While Daniel Defoe’s most loved book is still Robinson Crusoe (1719) due to its appeal to young readers, Moll Flanders is considered by critics his most artful. Although it features the same hyperbole used in Robinson Crusoe, with Moll taking… Read More ›
While it purports to be a journal, Daniel Defoe’s novel, A Journal of the Plague Year, is an imaginatively drawn “history” of the Great Plague that seized England from 1664 to 1665. Defoe likely based his narrator, a Whitechapel saddler… Read More ›
When Samuel Richardson began The History of Sir Charles Grandison, he had no plan other than to present a moral tale to counter the bawdy tone and content of Henry Fielding’s wildly popular The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling… Read More ›
Fanny Burney published her first work, Evelina, anonymously, basing it on a piece of juvenilia titled The History of Caroline Evelyn, which she had destroyed on the advice of her stepmother. As an account of the unhappy life of Evelina’s… Read More ›
The third in his sequence of Palliser novels, The Eustace Diamonds represents one of Anthony Trollope’s darkest tales. He departs from his gently ironic presentations of everyday human relationships with their small but important emotional battles. This novel focuses on… Read More ›
The word chivalry derives from the French term cheval, or horse, and those practicing chivalry in medieval times possessed highly developed horseback-riding skills. Dressed in armor during times of battle and known as knights, from a term that originally meant… Read More ›
William Makepeace Thackeray’s first novel, The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century by Fitz-Boodle [The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.], appeared in Fraser’s Magazine as a monthly serial in 1844. It was later revised and released… Read More ›
Anne Brontë’s autobiographical novel about a young woman governess features themes of social injustice, class consciousness, education, and isolation. Brontë’s first-person narrative alerts readers in its opening sentence that, by presenting a “history,” it intends to instruct and will be… Read More ›
James Morier based his satire of Persian life on firsthand knowledge of the culture. Born in Smyrna (later Izmir), Turkey, Morier acted as attaché to two diplomats to Iran, Sir Harford Jones and Sir Gore Ouseley, from 1807 to 1814…. Read More ›
Sentimental fiction was pervasive in early Republican literature, not only among the published novels but also in the sketches, stories, and serializations of fiction that appeared in early American magazines. Among the most popular works imported from England throughout the… Read More ›
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