Topics in Literature
Showing 49–72 of 371 resultsSorted by latest
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The Invisible Man
The Invisible Man stands out as possessing one of the most complicated heroes, or perhaps anti-heroes, in literature. A thoroughly unlikeable character, the Invisible Man…
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In a Glass Darkly
From the predatory same-sex desire in “Carmilla” to the ghostly hallucinations in “Green Tea,” the five supernatural stories in In a Glass Darkly reflect a…
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Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in English and is perhaps the greatest example of…
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Edgar Huntly
Edgar Huntly is a compelling tale of sleepwalking, murder, and frontier violence set in rural Pennsylvania in the 1780s. His memory and wits shaken by…
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Published in the bicentenary year of Frederick Douglass’s birth and in a Black Lives Matter era, this edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick…
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Iola Leroy
Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil…
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Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist, lecturer, poet, and America’s first “public intellectual,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) is the central figure in nineteenth-century American letters and the leader (albeit reluctantly)…
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A Marriage Below Zero
A Marriage Below Zero is the first novel in English to explicitly explore the subject of male homosexuality. Written by a British émigré to America,…
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The Melting-Pot
Israel Zangwill, an Anglo-Jewish author and son of immigrants, wrote The Melting-Pot to demonstrate how immigrants could become good American citizens, hoping to forestall the…
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Othello
Although other Shakespeare plays offer higher body counts, more gore, and more plentiful scenes of heartbreak, Othello packs an unusually powerful affective punch, stunning us…
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A City Girl
In April 1888, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the English novelist and journalist Margaret Harkness, expressing his appreciation for her first novel, A City…
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Coryats Crudities: Selections
The early seventeenth-century traveler Thomas Coryate’s five-month tour of Western Europe culminated in Coryats Crudities, one of the strangest travelogues published in early modern England.…
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Pizarro
Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s last play, an adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru first performed in 1799, was one of the most popular…
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Ida May
The sentimental antislavery novel Ida May appeared so like its predecessor in the genre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that for the month of November 1854, reviewers…
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Ragged Dick and Risen from the Ranks
In Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s most successful book, Alger codified the basic formula he would follow in nearly a hundred subsequent novels for boys: a…
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Manfred
The quintessential depiction of the Byronic hero is accompanied in this edition by a substantial selection of contextual materials, including Byron’s original draft of the…
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich
This edition brings together Tolstoy’s 1886 masterpiece and several shorter works that connect with it in thought-provoking ways. The stories are accompanied by a fascinating…
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The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman
The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778) tells the story of a fictional midshipman abandoned in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, after a battle with Maori…
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Civil Disobedience
In 1848, Henry David Thoreau twice delivered lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, on “the relationship of the individual to the state.” The essay now known as…
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Billy Budd
“Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever?” asked Henry David Thoreau. The question has never been academic, but in…
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The Half-Caste
Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste concerns the coming-of-age of its title character, the mixed-race Zillah Le Poer, daughter of an English merchant and an Indian…
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The Life of Mr Richard Savage
The Life of Mr Richard Savage was the first important book by a then-unknown Grub Street hack, Samuel Johnson. Richard Savage (1697—1743) was a poet,…
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Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us…
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Clotel
As nearly all of its reviewers pointed out, Clotel was an audience-minded performance, an effort to capitalize on the post—Uncle Tom’s Cabin “mania” for abolitionist…