Literary Criticism - Modern - 19th Century

John Pepper's love affair with books began when he was a child. He sought refuge and escape in books; he began to explore the world through them; he developed friendships, of a sort, with the authors whose writing inspired him. Over time, he came...

John Pepper's love affair with books began when he was a child. He sought refuge and escape in books; he began to explore the world through them; he developed friendships, of a sort, with the authors whose writing inspired him. Over time, he came...

A richly textured portrait of an American man of letters who came to exemplify the writer's life with all its setbacks and triumphs Washington Irving (1783-1859) is often considered America's first professional writer, supporting himself and his family amid the ups and downs of...

At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties - to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values...

Meet the real, thinking, feeling woman that was Charlotte Brontë, as told in this biography by the surviving witnesses to her life - the clothes that she once wore. These garments were present as she penned Jane Eyre, as she walked the cobbled streets...

An immersive, beautifully illustrated revelation of Henry David Thoreau's final project--a monthly almanac of natural phenomena.In the last years of his life, Henry David Thoreau created something new. Part blueprint for a major new work, part scientific chart, and part re-envisioning of the way...

If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian's perspective and a critic's insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded -- in his books,...

A captivating portrait of the poet and the scientist who shared an enchanted view of nature Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests,...

A captivating portrait of the poet and the scientist who shared an enchanted view of nature Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests,...

The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Motillo brings to life the fascinating times, startling science, and real-life horrors behind Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.Montillo recounts how--at the intersection of the Romantic Age and the Industrial Revolution--Shelley's Victor Frankenstein was inspired by actual scientists...

On a summer day in 1828, Book of Mormon scribe and witness Martin Harris was emptying drawers, upending furniture, and ripping apart mattresses as he desperately looked for a stack of papers he had sworn to God to protect. Those pages containing the only...

Reading Thoreau as a scientist for modern times Henry David Thoreau's Walden stands as the foundational text for the environmental movement and as a model for the practice of nature writing. In The Walden Experiments, Robert Thorson tells the story of how, after several...

A "brilliant and provocative" (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville's masterpiece--from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel...