Literary Criticism
The Perfect Wagnerite
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (originally published London, 1898) is a philosophical commentary on Richard Wagne…
Mrs. Armytage
Mrs Armytage is a widowed landowner, spirited, independent and very much used to having her own way and exercising total dominance over her …
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
This is Mark Twain's vicious and amusing review of Fenimore Cooper's literary art. It is still read widely in academic circles. Twain's essa…
The Colonel's Dream
In this novel, Chesnutt described the hopelessness of Reconstruction in a post-Civil War South that was bent on reestablishing the former st…
Winesburg, Ohio
Published in 1919, and listed on the Modern Library roster of the 20th century's 100 greatest novels in English, Winesburg, Ohio presents a …
Don Quixote
It is a curious paradox that while the two volumes of Don Quixote have been described as the "best novel of all time" and the &quo…
The Golden Bowl
The Golden Bowl is a 1904 novel by Henry James. Set in England, this complex, intense study of marriage and adultery completes what some cri…
Ulysses
Ulysses is a groundbreaking novel in which Irish author James Joyce explores realism through stream-of-consciousness technique and shifting …
Chronicles of Avonlea
In this first collection of stories following the characters from the "Anne of Green Gables" series, we see 12 vignettes into the …
Sons of the Covenant
Born in London's poverty-stricken and heavily Jewish East End, the Lipcott boys create their own successes in life and love. The brothers' c…
An Ideal Husband
The "Ideal Husband" of the title is Sir Robert Chiltern, with his equally upright wife Lady Chiltern. He has never committed a cri…
Agnes Grey
The novel tells the story of Agnes Grey, the daughter of a minister, whose family comes to financial ruin. Desperate to earn the money to ca…
The Story of an Unhappy Friendship
The Story of an Unhappy Friendship offers a unique glimpse into the complex relationship between Robert Sherard and the renowned playwright …
Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
“These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries o…
The Burning Secret
A lonely, convalescing 12 year-old boy and his attractive mother, who is in a loveless marriage, meet a gentleman while vacationing at a Eur…
The Cossacks
The Cossacks (1863) is an unfinished novel which describes the Cossack life and people through a story of Dmitri Olenin, a Russian aristocra…
Hunger
Hunger (Norwegian: Sult) is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and was published in its final form in 1890. The novel has been hail…
At the Foot of the Rainbow
This story is about three people, two men and a woman. Jimmy, selfish and deceitful, who has shamelessly lied to, cheated, and used his dear…
Liza of Lambeth
Liza of Lambeth focuses on the challenges of life facing Liza, an 18 year old factory girl who lives in the poverty of the slums of 1890s Lo…
Oliver Twist
Oliver Twist was published in 1838 as a three volume book. The novel was the first of Dickens' works to realistically portray the degradatio…