Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

The flaxen-haired beauty of the childlike Lady Audley would suggest that she has no secrets. But M.E. Braddon's classic novel of sensation uncovers the truth about its heroine in a plot involving bigamy, arson and murder. It challenges assumptions about the nature of femininity and investigates the narrow divide between sanity and insanity, using as its focus one of the most fascinating of all Victorian heroines.Combining elements of the detective novel, the psychological thriller and the romanc...

With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition. The famous 'Lady Chatterley trial' heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades and...

This collection brings together Jane Austen's earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationshi...

The Last Man is Mary Shelley's apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel unfolds a sombre and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting inevitable destruction. Interwoven with her futuristic theme, Mary Shelley incorporates idealised portraits of Shelley and Byron, yet rejects Romanticism and its faith in art and nature.Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rig...

It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father. Thwarted by Magua, the si...

An invaluable companion to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's inimitable portrait of `the great Father of Waters'. Part memoir, part travelogue, it expresses the full range of Twain's literary personality, and remains the most vivid, boisterous and provocative account of the cultural and societal history of the Mississippi Valley, from `the golden age' of steamboating to the violence wrought by the Civil War.This new editi...

Little Dorrit is a classic tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, while Dickens' working title for the novel, Nobody's Fault, highlights its concern with personal responsibility in private and public life. Dickens' childhood experiences inform the vivid scenes in Marshalsea debtor's prison, while his adult perceptions of governmental failures shape his satirical picture of the Circumlocution Office. The novel's range of characters -the honest, the crooked, the selfish and the self-...

First published in 1900, Lord Jim established Conrad as one of the great storytellers of the twentieth century. Set in the Malay Archipelago, the novel not only provides a gripping account of maritime adventure and romance, but also an exotic tale of the East. Its themes also challenge the conventions of nineteenth-century adventure fiction, confirming Conrad's place in literature as one of the first 'modernists' of English letters.Lord Jim explores the dilemmas of conscience, of moral isolation...

Lorna Doone, a Romance of Exmoor is an historical novel of high adventure set in the South West of England during the turbulent time of Monmouth's rebellion (1685).It is also a moving love story told through the life of the young farmer John Ridd, as he grows to manhood determined to right the wrongs in his land, and to win the heart and hand of the beautiful Lorna Doone.Continuously in print since its first publication in 1869, Lorna Doone has remained perennially popular with a wide readership...

These lively, varied and thought-provoking science-fiction stories (from the era of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells) are linked by their imposing central character, the pugnaciously adventurous and outrageous Professor Challenger. The Lost World (forebear of Jurassic Park) vividly depicts a perilous region in which the explorers confront creatures from the prehistoric era. The Poison Belt presents an eerie doomsday scenario, while The Disintegration Machine satirically comments on scientific cynicis...

Shakespeare's Macbeth is one of the greatest tragic dramas the world has known. Macbeth himself, a brave warrior, is fatally impelled by supernatural forces, by his proud wife, and by his own burgeoning ambition. As he embarks on his murderous course to gain and retain the crown of Scotland, we see the appalling emotional and psychological effects on both Lady Macbeth and himself. The cruel ironies of their destiny are conveyed in poetry of unsurpassed power. In the theatre, this tragedy remains...

Castigated for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to cause a storm. For Flaubert's contemporaries, the fascination came from the novelist's meticulous account of provincial matters. For the writer, subject matter was subordinate to his anguished quest for aesthetic perfection. For his twentieth-century successors the formal experiments that underpin Madame Bovary look forward to the innovations of contemporary fiction.Flaubert's protagonist in particular has never ...

During his tragically short life, Stephen Crane gained fame as a vividly distinctive writer. His stories of evolving American society are unflinchingly realistic and shrewdly ironic. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets tells of Maggie's seduction and downfall into prostitution amid the harsh world of the Bronx, where life is a battlefield.The other tales offer a diversity of insights into social hypocrisy, child psychology, and the wild violence of the frontiersmen. Such violence is ruthlessly depicte...

This anthology of tales by Rudyard Kipling contains some of the most memorable and popular examples of the genre of which he is an undisputed master. The Man Who would be King (later adapted as a spectacular film) is a vivid narrative of exotic adventure and disaster. The other tales include the ironic, horrific, poignant and haunting. Here Kipling displays his descriptive panache and realistic boldness. Shrewd, audacious, abrasive and challenging, he remains absorbingly readable...

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

Martin Chuzzlewit is Charles Dickens' comic masterpiece about which his biographer, Forster, noted that it marked a crucial phase in the author's development as he began to delve deeper into the 'springs of character'.Old Martin Chuzzlewit, tormented by the greed and selfishness of his family, effectively drives his grandson, young Martin, to undertake a voyage to America. It is a voyage which will have crucial consequences not only for young Martin, but also for his grandfather and his grandfat...

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel depicts nothing less than the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-nineteenth century. But these clashes are dramatized through personal struggles. John Barton has to reconcile his personal conscience with his socialist duty, risking his life and liberty in the process. His daughter Mary is caught between two lovers, from opposing classes - worker and manufacturer. And at the heart of t...

Mathilda is Mary Shelley's haunting story of an incestuous and fatal love. The narrative traces the teenaged Mathilda's reunion with her unnamed father, and the development of their obsessive bond that culminates in suicide. Shelley's own father, William Godwin, was so disturbed after reading the manuscript that he refused to return it to her and it remained unpublished for over one hundred years. This near-forgotten and harrowing work encompasses the Romantic themes of the individual's growth, ...

None of the great Victorian novels is more vivid and readable than The Mayor of Casterbridge. Set in the heart of Hardy's Wessex, the 'partly real, partly dream country' he founded on his native Dorset, it charts the rise and self-induced downfall of a single 'man of character'. The fast-moving and ingeniously contrived narrative is Shakespearian in its tragic force, and features some of the author's most striking episodes and brilliant passages of description. An aparitie: 1998Format: 17,4 X1...

In the hope of saving her brother's life, should a woman submit to rape? Should the law be respected when its administrator is corrupt? How powerful in the state should religion become? Although Measure for Measure ends like a comedy, with reconciliations, forgiveness and marriages, it has often been regarded as one of Shakespeare's problem plays. The drama shows the difficulty of effecting an appropriate balance between judicial severity and mercy, between sexual repression and decadence, and b...