Literary Criticism
The Gambler
The Gambler is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky about a young tutor in the employment of a formerly wealthy Russian general. The novella r…
The Real Thing
The Real Thing is, on one level, a somewhat ironic tale of an artist and two rather particular models. Yet it also raises questions about th…
Felix Holt, The Radical
"Harold Transome is a landowner who goes against his family's political tradition (much to his mother's distress), while Felix Holt is …
Sir Dominick Ferrand
"Levity" is not a word often applied to Henry James, but this story has about it an attractively lighthearted quality. It tells of…
The Lost Girl
"There is no mistake about it, Alvina was a lost girl. She was cut off from everything she belonged to."In this most under-valued …
The Princess Casamassima
Princess Casamassima can be read on several levels: first, as a political and social novel, exploring the anarchistic and revolutionary unde…
Clotel
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter is a novel by William Wells Brown (1814-84), a fugitive from slavery and abolitionist and was published…
Hilda Lessways
This book is the second in Bennett’s four books about life in the Five Towns (the real life Potteries in Staffordshire). It tells the story …
Lost Illusions
Ève and David (1843) is the final book in Balzac’s Lost Illusions trilogy, which is part of his sweeping set of novels collectively t…
L'Assommoir
Émile François Zola (French pronunciation: [emil zɔˈla]) (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was an influential French writer, …
The Man Who Laughs
The Man Who Laughs is a profound exploration of identity and societal perception, set against the backdrop of 17th-century England. The stor…
His Family
The 1910s is historically considered the decade of greatest social change in history. It saw the advent and proliferation of the automobile,…
The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.
First published as a serial in Fraser's Magazine in 1844 as The Luck of Barry Lyndon, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq is a picaresque novel…
The Rise of Silas Lapham
The Rise of Silas Lapham is the most widely read of W.D. Howells’ novels. An example of literary realism, the story is about a farmer (Silas…
The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles
The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles invites listeners to explore the haunting beauty and stark realities of the Galápagos Islands throu…
A Brief History of English and American Literature
Henry Augustin Beers, native of Buffalo, NY and professor of English at Yale, with the help of John Fletcher Hurst (1834-1903), Methodist bi…
The Flood
A well-to-do French farm family is destroyed by a flood. The story, thrilling to the very end, is told from the point of view of the family…
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 Good Soldier
First published in 1915, The Good Soldier might be characterised as a melodrama of English upper class infidelities, cut into little pieces,…
Joseph Andrews
Joseph Andrews is a pioneering work of English literature that blends humor and social commentary in a tale of adventure and virtue. Followi…