Literary Criticism
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Irritated and drunken, an itinerant farm-worker sells his wife and child to a stranger. Thus begins The Mayor of Casterbridge, set in rural …
Sanctuary
Sanctuary is a poignant exploration of love, betrayal, and the quest for personal freedom, set against the backdrop of early 20th-century so…
Far From The Madding Crowd
Far From The Madding Crowd is Hardy's fourth novel. It centres on the lives of five characters: Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba Everdene, Mr Boldwood…
Bartleby, the Scrivener
Bartleby, the Scrivener is a thought-provoking novella that explores the complexities of human behavior and the nature of work through the e…
Mosses From An Old Manse
"Mosses from an Old Manse" is a short story collection by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1846. The collection includes se…
Doctor Thorne
Doctor Thorne is the third of Trollope's Barsetshire novels, and unlike some of the others, has little to do with the politics and personali…
Notes From The Underground
Notes from Underground is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presen…
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch is the story of a socially ambitious middle-aged judge who contracts an unexplained and untreatable illness. As I…
The Idiot
The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Ru…
The Vicar of Wakefield
Published in 1766, 'The Vicar of Wakefield' was Oliver Goldsmith's only novel. It was thought to have been sold to the publisher for £…
The Moorland Cottage
"Maggie Brown is torn between her mother who constantly tells her to live for her selfish brother (to whom she gives all her love) to h…
Dubliners
Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle cl…
What's Mine's Mine
Set in the invigorating wilds of Scotland, clans are crumbling and emigrating as their homeland is bought out from under them. The character…
The Story of Avis
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1877 novel is set in a New England college town, and focuses on Avis Dobell, a professor's daughter. Avis is a ta…
O Pioneers!
O Pioneers! tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish immigrants in the farm country near Hanover, Nebraska, (a fictional town ne…
The Sun Also Rises
This first novel by Ernest Hemingway follows a group of American and British expatriates in the years following World War I as they travel f…
Siddhartha
Siddhartha is one of the great philosophical novels. Profoundly insightful, it is also a beautifully written story that begins as Siddhartha…
The Regent
'The Regent' is, if not a sequel to 'The Card', then a 'Further Adventures of' the eponymous hero of that novel.Denry Machin is now forty-th…
Hard Times
Hard Times was Dickens's shortest novel and the only one to be set in the industrial north of England. A fast moving story with a typical ca…
The Man in the Iron Mask
In this, the last of the Three Musketeers novels, Dumas builds on the true story of a mysterious prisoner held incognito in the French penal…