Literary Criticism
Roderick Hudson
Published as a serial in 1875, Roderick Hudson is James's first important novel. The theme of Americans in Europe, so important in much of J…
A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol is a novella by English author Charles Dickens first published by Chapman & Hall on 17 December 1843. The story tells …
The Master of Ballantrae
Heir to a noble Scottish house in the mid 18th century, the Master is a charming, clever, and resourceful villain whose daring but ill-advis…
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…
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…
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…
Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
This is Stowe's second book, another one depicting the horrors of southern slavery, published 4 years after Uncle Tom's Cabin and 5 years be…
The Hidden Places
Hollister, returning home from the war physically scarred but otherwise healthy and intact, finds life difficult among society, and so choos…
Stalky & Co.
Rudyard Kipling published Stalky & Co. in 1899. Set at an English boarding school in a seaside town on the North Devon coast. (The town,…
Ball of Fat
Ball of Fat is a poignant short story by renowned French author Guy de Maupassant, set against the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War. The …
Taras Bulba
Taras Bulba is a romanticised historical novella by Nikolai Gogol set in Russia’s equivalent of America’s wild frontier, what is today Ukrai…
Lord Jim
While it's not often described as such, "Lord Jim" can be viewed as a kind of love story whose real theme is the close bond which …
Bartleby the Scrivener
Bartleby the Scrivener is a thought-provoking short story set against the backdrop of Wall Street, exploring themes of isolation, conformity…
Resurrection
Resurrection is the last of Tolstoy's major fiction works published in his lifetime. Tolstoy intended the novel as an exposition of injustic…
The Wolf-Leader
Part local legend of a dark and dangerous Wolf-Leader, part childhood memories of his home near Villers-Cotterets, in Aisne, Dumas here penn…
A Dozen Short Stories
Twelve of H. G. Wells' early short stories (1894-1925) originally printed in various magazines and papers. His earlier works delve into the …
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…
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann, author of Death in Venice (German: Der Tod in Venedig) was a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. The main character in th…
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…
The Money Moon
Rejected in love, the incredibly rich (but appropriately modest) George Bellew walks into a small English village populated with a cast of m…