The five volumes in this series include Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). Taking the series as a whole, critics rank this work as among the… Read More ›
political satire
Analysis of John Galt’s The Provost
John Galt had written four Scottish regional stories for William Blackwood’s Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine before he published his fifth, The Provost, in that journal. The series boosted Galt’s reputation beyond that of a writer of biographies, articles, travel books, and… Read More ›
Analysis of Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt
Thomas Love Peacock wrote his second novel, Melincourt or Sir Oran Hautton, with the goal of lambasting various political and literary figures. The book proved more ambitious, particularly in its length, than its predecessor, Headlong Hall (1816). Some critics found its… Read More ›
Analysis of Henry Fielding’s The History of the Life of the Late Jonathan Wild the Great
Henry Fielding received some criticism for romanticizing a common criminal in his novel The History of the Life of the Late Jonathan Wild the Great. Based on the career of a well-known criminal executed earlier in the 18th century, the… Read More ›
Analysis of Robert Smith Surtees’s Hillingdon Hall
Robert Smith Surtees became the most popular of the “squire novelists” with his series featuring the inexpert fox-hunting enthusiast and London grocer John Jorrocks. Made famous first in Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities and later in its sequel, Handley Cross (1843),… Read More ›
Analysis of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift likely began writing Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships five years before its publication. Later known simply as Gulliver’s Travels,… Read More ›
Southwestern Humor
Southwestern humor is geographically misnamed, as its most prominent writers (not all of them Southwesterners) resided in states and territories as far east as Georgia and as far north as Tennessee. It is sometimes called “frontier” humor because its plots… Read More ›
Analysis of John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel
John Dryden’s publication of Absalom and Achitophel (1681) had a specific political motivation. He wrote the poem during the threat of revolution in England, connected to the so-called Popish plot and the move to exclude the reigning King Charles II’s… Read More ›
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