In this roman à clef, the author contrasts Victorian repression with the freer attitudes, values, and behaviors of the 1920s. The novel’s protagonist is Willie Ashenden, a representation of Maugham himself. Ashenden, a writer, is friends with another writer, Alroy… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy first published The Woodlanders as a serial in Macmillan’s Magazine between May 1886 and April 1887. It emphasizes themes of marriage and adultery, faith and duplicity, and, a favorite element for Hardy, unrequited love and the human propensity… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy at last attracted public notice as a novelist with his tale of pastoral simplicity, Under the Greenwood Tree, or the Mellstock Quire. It was his third novel. He had destroyed the first and written a second, Desperate Memories… Read More ›
First appearing as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly between May and December of 1882, Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower has been considered an extreme example of Hardy’s employing enormous settings, in this case the universe, to minimalize the… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native moves at a slow pace that drives some readers to distraction. His narrative pace mirrors that of country life, very much a topic in his novel, featured in his setting of Egdon Heath…. Read More ›
The quest story has existed for centuries, with Homer’s The Odyssey serving as the prototypical example. Also known as the hero’s journey, plot aspects of the quest often appear in the modern English-language romance novel and may be identified in… Read More ›
Henry James first published The Princess Casamassima as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly between September 1885 and October 1886. He reintroduces the princess as a character from a previous novel, Roderick Hudson (1875), in which the sculptor Hudson dies in… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy first published The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge: A Man of Character in serial parts; it appeared in The Graphic between January and May 1886, to be published in book form later that year. It… Read More ›
Like other novels by Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure offers a bleak picture of the choices available to the working man. First published as a serial in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine between December 1894 and November 1895, the novel upset… Read More ›
First published as a serial in The Cornhill Magazine between July 1875 and May 1876, The Hand of Ethelberta represents Thomas Hardy’s sole published attempt at humor. Whether because his reading public did not expect him to write humor, or… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, became his first commercially successful venture, allowing him to leave his vocation of architecture and write full time. First published as a serial in The Cornhill Magazine from January through December… Read More ›
In 1860, founder and publisher George Smith hired William Makepeace Thackeray as the first editor to write and critique material for The Cornhill Magazine. Eight other men worked as editors until the last issue appeared in 1900. Thackeray devoted issues… Read More ›
A label often applied to the last half of the 18th century, the Age of Johnson takes its name from Samuel Johnson, lexicographer, critic, scholar, poet, and novelist most well known for his DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1755). With… Read More ›
“On the Western Circuit” addresses many of the same questions of sexuality, propriety, and class structure that dominate much of Thomas Hardy’s longer fiction, but it does so from a fundamentally different perspective. Like such novels as Tess of the… Read More ›
First published in the New Quarterly Magazine in July 1878, “An Indiscretion” was never collected by Thomas Hardy into any of the four volumes of short stories that he produced during his lifetime. Its eventual printing in 1934 caused a… Read More ›
In The Courage to Be (1952), Paul Tillich asserts that “the decisive event which underlies the search for meaning and the despair of it in the twentieth century is the loss of God in the nineteenth century.” Most critics of… Read More ›
The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin,… Read More ›
If the era of ‘postmodernity’ is increasingly seen as ‘a socio-economic mode that has intensified and surpassed modernity itself’ then poetry produced under this new ‘socio-economic mode’ might rightly be dismissed as another form of ‘postmodern’ candyfloss neatly packaged for… Read More ›
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