Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. It begins with six children--three boys and three girls--playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their...

Likely written around 1607 or 1608 and attributed at least in part to Shakespeare, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" is an adventure-filled play that follows the extended sailing journeys of a young prince. Pericles, a young prince from Phoenicia, is forced to flee Antioch when he correctly guesses a riddle that reveals the incestuous activity of King Antiochus. Unable to stay at home in Tyre because of Antiochus' vengeance, he sails away and ends up shipwrecked...

From eastern woods and farmlands to the Pacific northwest coast, to tropical islands and rivers, the author explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.

Published in 1879, this is Eliot's last completed work, and perhaps her most underrated. It consists of a series of essays told by a nameless English bachelor. Though critics harshly judged the work as "ponderous and moralizing" when it was published, today's readers will recognize Eliot's keen intelligence, sharp wit, and intriguing insights in such essays as "A Too Deferential Man," "A Political Molecule," and "Only Temper."

This 1891 volume of essays, in the words of its editor, Fred Scott, "is just the work to go into the hands of those that hope and despair of the teacher of rhetoric-the callow young man with a sneaking ambition for literature..." Lewes examines how such elements as vision, sincerity, beauty, and style determine literary success or failure.

From Austin Dobson, the illustrious poet and essayist, comes this collection of charming essays and poems that pay homage to books, authors, illustrators (including Kate Greenaway), printers and printing, Milton, Thackeray, and other book-related topics. These pieces capture Dobson's deep love of literature.

Critical writing could scarcely be more admirable than this, pronounced the New York Times in its review of this 1921 classic of literary criticism. This immensely influential text examines such authors as Tolstoy, Flaubert, Thackeray, and James, with an eye toward the form rather than the content of storytelling.

An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit is the most extensive work on the nineteenth century comic genre. It was initially presented as Meredith's first and only public lecture in London in 1877, and published separately as a book in 1897. In it, Meredith defines comedy as a "humour of the mind," not prevalent in the British society of his day, which he saw as fraught with "Unreason and Sentimentalism." The work had a strong influence...

From his perch as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, author, editor, and literary critic William Dean Howells discussed his theories of realism in literature in his column, "The Editor's Study." Highly influential, this collection of Howells's essays and ideas is an invaluable resource for any reader or student with a passion for literature.

In a unique 1869 take on Greek mythology, the influential Victorian-Edwardian sage considers the myth of the goddess Athena. Ruskin asks us to consider Athena-"in the heavens, the earth, and the heart"-as a vital force in the material world channeled by those leading virtuous lives and also as "the directress of the imagination and will."