Writers, Readers, and Reputations - Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918
Charles Dickens died in 1870, the same year in which universal elementary education was introduced. During the following generation a mass reading public emerged, and the term "best-seller" was coined. In new and cheap editions Dickens's stories sold hugely, but these were progressively outstripped in quantity by the likes of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, Charles Garvice and Nat Gould. Who has now heard of these writers? Yet Hall Caine, for one, boasted of having made more money from his pen than any previous author.
Added by: stovokor | Karma: 1758.61 | Fiction literature | 2 January 2009
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One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is an immensely exciting tale of love, revolution, and politics set in the mythical South American country of Costaguana during the 1890s. Joseph Conrad, born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, (1857-1924) was a Polish-born novelist who spent most of his adult life in Britain. He is regarded as one of the greatest English novelists, which is even more notable because he did not learn to speak English well until he was in his 20s. He is recognized as a master prose stylist. Some of his works have a strain of romanticism, but more importantly he is recognized as an important forerunner of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence and Graham Greene. Writing during the apogee of the British Empire, Conrad drew upon his experiences in the British Merchant Navy to create novels and short stories that reflected aspects of a world-wide empire while also plumbing the depths of the human soul. Amongst his best known works are Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Under Western Eyes (1911), Victory (1915) and The Rescue (1920).
The Grammar of English Grammars, with an introduction historical and critical; the whole methodically
arranged and amply illustrated; with forms of correcting and of
parsing, improprieties for correction, examples for parsing, questions
for examination, exercises for writing, observations for the advanced
student, decisions and proofs for the settlement of disputed points,
occasional strictures and defences, an exhibition of the several
methods of analysis, and a key to the oral exercises: to which are
added four appendixes, pertaining separately to the four parts of
grammar.