Literary Criticism
Contending Forces
Contending Forces is a powerful exploration of race, identity, and love set against the backdrop of a divided America. Pauline Elizabeth Hop…
The Fallen Leaves
Amelius Goldenheart, the hero of this story, is expelled from a Utopian community in New England and finds himself in London. His story is d…
The Raven
Poe’s famous narrative poem and the author’s reflections on its composition. (David Wales)
The Metamorphosis
The Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung, also sometimes translated as The Transformation) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in…
A Hero of Our Time
One of the iconic characters of all Russian literature, Grigori Aleksandrovich Pechorin is the ultimate “superfluous man.” An aristocratic r…
The Regeneration of Lord Ernie
"The Regeneration of Lord Ernie is a story about a young man with no passion for life, he was very capable and the heir to a large fami…
Pearl
Written in the 14th century by the Gawain poet, 'Pearl' is an elegiac poem reflecting on the death of a young daughter, pictured as a pearl …
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
Fenimore Cooper - author of The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, etc - has often been praised, but just as often been criticised for hi…
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 Metropolis
In this 1907 novel about the extravagant life of New York City’s high society, the author of The Jungle, presents a portrait of the wealthy …
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…
If Winter Comes
If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson explores the complexities of love, loss, and societal expectations in early 20th-century England. At …
The Voyage Out
The Voyage Out is the first novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1915 by Duckworth; and published in the U.S. in 1920 by Doran. One of Wool…
A Common Story
Alexander Fedoritch Adouev is the naïve, pampered son of Anna Pavlovna, a provincial landowner. He decides to go off to Saint Petersbur…
Art and Morality
“Who can help laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist?”“We are dom…
The Hungry Stones
The Hungry Stones is a captivating collection of short stories by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, exploring the depths of human emotion …
Arrowsmith
This 1926 Pulitzer Prize winning novel centers on the title character, a promising medical student who, as a doctor and following several in…
Crome Yellow
Fascinating and brilliant at many levels, Huxley's spoof of Lady Ottoline Morrell's famous bohemian gatherings is difficult to categorize. T…
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 …
The Portrait of a Lady
The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 1880-1881 …