Literary and Social Essays (Esprios Classics)

Literary and Social Essays (Esprios Classics)
Author: George William Curtis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2020-10-29
Genre:
ISBN: 9781715676612

George William Curtis (1824 -1892) was an American writer and public speaker, born in Providence, Rhode Island, of New Englander ancestry. A Republican, he spoke in favor of African-American equality and civil rights. Curtis returned from Europe in 1850, attractive, accomplished, and ambitious for literary distinction. He settled on Staten Island and instantly plunged into the whirl of life in New York, obtained a post on the Tribune, became a popular lecturer, started work on Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851), and became a favorite in society. He wrote for Putnam's Magazine which he helped George Palmer Putnam to found. He became an associate editor along with Parke Godwin and managing editor Charles Frederick Briggs; the three also collaborated on a gift book called The Homes of American Authors (1853).

Literary and General Lectures and Essays (Esprios Classics)

Literary and General Lectures and Essays (Esprios Classics)
Author: Charles Kingsley
Publisher: Blurb
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2022-03-25
Genre:
ISBN:

Charles Kingsley (12 June 1819 - 23 January 1875) was a broad-church priest of the Church of England, a university professor, social reformer, historian, novelist and poet. He is particularly associated with Christian socialism, the working men's college, and forming labour cooperatives, which failed, but encouraged later working reforms. He was a friend and correspondent of Charles Darwin. Kingsley's interest in history is shown in several of his writings, including The Heroes (1856), a children's book about Greek mythology, and several historical novels, of which the best known are Hypatia (1853), Hereward the Wake (1865) and Westward Ho! (1855).

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
Author: Ralph Ellison
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2003-09-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812968263

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans lead. “Ralph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”

Words Are My Matter

Words Are My Matter
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Mariner Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0358212103

A collection of essays on life and literature, from one of the most iconic authors and astute critics in contemporary letters. Words Are My Matter is essential reading: a collection of talks, essays, and criticism by Ursula K. Le Guin, a literary legend and unparalleled voice of our social conscience. Here she investigates the depth and breadth of contemporary fiction--and, through the lens of literature, gives us a way of exploring the world around us. In "Freedom," Le Guin notes: "Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now ... to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom--poets, visionaries--realists of a larger reality." Le Guin was one of those authors and inWords Are My Matter she gives us just that: a vision of a better reality, fueled by the power and might and hope of language and literature.

Literary Occasions

Literary Occasions
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2010-02-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0307557464

Eleven essays on reading, writing, and identity—which have been brought together for the first time—from the Nobel Prize-winning author. • “He brings to [nonfiction] an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought…. I can no longer imagine the world without Naipaul’s writing.” —Vivian Gornick, Los Angeles Times Book Review Here the subject is Naipaul’s literary evolution: the books that delighted him as a child; the books he wrote as a young man; the omnipresent predicament of trying to master an essentially metropolitan, imperial art form as an Asian colonial from a New World plantation island. He assesses Joseph Conrad, the writer most frequently cited as his forebear, and, in his celebrated Nobel Lecture, “Two Worlds,” traces the full arc of his own career. Literary Occasions is an indispensable addition to the Naipaul oeuvre, penetrating, elegant, and affecting.

Damn! A Book of Calumny (Esprios Classics)

Damn! A Book of Calumny (Esprios Classics)
Author: Professor H L Mencken
Publisher:
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2020-12-20
Genre:
ISBN: 9781034132462

Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 - January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial," also gained him attention. As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, populism, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.

In the Age of Prose

In the Age of Prose
Author: Erich Heller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 1984
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780521254939

The guiding theme of these essays is the fate of the imagination and the condition of art in the modern world, where both appear to be enfeebled by scientific hubris, undermined by psychological self-questioning and compromised by political disaster. Erich Heller traces this predicament with subtlety and profundity, from Hegel's and Nietzsche's diagnoses to the various truces and manoeuvres through which remarkable victories have nonetheless been achieved - such as the comic triumphs of Wilhelm Busch. As elsewhere in Professor Heller's work, Thomas Mann's attempt to outwit and redeem his circumstances through art - 'despite' them, as he said himself - occupies a central place. Three of the present essays are devoted to him. Others consider Kleist, Fontane, Hamsun, Karl Kraus and the crucial figures of Hölderlin (who plays such a central role in Heidegger's later philosophical writings) and Rilke. Written with feeling, and the distinctive elegance and wit that have characterized all of Professor Heller's work, the essays here reaffirm the vital interdependence of literature and human values.

The Liberal Imagination

The Liberal Imagination
Author: Lionel Trilling
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2008-09-23
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1590172833

The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.