A post-modern masterpiece; a century ahead of its time. The novel portrays a Canterbury Tales-style group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. The novel is written as cultural satire, allegory, and metaphysical treatise, dealing with themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, economic materialism, irony, and cynicism. And the novel itself tests the confidence of the reader as eac...
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about a young boy, Huck, in search of freedom and adventure. He meets a run away slave named Jim and the two undertake a series of adventures based on the Picaresque novel by Mark Twain. As the story progresses the duo exploit an array of episodic enterprises, while Huckleberry slowly changes his views of bigotry. Along the way, Huck and Jim meet the King and Duke, who ultimately send the protagonists towards a different route on their ...
As in many of Dickens’s greatest novels, the gulf between appearance and reality drives the action. Set in the seemingly innocuous cathedral town of Cloisterham, the story rapidly darkens with a sense of impending evil. Charles Dickens’s final, unfinished novel is in many ways his most intriguing. A highly atmospheric tale of murder, The Mystery of Edwin Drood foreshadows both the detective stories of Conan Doyle and the nightmarish novels of Kafka. Though The Mystery of Ed...
Inspired by accusations of venality leveled at the men who captured Major Andre (Benedict Arnold’s co-conspirator, executed for espionage in 1780), Cooper’s novel centers on Harry Birch, a common man wrongly suspected by well-born Patriots of being a spy for the British. Even George Washington, who supports Birch, misreads the man, and when Washington offers him payment for information vital to the Patriot’s cause, Birch scorns the money and asserts that his action were mot...
The Prairie: A Tale (1827) is a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, the 3rd novel written by him featuring Natty Bumppo. Civilization drives old hunter Natty Bumppo (Leatherstocking) west of the Mississippi to the prairies, where he becomes a trapper and helps a band of emigrants in their conflicts with Indians, miscreants, and the harsh environment. We find Hawkeye removed to the uncharted territory which would become Wyoming and the Dakotas. Having fled the relentless sound o...
The fourth of the Leatherstocking novels, we find Leatherstocking (Natty Bumppo) entering the last stages of his life. He has lost a great deal of his effectiveness with his musket and now relies a great deal on his dog to help him hunting. The main focus is one two things: 1. the reinstatement of Natty’s old commander in his properties and wealth in the new US while believing he is the victim of treachery by his old friend – the judge in this story; and 2. Natty’s struggle...
1839. It tells the story of Nelly Trent and her grandfather as they wander the English countryside, north of London, trying to evade Daniel Quilp, probably Dickens’ most evil villain. Nell’s grandfather has borrowed money from Quilp to support a gambling habit and has lost everything, including the curiosity shop. But Quilp isn’t sitting still, his spies are everywhere. Meanwhile a stranger is also looking for Nell’s grandfather. Dickens’s depiction of the fate of his main ...
Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens is a story of selfishness, greed, and hypocrisy. The central character is old Martin Chuzzlewit, whose selfishness and cynicism, combined with his great wealth, cause him to mistrust everyone around him. Also a major character in the story is his relative, Mr. Pecksniff, an accomplished hypocrite, who covers his avarice with a mask of smooth piety and humility. Martin Chuzzlewit is a picaresque novel, which follows the genre convention o...
This historical novel tells of a romantic young English captain in Scotland who strives for love, harmony and peace during the Jacobite rebellion in 1745. He becomes one of the leaders of the insurrection directed against the English. There is romance and adventure in this tale as our young hero is forced to test his loyalties to his country and the love of his life. Its unprecedented success prompted Scott to write more than two dozen novels in a similar vein–commonly desi...
The Innocents Abroad is one of the most prominent and influential travel books ever written about Europe and the Holy Land. When you dive into Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, you have to be ready to learn more about the unadorned, ungilded reality of 19th century „touring” than you might think you want to learn. This is a tough, literary journey. It was tough for Twain and his fellow „pilgrims”, both religious and otherwise. They set out, on a June day in 1867, to visit ...
The young educated gentleman Guy Mannering, after leaving Oxford, is travelling alone through some of the wilder parts of Scotland. After losing his way at nightfall, he is directed to Ellangowan, the home of Mr Godfrey Bertram at the time of the birth of Henry Bertram. By request of the father of a newborn baby, Guy made a horoscope in which the child was predetermined the ordeals from the fifth to the twenty-first years of life. The most incredible adventures are waiting ...
The protagonist in Rob Roy is Francis Osbaldistone not the title character! Francis a spoiled son of a rich London businessman,who would rather write poetry than work for his father. Sent to his uncle’s estate as punishment in northern England, bordering simmering Scotland. He soon becomes involved in a feud with his cousin Rashleigh (youngest and smartest of six brothers!). A woman Diana is the main reason.This being 1715 a revolt soon brakes out, Rashleigh steals importan...
Nineteenth century England. When Nicholas Nickleby’s father dies and leaves his family destitute, his uncle, the greedy moneylender, Ralph Nickleby, finds Nicholas a job teaching in a repulsive school in Yorkshire. Nicholas flees the school taking with him one of the persecuted boys, Smike, and they join a troop of actors. Nicholas then has to protect Smike, while trying to stop his Uncle Ralph taking advantage of his sister Kate, and later his sweetheart, Madeline Bray, wh...
This novel demonstrates Dickens experimenting with building his own voice. The Pickwick Papers is a series of linear adventures, unlike the convoluted plots of Dickens’s later novels. In other words, we follow our heroes from one stop to the next and meet interesting characters, rather than unraveling a mystery. The novel is a late example of the picaresque, a style of story in which we follow a rough, but still likable, hero through his adventures.The Pickwick Club sends M...
The tongues of London high society gossips begin to wag when John Harmon --a young man whose inheritance depended on his marrying a woman he had never met-- is found dead in the River Thames. The fortune passes into the hands of the working-class Boffins, who take into their new home both Bella Wilfer (Harmon’s would-be bride), and a mysterious secretary known as Rokesmith. Meanwhile, Lizzie Hexam, the daughter of the boatman suspected of Harmon’s murder, is pursued by two ...
«Записки из подполья» – повесть точно поставленных вопросов и точно найденных интонаций. Уйдя в психологическое подполье и презрев мир живых людей, главный герой задается вечными вопросами: что есть человек и каково его предназначение? Он протестует против отождествления добра и знания, против безоговорочной веры в прогресс науки и цивилизации и получает удовольствие от того, что мучает себя и других. Ярко и выразительно описывая состояние героя, оттенки и движения его мысл...
Роман „Мастер и Маргарита” без преувеличения является великим литературным творением XX века. Пик творчества Михаила Булгакова, роман, над которым он работал до последнего дня своей жизни, а, умирая, сказал: „Может это и правильно... Что я мог написать после „Мастера”? „. В «Мастере и Маргарите» есть все: веселое озорство и щемящая печаль, романтическая любовь и колдовское наваждение, магическая тайна и безрассудная игра с нечистой силой. Фантастический и в тоже время реали...
Роман «Обломов» Гончарова входит в трилогию с двумя другими произведениями Гончарова – «Обрыв» и «Обыкновенная история». В романе автор выводит важную для того время проблему российского общества – «обломовщину», сделав имя главного героя Ильи Обломова нарицательным. Что такое «обломовщина»? Это определенный образ жизни, пассивная жизненная позиция, ничегонеделание, каждодневное лежание на диване, апатия.. Эта проблема актуальна и в нынешнее время. Человек, страдающий облом...
Powieść przygodowa Karola Maya rozgrywa się na Dzikim Zachodzie, wśród plemion indiańskich Komanczów i Apaczów. Tytułowy Czarny Mustang to podstępny wódz Komanczów, który zamierza zaatakować osadę robotników kolejowych. Na drodze realizacji jego planów stają Winnetou i Old Shatterhand. Z pomocą przyjaciół, w szalonym tempie zawalczą o życie wielu niewinnych ludzi.
Karol May rzadko zabiera czytelników do Chin, więc tym bardziej warto skorzystać z nadarzającej się okazji i odwiedzić z grupą podróżników ten niezwykły kraj. Emocji i ekscytujących przygód jak zwykle nie zabraknie, a dodatkową atrakcją będzie specyficzna sceneria Państwa Środka. Wraz z podróżnikami zanurzymy się w chińskiej kulturze i religii oraz zachwycimy chińskimi krajobrazami.
Czy Indianie obchodzą święta Bożego Narodzenia? Pewnie zwykle nie, ale jeśli mają europejskiego przyjaciela w osobie Old Shatterhanda, mogą spotkać się z tą piękną tradycją. Powieść rozpoczyna się w czasie Bożego Narodzenia, jeszcze w Europie, w młodości Old Shatterhanda. Po przybyciu na Dziki Zachód Old Shatterhand przywozi ze sobą swoją kulturę i kolejne święta obchodzi wśród Indian na Dzikim Zachodzie.
This is one of the most uplifting of Dickens’s novels. This book is certainly different from all the other books by Charles Dickens as it has no particular central character. Well all the other novels by Dickens have a strong connection with London but this story depicts Coketown and Coketown only, a typical red-brick industrial city of the north. Hard Times is a very tragic and wonderfully described story of human oppression. Dickens’s brilliant use of characterization can...
Written two years before Jane Eyre, The Professor was Charlotte Bronte’s first novel and was based on her experiences in Brussels. The story is one of love and doubt, as the hero, William Crimsworth, seeks his fortune as a teacher in Brussels and finds his love for the good Anglo-Swiss girl, Frances Henri, severely tested by the sensuously beguiling and manipulative headmistress, Zoroaïde Reuter. On the other hand, the social protest sounded distinctly in this novel that is...
Fenimore Cooper is known for everyone who were interested in Indians and their life in childhood. Almost everyone knows the name of Cooper’s favorite hero, wandering from novel to novel – Natanael, Bampo. The hero of „The Last of the Mohicans” is Hawkeye. The last members of a dying Native American tribe, the Mohicans – Uncas, his father Chingachgook, and his adopted half-white brother Hawkeye – live in peace alongside British colonists. But when the daughters of a British ...
