A guide to reading "Tom Jones" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list.
Fanny Burney's lighthearted first novel, completed after nine years of secret labor, was published anonymously in January 1778. Before the end of that year, it had gone through four editions--a huge popular success. In Burney's own words, it is the story, written in letters, of a young woman "of obscure birth, but conspicuous beauty," who "makes, a...more
Flannery O'Connor, a unique and important figure in the Southern literary tradition, was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. This volume, containing her two novels, short stories, essays and letters, is the only complete collection of her works.
A heartwarming portrait of the mysteries and miracles of everyday life in a small town introduces the charming North Carolina town of Mitford and its colorful inhabitants, including Tim, a bachelor rector, who is falling in love with his neighbor. Reprint.
Briefly traces Fanny Fern's life, presents her novel about a young widow struggling to support her children, and gathers a selection of her newspaper articles.
First published in 1816, Jane Austen's EMMA is about an unconventional heroine--and one whom Austen thought no one but herself would like. Emma Woodhouse is bright, beautiful, and rich; she is also snobbish and judgmental, and she can be cruel, with a tendency to interfere in other people's lives. The novel chronicles Emma's attempts to make a matc...more
When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote THE GREAT GATSBY in the early 1920s, the American Dream was already on the skids. Originally based on the idea that the pursuit of happiness involves not only material success but moral and spiritual growth, the dream had by Fitzgerald's time become increasingly focused on money and pleasure--a phenomenon the high-liv...more
Jane Austen's last and most melancholy novel was published posthumously in 1818. In PERSUASION, Austen creates a strong, mature, and independent heroine, Anne Elliot. Having foolishly broken off an engagement eight years earlier to Frederick Wentworth, a penniless naval officer, Anne at the age of 27 has remained unmarried--and secretly devoted to ...more
A simplified edition of the autobiographical novel whose hero, an orphan boy in nineteenth-century England, successfully overcomes an unhappy childhood.