Download or read book The Rise of Silas Lapham written by William Dean Howells and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1983-04-28 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Dean Howells' richly humorous characterization of a self-made millionaire in Boston society provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age. After establishing a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston, where they awkwardly attempt to break into Brahmin society. Silas, greedy for wealth as well as prestige, brings his company to the brink of bankruptcy, and the family is forced to return to Vermont, financially ruined but morally renewed. As Kermit Vanderbilt points out in his introduction, the novel focuses on important themes in the American literary tradition: the efficacy of self-help and determination, the ambiguous benefits of social and economic progress, and the continual contradiction between urban and pastoral values. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book Study Guide to The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells written by Intelligent Education and published by Influence Publishers. This book was released on 2020-02-15 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, one of the many in Howells’ movement into strong anti-romantic realism and social criticism. As a novel of the realism movement, The Rise of Silas Lapham began Howells’ trend of incorporating Christian Socialism in his writing—a theory that the common welfare could be improved along guidelines of Christian ethical principles. Moreover, Howells is considered to be the father of American realism. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Howells’ classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work - Character Summaries - Plot Guides - Section and Chapter Overviews - Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.
Download or read book William Dean Howells The Rise of Silas Lapham written by Robert Warren Walts and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Hazard Of New Fortunes written by William Dean Howells and published by Jazzybee Verlag. This book was released on 2020 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one can complain that in this story Mr. Howells has taken his type from the commonplace. It is a study of life in New York, and the author has brought together such a gallery of odd and strongly differentiated characters as could perhaps be found in no other city on the continent, while the conditions and phases of social life represented are not less distinctive and peculiar. The Marches, it is true, are from Boston, but they serve the purpose of external points of observation, whence to note and sufficiently to emphasize those features of our city life which of necessity strike strangers and outsiders most forcibly and with the greatest freshness of suggestion. A new magazine is founded with the money of old Dryfoos, a "natural gas millionaire," whose primary object is to give his son Conrad — a youth of saint-like character and dominant altruism — opportunity to become a businessman. The prime mover of the venture is Fulkerson, a true Western Yankee, if the phrase be allowable, whose engaging impudence, fluent slang, indomitable assurance, and substantial loyalty and goodness of heart are sure to make him as great a favorite with the reader as he is with all who know him in the story. The Marches, too, are fantastic, and nowhere has Mr. Howells better presented that peculiar American humor which finds motives for half-sarcastic jest and quip in even the most serious things, less out of lightness of heart than from an almost desperate conscious ness of hopeless incongruities and perplexities inherent in the general scheme. The picture is in itself a condemnation of and protest against that rank growth of naked materialism which is the most depressing feature of our time. The character and the faults of society are shown plainly but temperately — the spirit of levity, the love of spectacle, the repugnance to serious thinking, the absence of jealousy of popular rights, constantly encroached upon, ignored and subordinated to selfish corporate or individual interests. The aspects of the city are also most graphically and admirably described in many a wandering of the Marches, and the book exhibits an amount of local study undertaken by the author which speaks well for his conscientiousness, and adds much to the charm and permanent interest of the story. There is, as we have intimated, an unwonted variety and an unwonted force in " A Hazard of New Fortunes." If it can hardly be said to have a dominant note, it is none the less a faithful and carefully elaborated study of New York life, and it presents some of the most salient characteristics of that life in a very impressive and artistic manner. Most readers will, we think, agree with us that the change in method here shown is a change for the better. Never, certainly, has Mr. Howells written more brilliantly, more clearly, more firmly, or more attractively, than in this instance. The reversion to these strong individualizations seems to have put new vigor into his hands, and he deals with the deeper tragedies, the graver emotions of life, with a power which may perhaps be regarded as a practical demonstration of the ultimate supremacy destined to be attained by Nature over Art ; by the true over the false Realism.
Download or read book A study guide for William Dean Howells The Rise of Silas Lapham written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on 2015-03-13 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study guide for William Dean Howells' "The Rise of Silas Lapham", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book Editha written by William Dean Howells and published by Creative Education. This book was released on 1993-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A girl with a romantic concept of war has her beliefs challenged when her fiance goes off to fight.
Download or read book William Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis written by Lance Rubin and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With social and political issues providing the foreground of literary studies over the past several years, William Dean Howells has re-emerged as a major author. Yet, among canonical American writers, Howells simultaneously attracts both significant attention and curious neglect. While studies devoted to his novels, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, are proliferating, the attention paid to his later writing, particularly his short fiction, is not only far less sustained but often dismissive, promoting a continuous inattention to the process by which the author discovers new forms and expression. William Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis confronts the frequent refusal to see Howells as a writer whose lifelong engagement with literature pushed him through generic boundaries in search of new ways of shaping his fiction and questioning American identity. By focusing on Howellss preoccupation with tropes of memory and amnesia, this book positions his work within the American memory crisis, the turn-of-the-centurys pervasive feelings of fragmentation, loss, and dislocation that followed breathtaking transformations in the pace of everyday life and traditional social structures, which contributed to the sense that the linear inheritance of the past was severely weakened, if not broken beyond repair. As Americans engaged in a politics of memorywith various groups battling for their stake in shaping Americas present and future by defining its pastHowellss work interacts with a number of social discourses and practices through which national identity was being (re)constructed and debated. The book explores these sites of memory, including historiography, therhetoric of imperialism, the revival in historical romantic fiction, the rise of photography, the boom in monument construction, the beginnings of modern advertising, the interest in spiritualism and the occult, and literary history itself. By focusing on two neglected areas of Howells studieshis late short fiction and his engagement in the politics of memoryWilliam Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis clarifies the convergence of his aesthetic and political goals and challenges recent innovative studies that situate Howells and literary realism as reinforcing late-nineteenth-century hierarchies of race, class, and gender. As a major figure of the traditional canon, Howells routinely has been positioned as a powerful cultural authority who was either deceptive of his real goals, willfully hypocritical, or ignorant of the actual political scene in which he was working. Rubins book complicates some of these accepted views by arguing that, while not apolitical, Howells was not as nave or as reactionary as some have claimed. By not accounting for the direction Howells takes in his later work, particularly as it imagines and represents memory, previous studiesso reliant on postmodern-influenced criticism seem to have often overlooked Howellss own postmodern leanings. Tropes of memory and amnesia have become prominent in postmodern theories of history and subjectivity, registering anxiety about the stability of the self and serving as metaphors for the impossibility of objective and secure historical narratives. Howellss work, this book maintains, consistently gestures toward these and other characteristics of the postmodern in its approach to history and questions the versions ofliterary realism that have become sacrosanct within the academy. Ultimately, this book provides other teachers, researchers, and students with a new framework with which to approach Howells and American realism. As his discussion draws on a variety of discourse in its exploration of Americas politics of memory, a secondary, more interdisciplinary audience includes those interested in political and social theory, history, and cultural studies. This is an important book for scholars, students, and te
Download or read book Editor s Study written by William Dean Howells and published by Troy, N.Y. : Whitston Publishing Company. This book was released on 1983 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present edition contains a comprehensive index with cross-references and a thorough introduction revealing the details concerning the column, the corresponding period in Howells' life, and the literary milieu of these critical years in American literature. "The Editor's Study" collection offers a unique reference work to scholars interested in this important period of transition in American literature, as well as to those interested in Howells as one of America's first exponents of comparative literature.
Download or read book Criticism and Fiction written by William Dean Howells and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sincerely Willis Wayde written by John P. Marquand and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unforgettable journey of an American businessman—from his humble origins to his extraordinary successes—and the compromises he made along the way When Willis Wayde first lays eyes on the Harcourt mansion near Clyde, Massachusetts, he is fifteen years old. His father is an engineer at Harcourt Mill, and Willis is awestruck by the family’s wealth and power. Seeking guidance from Henry Harcourt, Willis meets Bess, the old man’s granddaughter. Their friendship eventually blossoms into love as the elder Harcourt takes the young man under his wing, recognizing in Willis a kindred spirit whose instinct for making money matches his own. Pleased with his good fortune, Willis is nevertheless acutely aware of the great social gulf that separates the Waydes from the Harcourts. Determined to make his own way, he sets out on a path that will take him far beyond New England and the insular, old-money world of Henry and Bess. Then the Depression hits, wiping out the Harcourt family fortune. When he comes back into their life, Willis has the power to rescue the last vestige of the family’s prestige: the mill. Torn between his nostalgia for a simpler, more sentimental time and his sharply honed business acumen, Willis must make a fateful decision.
Download or read book The World of Chance written by W. D. Howells and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Study Guide for Henry James s The American written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale Cengage Learning. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Henry James's "The American," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book Creating Realities written by Erhan Simsek and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Business is woven into the very fabric of American life, yet rarely surfaces in the nation's literary history. Even in novels about business, it proves an elusive motif that fails to mirror actual business organizations. This book argues that literary representations of business remain ineffable because business serves potential aesthetic functions, subtly yet meaningfully impacting readers. Exploring the complex representation of business in realist, naturalist and modernist works, Erhan Simsek reveals these functions by analyzing how the motif intertwines with social developments, literary movements and author biographies. He thus illuminates the motif itself while highlighting the utility of a focus on the changing functions of literature.
Download or read book Study Guide to The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain written by Intelligent Education and published by Influence Publishers. This book was released on 2020-09-12 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, the author’s first attempt at historical fiction. As a novel of the nineteenth-century, the story of The Prince and the Pauper continues to live on through video games, movies, TV shows, and books. Moreover, the novel presents timelessly relevant themes of justice and judgement, identity, and, society and class. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Mark Twain’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work - Character Summaries - Plot Guides - Section and Chapter Overviews - Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.
Download or read book Study Guide to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain written by Intelligent Education and published by Influence Publishers. This book was released on 2020-02-15 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the best-selling of Twain’s work. As a novel written in 1876, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer follows the antics of a young boy during his childhood on the Mississippi River. Moreover, Twain examines the carefree spirit of children, manipulation, and race in this lighthearted novel through the use of imagery and symbolism. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Twain’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work - Character Summaries - Plot Guides - Section and Chapter Overviews - Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.
Download or read book A Traveler from Altruria Romance written by William Dean 1837-1920 Howells, Ed and published by Palala Press. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book How Reading Changed My Life written by Anna Quindlen and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2010-12-22 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Anna Quindlen presents a “swift and compelling paean to the joys of books” (Booklist). “Like the columns she used to write for the New York Times, [How Reading Changed My Life] is tart, smart, full of quirky insights, lapidary, and a pleasure to read.”—Publishers Weekly “Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. . . . Yet of all the many things in which we recognize universal comfort—God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in a chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. . . . I read because I loved it more than any activity on earth.”—from How Reading Changed My Life
