The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction

Author: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-02-06

Total Pages: 34

ISBN-13: 9781523909483

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This work was compiled by Various Authors and despite its age continues to be popular with modern readers


Reading Fiction in Antebellum America

Reading Fiction in Antebellum America

Author: James L. Machor

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2011-04-01

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 0801899338

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War. Machor takes four antebellum authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'—and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America. Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans shaped not only the experiences of these writers at the time but also the way the writers were received in the twentieth century. What Machor reveals is that these authors were received in ways strikingly different from how they are currently read, thereby shedding significant light on their present status in the literary canon in comparison to their critical and popular positions in their own time. Machor deftly combines response and reception criticism and theory with work in the history of reading to engage with groundbreaking scholarship in historical hermeneutics. In so doing, Machor takes us ever closer to understanding the particular and varying reading strategies of historical audiences and how they impacted authors’ conceptions of their own readership.


My Antonia

My Antonia

Author: Willa Cather

Publisher: Gildan Media LLC aka G&D Media

Published: 2024-01-02

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1722525045

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A haunting tribute to the heroic pioneers who shaped the American Midwest This powerful novel by Willa Cather is considered to be one of her finest works and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. It tells the stories of several immigrant families who start new lives in America in rural Nebraska. This powerful tribute to the quiet heroism of those whose struggles and triumphs shaped the American Midwest highlights the role of women pioneers, in particular. Written in the style of a memoir penned by Antonia’s tutor and friend, the book depicts one of the most memorable heroines in American literature, the spirited eldest daughter of a Czech immigrant family, whose calm, quite strength and robust spirit helped her survive the hardships and loneliness of life on the Nebraska prairie. The two form an enduring bond and through his chronicle, we watch Antonia shape the land while dealing with poverty, treachery, and tragedy. “No romantic novel ever written in America...is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.” -H. L. Mencken Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American writer best known for her novels of the Plains and for One of Ours, a novel set in World War I, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943 and received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments. By the time of her death she had written twelve novels, five books of short stories, and a collection of poetry.


Le Deuxième Sexe

Le Deuxième Sexe

Author: Simone de Beauvoir

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 791

ISBN-13: 0679724516

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.