This is a sensitive study of Wells’ imaginative development during his formative years. It comes at a time when interest in H.G. Wells’ early writing is beginning to revive, owing, no doubt, to the current translation into reality of some aspects of science fiction.Mr. Bergonzi examines Wells’ early fiction, from surviving student writings of the late eighties to 1901 when he published The First Men in the Moon, his last significant scientific romance, and Anticipation...

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In the opening section of these related studies of modern literature, Bernard Bergonzi considers the poetry and fiction of two World Wars, including discussions of Wilfred Owen, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Pat Barker’s Regeneration, and the poetry of the Desert War of the 1940s. The second section deals with a number of prominent twentieth-century authors. Among other subjects, it looks at Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as a novel anticipating the Great War, the treatment of m...

In New Grub Street George Gissing re-created a microcosm of London's literary society as he had experienced it. His novel is at once a major social document and a story that draws us irresistibly into the twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends and acquaintances in Grub Street including Jasper Milvain, an ambitious journalist, and Alfred Yule, an embittered critic. Here Gissing brings to life the bitter battles (fought out in obscure garrets or in the Reading ...

The essential collection of critical essays from a twentieth-century master and author of 1984.As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low.A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, wh...

A career-spanning collection of thought-provoking analyses from the renowned literary critic.Sir Frank Kermode has been writing peerless literary criticism for more than a half-century. Pieces of My Mind includes his own choice of his major essays since 1958, beginning with his extraordinary study of "Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev" and ending with a marvelous consideration of Shakespeare's Othello and Verdi-Boito's Otello. Important es...

Sir Frank Kermode is acknowledged as one of the greatest critics of our time, renowned for the wit humanity and good sense of his writing. Pleasing Myself brings together the very best of his shorter pieces, on topics ranging from Donne and Yeats to modern art and money.

When facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie--Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and title character of a series of novels by best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith--often refers to the great twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden. This is no accident: McCall Smith has long been fascinated by Auden. Indeed, the novelist, best known for his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, calls the poet not only the greatest literary discovery of his life but also the best of guides on how to ...

Introduction by China MiévilleLong acknowledged as a master of nightmarish visions, H. P. Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, At the Mountains of Madness. The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition’s uncanny discoveries–and their encounter with untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization–is a milestone of macabre literature....

The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895. It is generally credited with the popularisation of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle. This work is an early example of the Dying Earth subgenre.The Time Machine has since been adapted into two feature films of the same...

Bubbling potions can be bad for your health! Just ask Dr. Jekyll. By day, he's a kind doctor. But by night, he's the merciless kill Mr. Hyde. And all because of a magic formula. Will anybody find out the horrible secret of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

The best-selling student edition on the market, now available in a Second Edition.Almost two centuries after its publication, Frankenstein remains an indisputably classic text and Mary Shelley’s finest work.This extensively revised Norton Critical Edition includes new texts and illustrative materials that convey the enduring global conversation about Frankenstein and its author. The text is that of the 1818 first edition, published in three volumes by Lackington, H...