazing already. The whole thing wouldn't feel out of place as an episode of Ripper Street, which combines modern social sensibilities with sometimes pretty bigoted protagonists. ^note Sadly, the Bury Your Gays trope is also still alive and well in modern mainstream media.
    At the bottom I struck my head against a stone, and I remembered nothing more. When I came to myself I was lying among some low bushes, not far from the railroad track, and somebody was bathing my head with a wet handkerchief. It was Sparrow MacCoy.
    "I guess I couldn't leave you," said he. "I didn't want to have the blood of two of you on my hands in one day. You loved your brother, I've no doubt; but you didn't love him a cent more than I loved him, though you'll say that I took a queer way to show it. Anyhow, it seems a mighty empty world now that he is gone, and I don't care a continental whether you give me over to the hangman or not."
    He had turned his ankle in the fall, and there we sat, he with his useless foot, and I with my throbbing head, and we talked and talked until gradually my bitterness began to soften and to turn into something like sympathy. What was the use of revenging his death upon a man who was as much stricken by that death as I was?
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A woman is raped, escapes the rapist, falls in love, and is rejected by her husband because she's not a virgin anymore. She then is forced to become her rapist's mistress in order to survive. This was presented as a tragedy — with the heroine being innocent — and controversial in the time it was written, while nowadays most people would agree that of course Tess is not to be blamed for the rape, and that the double-standard her husband (who lost his virginity in consensual sex) uses to justify his leaving her is despicable. The message against victim-blaming is still an anvil that needs to be dropped, sadly, even though attitudes on virginity have relaxed.
• The short poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Sara Teasdale, considering its topic of humanity's self-destruction through apocalyptic war and its Gaia-theory-like environmental sensibilities, seems like it could have been written in the 1980s or later. In fact, it was published in 1918 — 25 years before the invention of the nuclear bomb.^note Much later, Ray Bradbury based a short story on the poem; and later it was quoted in Fallout 3.
  There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
  And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
  And frogs in the pools singing at night,
  And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
  Robins will wear their feathery fire
  Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
  And not one will know of the war, not one
  Will care at last when it is done.
  Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
  If mankind perished utterly;
  And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
  Would scarcely know that we were gone.
• Tibullus, an ancient Roman poet who lived in the 1st century BC wrote an elegy (the eleventh) where he states that war is madness and wishes for peace.
• Although Mark Twain's anti-religious works may look very old-fashioned or even strange from the point of view of modern readers when the church has much less power and influence over Western countries, his other works are still surprisingly perceptive. In particular, although formally colonialism is already in the past, the idea that large states do not have the right to manipulate or dictate their will to weaker countries only on the basis of the law of force remains relevant even now, especially in the context of geopolitics.
• Uncle Tom's Cabin, particularly the ideas of passive resistance and racial equality. It wasn’t until after the Civil Rights Era that Harriet Beecher Stowe was fully vindicated as being on the right side of history.
• Voltaire defended freedom of speech, religious toleration and secularism in a time when these things were highly controversial notions (contrary to French laws). Not only with words, either — he campaigned to save religious dissidents persecuted under his country's government, saving some. He also criticized slavery harshly. Voltaire endorsed cultural pluralism, saying Europeans had slandered the Chinese since they held different beliefs, praising Confucianism, Hinduism and the Persian culture at a time when Western thinkers often disparaged Asian people wholesale. He also praised Native Americans, such as the Incan Empire.
• The Water-Babies (1862) argues against child labour and Corporal Punishment during a time when both were commonplace. It may have been part of the reason for the passage of the Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act of 1864.
• The World According to Garp contains an early transgender character, Roberta Muldoon, who In-Universe makes a highly publicized transition from a professional football player to an activist for women's rights. The character is treated in a surprisingly serious manner, in that she's rarely played for laughs (or at least no more so than the rest of the cast) and is one of the few characters who come across as consistently kind, generous, and level-headed (she experiences deep regret that she did not take the bullet that killed Jenny Fields and later serves as an affectionate substitute mother for the Garp children after their own parents die). There is a particularly touching scene after Roberta's death in which televised sportscasters make a point of honoring her life's work by not misgendering her.

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