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With her satire on Anglo-Irish landlords in Castle Rackrent (1800), Maria Edgeworth pioneered the regional novel and inspired Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814). Politically risky, stylistically innovative, and wonderfully entertaining, the novel changes the focus of conflict in Ireland from religion to class, and boldly predicts the rise of the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie.
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"Savaged by critics for its supposed profanity and obscenity, and bought in large numbers by readers eager to see whether it lived up to its lurid reputation, The Monk became a succès de scandale when it was published in 1796--not least because its author was a member of parliament and only twenty years old. It recounts the diabolical decline of Ambrosio, a Capuchin superior, who succumbs first to temptations offered by a young girl who has entered...
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It is the story of Sterne's fictional travel through both countries, particularly France. Sterne made two trips within the continent, in 1762-64 and 1765-66, but the book is not about his errands, but those of parson Yorick's (a character in "Tristram Shandy"). With a less acid and outrageous humor than in his previous work, Sterne anyway mixes the picaresque with an ironic and, frequently, hilarious philosophical irony. Yorick begins by trying to...
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"Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of...
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When Alice tumbles down a rabbit hole one hot summer's afternoon in pursuit of a White Rabbit she finds herself in Wonderland. Wonderland is no ordinary place and the characters that populate it are quite unlike anybody young Alice has ever met. "Through the Looking-Glass" continues her bizarre adventures, and she meets more outlandish creations including the Red and the White Queens, Humpty Dumpty and the White Knight.
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"The Adventures of Roderick Random" is a picaresque novel by Tobias Smollett, first published in 1748. It is partially based on Smollett's experience as a naval-surgeon's mate in the British Navy, especially during the Battle of Cartagena de Indias in 1741. Roderick is combative, often violent, but capable of great affection and generosity. His father had been disinherited and has left Scotland leaving his son penniless. After a brief apprenticeship...
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A young man's quest for eternal youth and beauty ends in scandal, depravity and death. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The picture of Dorian Gray was a...
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The Female Quixote completely inverts the adventures of Don Quixote. While the latter mistook himself for the hero of a Romance, Arabella believes she is the fair maiden. She believes she can fell a hero with one look and that any number of lovers would be happy to suffer on her behalf.
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Oxford University Press
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English
Description
"Roxana (1724), Defoe's last and darkest novel, is the autobiography of a woman who has traded her virtue, at first for survival, and then for fame and fortune. Its narrator tells the story of her own 'wicked' life as the mistress of rich and powerful men. Endowed with many seductive skills, she is herself seduced: by money, by dreams of rank, and by the illusion that she can escape her own past. Unlike Defoe's other penitent anti-heroes, however,...
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Oxford U.P
Pub. Date
1967
Language
English
Description
The book is narrated by the Reverend Micah Balwhidder, a Presbyterian minister in the Ayrshire town of Dalmailing, and covers the years 1760 to 1810, the period of Robert Burns and the Industrial Revolution, when the economic and moral shape of Scottish life was changing in ways both explicit and invisible. The novel charts all this: the work of smugglers at Troon, new births in the parish, old deaths, the efforts of the press-gangs, the rise of the...
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Publisher
Oxford University Press
Pub. Date
1964.
Language
English
Description
Smollett's Scottish satire on human cruelty, inanity and voracity, first published in 1751. It is the story of luck and bad luck of the egotistical "Peregrine Pickle", who was discarded by his parents and hated by his brother. He is educated at Oxford and journeys to France. The novel provides a comic and sarcastic portrayal of European society. The novel is written as a series of adventures, with every chapter typically describing a new adventure....
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