Includes the unabridged text of Joyce's classic novel plus a complete study guide that helps readers gain a thorough understanding of the work's content and context. The comprehensive guide includes chapter-by-chapter summaries, explanations and discussions of the plot, question-and-answer sections, author biography, analytical paper topics, list of characters, bibliography, and more. ...
Includes the unabridged text of Austen's classic novel plus a complete study guide that helps readers gain a thorough understanding of the work's content and context. The comprehensive guide includes chapter-by-chapter summaries, explanations and discussions of the plot, question-and-answer sections, author biography, analytical paper topics, list of characters, bibliography, and more. ...
Best known as the creator of Captain Ahab and the great white whale of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (1819–91) found critical and popular success with his first novels, which he based on his adventures in the South Seas. His reputation was diminished by his preoccupation with metaphysical themes and allegorical techniques in later works; and by the time of his death, his books were long forgotten. Generations later, Melville's reader ...
While his literary reputation rests mainly on such celebrated novels as Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot, Dostoyevsky also wrote much superb short fiction. The Double is one of the finest of his shorter works. It appeared in 1846 (his second published work) and is by far the most significant of his early stories, not least for its successful, straight-faced treatment of a hallucinatory theme.In The Double, the protagon ...
Considered one of Ivan Turgenev's finest works, Fathers and Sons was the first of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels to achieve international renown. A stirring tale of generational conflict during a period of social revolution, it vividly depicts the friction between liberal and conservative thought and the rise of the radical new philosophy of nihilism. Set in Russia during the 1860s against the backdrop of the liberation of the ...
One of the most famous literary works of the 20th century, the novella «Death in Venice» embodies themes that preoccupied Thomas Mann (1875–1955) in much of his work; the duality of art and life, the presence of death and disintegration in the midst of existence, the connection between love and suffering, and the conflict between the artist and his inner self. Mann's handling of these concerns in this story of a middle-aged German ...
Daisy Miller is a fascinating portrait of a young woman from Schenectady, New York, who, traveling in Europe, runs afoul of the socially pretentious American expatriate community in Rome. First published in 1878, the novella brought American novelist Henry James (1843–1916), then living in London, his first international success. Like many of James' early works, it portrays a venturesome American girl in the treacherous waters of ...
A group of Utopians, dispirited by a mid-19th-century America they view as dissolute, takes to the pastoral life, but finds little satisfaction in its socialist living experiments. Little by little, the members' hypocrisies, contradictions, and ideological and economic paradoxes are exposed — even as they attempt to create the ideal community. Among the group are Hollingsworth, an idealistic but egotistical reformer; Zenobia, an a ...
A tribute to the first great age of fictional sleuthing, this delightful collection of 13 mystery classics is devoted to the genuine tale of ratiocination, in which the detective solves the crime by investigation and observation, by using his or her wits.Included among these gems, written between 1841 and 1920, are Edgar Allan Poe's «The Murders in the Rue Morgue,» widely acknowledged as the first detective story; Charles Dickens' «Thr ...
