Topics in Literature
Showing 193–216 of 367 results
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My Brilliant Career
Written by a teenager living in the Australian bush in the 1890s and originally published in 1901, Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career is a candid…
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New Grub Street
New Grub Street is the only one of George Gissing’s two dozen novels never to have gone out of print, and has long been recognized…
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The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus
In 1816, John William Polidori travelled to Geneva as Lord Byron’s personal physician. There they met Mary Godwin (later Shelley) and her lover Percy Shelley…
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Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura
Based on Leonora Sansay’s eyewitness accounts of the final days of French rule in Saint Domingue (Haiti), Secret History is a vivid account of race…
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A Simple Story
After its publication in early 1791, A Simple Story was widely read in England and abroad, going into a second edition in March of the…
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Coelebs in Search of a Wife
In this, Hannah More’s only novel and an early nineteenth-century best-seller, More gives voice to a wealthy twenty-three-year-old bachelor, who styles himself “Coelebs” (unmarried), but…
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Jack Sheppard
In London Labour and the London Poor (1861) Henry Mayhew wrote, “Of all books, perhaps none has ever had so baneful effect upon the young…
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The Scottish Chiefs
Rooted in political controversy, gender warfare, violence, and revolution, Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs is the epic story of William Wallace’s struggle for Scottish independence…
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Wuthering Heights – Ed. Newman
Over a hundred and fifty years after its initial publication, Emily Brontë’s turbulent portrayal of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, two northern English households nearly…
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Factory Lives
Factory Lives contains four works of great importance in the field of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography: John Brown’s A Memoir of Robert Blincoe; William Dodd’s A…
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Nightmare Abbey
This 1818 novel is set in a former abbey whose owner, Christopher Glowry, is host to visitors who enjoy his hospitality and engage in endless…
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The Mill on the Floss
This classic novel, first published in 1860, tells the story of Maggie Tulliver. Intelligent and headstrong but trapped by the conventions of family tradition and…
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Doctor Faustus – Second Edition
Doctor Faustus is a classic; its imaginative boldness and vertiginous ironies have fascinated readers and playgoers alike. But the fact that this play exists in…
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Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Second Edition
This classic novel tells the story of how the poor rural couple John and Joan Durbeyfield become convinced that they are descended from the ancient…
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Autobiography
Harriet Martineau lived an extraordinary literary life. She became a reviewer and journalist in the 1820s when her family’s fortune collapsed; published a best-selling series,…
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The Memoir of 1603 and the Diary of 1616-1619
Anne Clifford’s memoir for the year 1603 and her diary of 1616-1619 are invaluable records of the daily life and social and family relationships of…
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Winona; or, The Foster-Sisters
The prize-winning entry in a national competition for distinctively Canadian fiction, Winona was serialized in a Montreal story paper in 1873. The novel focuses on…
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Glances Backward
Glances Backward brings together in one volume a broad selection of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American writings about gay male love, including love stories, Westerns,…
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Sexing the Maple
Sexing the Maple is a unique sourcebook designed to raise issues of nationalism and sexuality in Canada through a rich and diverse selection of fiction,…
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Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
First published in 1893, when Stephen Crane was only twenty-one years old, Maggie is the harrowing tale of a young woman’s fall into prostitution and…
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The Autobiography of Ashley Bowen (1728-1813)
The first American sailor known to write his own autobiography, Ashley Bowen remains a valuable storyteller who can speak to today’s readers about the maritime…
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The Keepsake for 1829
Literary annuals played a major role in the popular culture of nineteenth-century Britain and America, and The Keepsake was the most distinguished, successful, and enduring…
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Soldiers of Fortune
A romance of America’s nascent imperial power, Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune recounts the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary,…
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
This classic novel of childhood is set in fictional St. Petersburg, a town based on Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Twain’s recounting of Tom…