Literary Criticism
Ulysses
Ulysses is a groundbreaking novel in which Irish author James Joyce explores realism through stream-of-consciousness technique and shifting …
The Art of Fiction
A lecture on the art of fiction, given by the English critic Walter Besant on April 25, 1884, and an answer to the lecture by American write…
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…
Tales of Unrest
Tales of Unrest is Joseph Conrad's first collection of short stories, published in 1898, showcasing his mastery of narrative and psychologic…
Jude the Obscure
Jude the Obscure is the last of Thomas Hardy's novels, begun as a magazine serial and first published in book form in 1895. Its hero Jude Fa…
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 …
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…
An Anonymous Story
In "An Anonymous Story," Chekhov continues to explore his favorite themes of superfluous men, ironic rakes, exploited women, and t…
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…
Siddhartha
A major preoccupation of Hesse in writing Siddhartha was to cure his "sickness with life" (Lebenskrankheit) by immersing himself i…
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…
Maria Chapdelaine
The novel Maria Chapdelaine portrays life in rural Quebec at the beginning of the 20th century. Published first in French in 1913, it is a f…
Harrington
Harrington follows the protagonist of the same name who tries to explore his memories in order to understand his views on Jews. It begins wi…
The Bostonians
This bittersweet tragicomedy centers on an odd triangle of characters: Basil Ransom, a political conservative from Mississippi; Olive Chance…
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…
Anna of the Five Towns
The plot centers on Anna Tellwright, daughter of a wealthy but miserly and dictatorial father, living in the Potteries area of Staffordshire…
The Country of the Pointed Firs
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is considered Jewett’s finest work, described by Henry James as her “beautiful little quantum of achi…
White Rose of Weary Leaf
Isobel Violet Hunt was a British author renowned for her literary salons, which hosted such notables as H.G. Wells, D.H. Laurence, Henry Jam…
Three Years
Laptev, the rich but unattractive scion of a merchant, renounces his independent-minded, intelligent, devoted, but equally unattractive mist…