Results by title
133 books match the query 'Classics' and 13 start with a
A Dance to the Music of Time
First MovementAnthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Read the novel that is #43 on the Modern Library's 100 Best of the 20th Century list and the Guardian called "a comic masterpiece" and the New York Times praised as "immensely entertaining."
A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London.
Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and carries through the 1950s, with all the changes of society, characters, and relationships that those shifting eras bring.
A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London.
Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and carries through the 1950s, with all the changes of society, characters, and relationships that those shifting eras bring.
Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widmerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. A masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich portrait of life in England between the wars.
"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give this first volume a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Includes these novels:
A Question of Upbringing
A Buyer's Market
The Acceptance World
[more]
A Dance to the Music of Time
Fourth MovementAnthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Read the novel that is #43 on the Modern Library's 100 Best of the 20th Century list and the Guardian called "a comic masterpiece" and the New York Times praised as "immensely entertaining."
A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and carries through the 1950s, with all the changes to society, character, and relationships those shifting eras bring.
In this final volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but its costs, physical and moral, were vast. Widmerpool's wife sets a snare for the young writer X. Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. Set against a background of politics, business, high society, and the counterculture in England and Europe, this magnificent work of art sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age.
"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give this first volume a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Includes these novels:
Books Do Furnish a Room
Temporary Kings
Hearing Secret Harmonies
A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and carries through the 1950s, with all the changes to society, character, and relationships those shifting eras bring.
In this final volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but its costs, physical and moral, were vast. Widmerpool's wife sets a snare for the young writer X. Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. Set against a background of politics, business, high society, and the counterculture in England and Europe, this magnificent work of art sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age.
"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give this first volume a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Includes these novels:
Books Do Furnish a Room
Temporary Kings
Hearing Secret Harmonies
[more]
A Dance to the Music of Time
Second MovementAnthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Read the novel that is #43 on the Modern Library's 100 Best of the 20th Century list and the Guardian called "a comic masterpiece" and the New York Times praised as "immensely entertaining."
A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and continues through the 1950s.
In the background of this second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, the rumble of distant events in Germany and Spain presages the storm of World War II. In England, even as the whirl of marriages and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures gathers speed, men and women find themselves on the brink of fateful choices.
"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give this first volume a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life
Includes these novels:
At Lady Molly's
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
The Kindly Ones
A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and continues through the 1950s.
In the background of this second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, the rumble of distant events in Germany and Spain presages the storm of World War II. In England, even as the whirl of marriages and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures gathers speed, men and women find themselves on the brink of fateful choices.
"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give this first volume a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life
Includes these novels:
At Lady Molly's
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
The Kindly Ones
[more]
A Dance to the Music of Time
Third MovementAnthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Read the novel that is #43 on the Modern Library's 100 Best of the 20th Century list and the Guardian called "a comic masterpiece" and the New York Times praised as "immensely entertaining."
A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and continues through the 1950s and all the changes to life, society, and relationships those shifting eras bring.
In this third volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, we again meet Widmerpool, doggedly rising in rank; Jenkins, shifted from one dismal army post to another; Stringham, heroically emerging from alcoholism; Templer, still on his eternal sexual quest. Here, too, we are introduced to Pamela Flitton, one of the most beautiful and dangerous women in modern fiction. Wickedly barbed in its wit, uncanny in its seismographic recording of human emotions and social currents, this saga stands as an unsurpassed rendering of England's finest yet most costly hour.
"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give Dance a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Includes these novels:
The Valley of Bones
The Soldier's Art
The Military Philosophers
A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and continues through the 1950s and all the changes to life, society, and relationships those shifting eras bring.
In this third volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, we again meet Widmerpool, doggedly rising in rank; Jenkins, shifted from one dismal army post to another; Stringham, heroically emerging from alcoholism; Templer, still on his eternal sexual quest. Here, too, we are introduced to Pamela Flitton, one of the most beautiful and dangerous women in modern fiction. Wickedly barbed in its wit, uncanny in its seismographic recording of human emotions and social currents, this saga stands as an unsurpassed rendering of England's finest yet most costly hour.
"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give Dance a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Includes these novels:
The Valley of Bones
The Soldier's Art
The Military Philosophers
[more]
A Hero of Our Time
Mikhail Lermontov, Translated from the Russian and with an Introduction by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen
Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time was the first modern Russian novel. Published in 1840, it set a model of penetrating observation and psychological depth that would come to typify Russian literature. Its "hero," Grigory Pechorin, also established a character type that became known in Russian fiction as "the superfluous man"—widely familiar from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. At once driven by pride and wracked by self-doubt, both shockingly self-revealing and blindly self-deceived, he flounders to affirm himself in a social world he despises yet yearns to dominate. Pechorin is a troubling and unforgettable character. And A Hero of Our Time, which has provoked much controversy, is a novel not only central to Russian literature but fundamental to the Western literary tradition of the antihero.
[more]
A Reading of Dante's Inferno
Wallace Fowlie
University of Chicago Press, 1981
This work is a guide to the reading of Dante's great poem, intended for the use of students and laymen, particularly those who are approaching the Inferno for the first time. While carefully pointing out the uniqueness, tone, and color of each of Dante's thirty-four cantos, Fowlie never loses sight of the continuity of the poet's discourse. Each canto is related thematically to others, and the rich web of symbols is displayed and disentangled as the poem's unity, patterns, and structures are revealed.
What particularly distinguishes Wallace Fowlie's reading of the Inferno is his emphasis on both the timelessness and the timeliness of Dante's masterpiece. By underlining the archetypal elements in the poem and drawing parallels to contemporary literature, Fowlie has brought Dante and his characters much closer to modern readers.
[more]
A Tale of Two Worlds
Vjenceslav Novak
Central European University Press, 2014
In this novel, written by the esteemed novelist in 1901, a provincial composer and organist from Croatia struggles to find his way along the perilous frontier between the worlds of artistic vocation and humdrum family life. The local kapellmeister—-a Czech, in good Habsburg tradition, and a confidant of Gaj and Palacky, influential politicians of the time—-recognizes young Amadej Zlatanic as a prodigy and persuades the stingy mayor and stubborn parish priest to pack the teenager off to the conservatory in Prague. After several years of sordid student purgatory, Amadej returns to Croatia—-ready for love and ready to make great art.The world of Central Europe in the 1860s flows past, and Amadej tries to keep abreast of political change. At the same time he ducks and dodges predatory relatives and townspeople in his native district, to which he has returned for the sake of employment. Despite his marriage to the impressionable and vulnerable local beauty, Adelka, and his devotion to their daughter Veruska, Amadej is sorely troubled by the political corruption and isolation of Croatia. His wife takes ill and his family is poor. Yet ultimately it is the vulgar, populist notion of Croatian "identity"—-symbolized by the worship of the tamburica, a local musical instrument—-that crushes Amadej's career. As it does so, he contemplates the two worlds of national greatness, amidst the Croatian national awakening, and international fame. Finally, frustrated beyond relief by unsuccessful affairs both amorous and professional, and tortured by the philistinism surrounding him, Amadej leaves the world of sanity for a mind-blowing descent into the maniacal and inescapable world of hallucination, paganism, and paranoia.
[more]
A World I Never Made
James T. Farrell, with an Introduction by Charles Fanning
University of Illinois Press, 2006
A sprawling tale of two families' struggles with harsh urban realities
The first book in Farrell's five-volume series to be republished by the University of Illinois Press, A World I Never Made introduces three generations from two families, the working-class O'Neills and the lower-middle-class O'Flahertys. The lives of the O'Neills in particular reflect the tragic consequences of poverty, as young Danny O'Neill's parents--unable to sustain their large family--send him to live with his grandmother. Seen here at the age of seven, Danny is fraught with feelings of anxiety and dislocation as he learns the ins and outs of life on the street, confronting for the first time a world he never made.
[more]
Abandoned Women
Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and ChaucerSuzanne Hagedorn
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Medievalists have long been interested in the "abandoned woman," a figure historically used to examine the value of traditional male heroism. Moving beyond previous studies which have focused primarily on Virgil's Dido, Suzanne Hagedorn focuses on the vernacular works of Dante, Bocaccio, and Chaucer, arguing that revisiting the classical tradition of the abandoned woman enables one to reconsider ancient epics and myths from a female perspective and question assumptions about gender roles in medieval literature.
[more]
Aeschylus I
The Persians, The Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliant Maidens, Prometheus BoundEdited and Translated by David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Mark Griffith, and Glenn W. Most
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The most engaging and authoritative translation of some of the foundational works of Western culture
This volume collects careful, readable translations of some of the key works of Aeschylus by experts in the language and culture of the ancient Greek world in which he lived and wrote. Aeschylus I contains “The Persians,” translated by Seth Benardete; “The Seven Against Thebes,” translated by David Grene; “The Suppliant Maidens,” translated by Seth Benardete; and “Prometheus Bound,” translated by David Grene.
For this edition, series editors Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous.New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.
[more]
Alternative Alcott
Showalter, Elaine
Rutgers University Press, 1988
The discovery in recent years of Louisa May Alcott's pseudonymous sensation stories has made readers and scholars increasingly aware of her accomplishments beyond her most famous novel, Little Women, one of the great international best-sellers of all time. What has been recovered throws new light on the children's books and asks us to question our assumptions about the suposedly staid and sentimental Alcott.
Alternative Alcott includes works never before reprinted, including "How I Went Out to Service," "My Contraband," and "Psyche's Art." It also contains Behind a Mask, her most important sensation story; the full and correct text of her last unfinished novel, Diana and Persis; "Transcendental Wild Oats"; Hospital Sketches; and Alcott's other important texts on nineteenth-century social history. This anthology brings together for the first time a variety of Louisa May Alcott's journalistic, satiric, feminist, and sensation texts. Elaine Showalter has provided an excellent introduction and notes to the collection.
Alternative Alcott includes works never before reprinted, including "How I Went Out to Service," "My Contraband," and "Psyche's Art." It also contains Behind a Mask, her most important sensation story; the full and correct text of her last unfinished novel, Diana and Persis; "Transcendental Wild Oats"; Hospital Sketches; and Alcott's other important texts on nineteenth-century social history. This anthology brings together for the first time a variety of Louisa May Alcott's journalistic, satiric, feminist, and sensation texts. Elaine Showalter has provided an excellent introduction and notes to the collection.
[more]
At the Village
Józef Lobodowski
Central European University Press, 2026
At the Village is the second volume of Polish poet and novelist Józef Lobodowski’s Ukrainian Trilogy, written between 1955 and 1960. The most lyrical and evocative installment of the cycle, it offers the fullest and most sympathetic portrait of Cossack life in all of modern Slavic literature. Lobodowski immerses the reader in the world of a fiercely independent people whose destiny has long been shaped by the competing gravitational pulls of the Russian Empire and the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The book’s protagonist, Stas, finds himself the guest of the Cossack Jakov Antonovich, a scholar as well as a military leader and an agricultural potentate. His time at Antonovich’s stanitsa provides him with an incomparable education in the history of the old Polish Commonwealth of nations, which at its height encompassed Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It is a lesson all the more engaging to the reader in that it is presented from a perspective that is neither Polish nor Russian, but Cossack. Through Lobodowski’s interweaving of historical reflection with sumptuous descriptions of agricultural life on the well-ordered stanitsa, At the Village is sometimes compared to the Polish national epic, Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1834), upon which Lobodowski is said to have consciously modelled the novel.
The book’s protagonist, Stas, finds himself the guest of the Cossack Jakov Antonovich, a scholar as well as a military leader and an agricultural potentate. His time at Antonovich’s stanitsa provides him with an incomparable education in the history of the old Polish Commonwealth of nations, which at its height encompassed Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It is a lesson all the more engaging to the reader in that it is presented from a perspective that is neither Polish nor Russian, but Cossack. Through Lobodowski’s interweaving of historical reflection with sumptuous descriptions of agricultural life on the well-ordered stanitsa, At the Village is sometimes compared to the Polish national epic, Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1834), upon which Lobodowski is said to have consciously modelled the novel.
[more]
Aucassin and Nicolette
A Facing-Page Edition and TranslationRobert S. Sturges
Michigan State University Press, 2015
A comic masterpiece of medieval French literature, Aucassin and Nicolette is categorized by its anonymous author as a “chantefable,” or “song-story,” and is the only known work of this kind. This edition includes the thirteenth-century French text and a modern English translation on facing pages. An introduction outlines the text’s background, genre, literary relations, historical contexts, major themes, and relevance to a contemporary audience. Its alternating sections of verse and prose recount a story of love between the aristocratic but distinctly unheroic young lord Aucassin and his beloved Nicolette. Despite familial disapproval, class and ethnic differences, imprisonment, and geographical separation, Nicolette’s single-minded pursuit of Aucassin raises interesting questions about gender roles and their depiction in the Middle Ages. The issue of identity is also addressed, as the identity of Nicolette shifts in terms of class, religion, and ethnicity: born a Muslim princess, she becomes both a slave and a Christian convert, and is eventually recaptured by her Saracen family, much to her displeasure. With its daring escapes, its descriptions of travel to exotic lands, its separations, and its happy reunions, Aucassin and Nicolette is both a classic romantic comedy and an entertaining parody of the romance genre.
[more]