Literary Criticism
Summer
The story is one of only two novels by Wharton to be set in New England. The novel details the sexual awakening of its protagonist, Charity …
Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short masterpiece about a ranting, slightly mad civil servant. The stylistic inventiveness, and the insights into the a…
Oliver Twist
When orphaned Oliver Twist asks for more food, the workhouse board are horrified and immediately pack him off to work for an undertaker, who…
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…
Cousin Pons
Cousin Pons is one of the final works in Balzac's long novel series titled The Human Comedy. It was published in 1847, along with Cousin Bet…
Deephaven
Sarah Orne Jewett is best known for her clean and clear descriptive powers that at once elevate common-place daily events to something remar…
The Rainbow
Briefly appearing in 1915, then banned and taken out of circulation for its adult treatment of sexuality, Lawrence's visionary novel The Rai…
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 Metamorphosis
"The Metamorphosis" is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915 and one of his best known works. The story begins with a …
Kipps
Arthur Kipps, an orphaned draper’s assistant of humble means, unexpectedly inherits a large sum of money and that is when all his troubles b…
Robert Falconer
Robert Falconer follows the journey of a young man whose life is shaped by the love of music and the struggles of faith. Set against the bac…
The Marrow of Tradition
In The Marrow of Tradition, Charles W. Chesnutt--using the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina massacre as a backdrop--probes and exposes the ra…
Growth of the Soil
Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde) is the novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. …
A Room with a View
When Lucy Honeychurch travels to Italy with her cousin, she meets George Emerson, a bohemian and an atheist who falls in love with her. Upon…
To Let
‘The Forsyte Saga’ is the story of a wealthy London family stretching from the eighteen-eighties until the nineteen-twenties.To Let is the t…
Confessions
“Thus I have acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.”Rousseau’s lengthy and sometimes anguished dossier on the Self is one of the most re…
McTeague
McTeague is a simple dentist who becomes infatuated with Trina, the cousin of his friend Marcus. Trina then buys a winning lottery ticket wo…
Birds of Prey
The first part of the book builds the characters of four con men who become interconnected and attempt their schemes on each other. This boo…
Sons and Lovers
Lawrence summarised the plot of Sons and Lovers in a letter to Edward Garnett in 1912:“It follows this idea: a woman of character and refine…
A Hero of Our Time
A Hero of Our Time presents a complex exploration of the human condition through the life of Grigory Pechorin, a disenchanted young officer …