The pride of high-ranking Mr Darcy and the prejudice of middle-class Elizabeth Bennet conduct an absorbing dance through the rigid social hierarchies of early-nineteenth-century England, with the passion of the two unlikely lovers growing as their union seems ever more improbable. One of the most cherished love stories in English literature, Jane Austen’s 1813 masterpiece has a lasting effect on everyone who reads it.
In the final ten years of his life, the author tackled the largest project any critic in English can take on - writing a preface to each of Shakespeare's plays. This title collects these prefaces. It introduces some of the most significant scholarship on Shakespeare to show the reader how certain critics frame large issues in a useful way.
Focusing on the themes of wonder and cultivated naivety, the author delves into the intricacies of American literature. The exploration highlights how these concepts shape narratives and character development, inviting readers to reconsider their understanding of literary works. Through critical analysis and engaging insights, the book offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between innocence and experience in the American literary canon.
Focusing on the work of Thomas Pynchon, this introduction delves into his early short stories and provides insights into his novels. Set against the backdrop of Pynchon's life, it offers a detailed examination of his literary contributions, including lesser-known stories. Originally published in 1982, the book serves as a valuable guide for readers looking to navigate Pynchon's complex narratives and themes.
This collection features insightful essays by the late Tony Tanner, exploring a diverse array of significant American authors. Tanner's analyses delve into the themes, styles, and cultural contexts of these writers, offering readers a deeper understanding of their contributions to literature. Through his unique perspective, the essays illuminate the complexities of American literary identity and the evolution of its narrative forms.
Nabokov - Borges - Ellison - Bellow - Heller - Purdy - Hawkes - Barth - Plath - Updike - Roth - Mailer - Kesey.
Nietzsche said that he never travelled anywhere without a volume of Emerson's essays in his pocket, while Mathew Arnold described Emerson as 'the greatest prose writer of the century'. It is a remarkable writer who could at once appeal to a man considered a pillar of Victorian society, and to a man dedicated to bringing down such pillars. In his own time Emerson was considered a profoundly radical thinker, but after his death he was increasingly seen as a bland Boston Brahmin, contentedly ripening with the new England melons, benignly meditating on such viperous notions as the Over–soul.He is now appreciated as one of the truly seminal American writers, refusing all orthodoxies, complacencies and fixities—both a truly celebratory and deeply adversarial thinker. A unique paperback edition, with introduction and chronology of Emerson's life and times.
Adultery serves as a pivotal theme in literature, particularly in bourgeois novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tony Tanner explores this topic by examining its significance in works such as Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. His analysis delves into the roles of women, family dynamics, societal norms, and the evolution of sexuality, highlighting how transgressions of marriage contracts reflect broader cultural concerns.
Tanner guides us through Austen's novels from optimistic early works to the darker Persuasion and fragmentary Sanditon--a journey that takes her from acceptance of a society maintained by landed property, family, money, and strict propriety through an insistence on the need for authentication of these values to a final skepticism and even rejection.
