Literary Criticism
Tolstoy on Shakespeare
In this thought-provoking essay, Leo Tolstoy presents a critical examination of William Shakespeare's works, exploring the playwright's them…
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…
Daisy Miller
Daisy Miller is an 1878 novella by Henry James. It portrays the confused courtship of the eponymous American girl by Winterbourne, a compatr…
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…
Against The Grain
Against The Grain is a provocative exploration of aestheticism and the complexities of modern existence, penned by Joris-Karl Huysmans. This…
The Perfect Wagnerite
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (originally published London, 1898) is a philosophical commentary on Richard Wagne…
The Colonel's Dream
In this novel, Chesnutt described the hopelessness of Reconstruction in a post-Civil War South that was bent on reestablishing the former st…
The Devil's Pool
George Sand (the pen name of Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin 1804-1876) is famous for flaunting the conventions of behavior expected of women o…
The Real Thing
The Real Thing is, on one level, a somewhat ironic tale of an artist and two rather particular models. Yet it also raises questions about th…
Ulysses
Ulysses is a groundbreaking novel in which Irish author James Joyce explores realism through stream-of-consciousness technique and shifting …
A Brief History of English and American Literature
Henry Augustin Beers, native of Buffalo, NY and professor of English at Yale, with the help of John Fletcher Hurst (1834-1903), Methodist bi…
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 Princess Casamassima
Princess Casamassima can be read on several levels: first, as a political and social novel, exploring the anarchistic and revolutionary unde…
The Warden
Anthony Trollope sets the scene for his wonderful Chronicles of Barsetshire with this short novel about Septimus Harding's challenged eccles…
The Quest of the Silver Fleece
The Quest of the Silver Fleece is a story of romance, race, economics and politics set around the 1900s. Here, a traditionally educated boy …
Joseph Andrews
Joseph Andrews is a pioneering work of English literature that blends humor and social commentary in a tale of adventure and virtue. Followi…
The Song of the Lark
Set in the 1890s in Moonstone, a fictional place supposedly located in Colorado, The Song of the Lark is the self-portrait of an artist in t…
L'Assommoir
Émile François Zola (French pronunciation: [emil zɔˈla]) (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was an influential French writer, …
Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
“These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries o…
Our Mutual Friend
Dickens' last complete novel was published serially 1864-5. It begins with an intriguing fortune offered to John Harmon by his late father, …