One of the most widely read and influential works in African American literature, «The Souls of Black Folk» is W.E.B. Du Bois's classic collection of essays in which he details the state of racism and black culture at the beginning of the 20th century. Often autobiographical, «The Souls of Black Folk» takes the reader on a history lesson of race relations and the state of the African American from the emancipation proclamation to the early ...
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is historically recognized as the first woman to make a living through writing; her plays, novels, poems and pamphlets have met with fresh notoriety since the 20th century. Her work was particularly significant to a group of contemporary writers known as The Female Wits, as well as to later feminist writers like Virginia Woolf. Stories of comedy and intrigue, complete with masks, mistaken identities, visual deceptions, and ...
A labor of love taking much of Burton's life to write and revise, «The Anatomy of Melancholy» is an expansive, informative, and eccentric work of genius first published in 1621. Burton was an English churchman and a scholar, and his depth and breadth of knowledge is readily apparent in this inexhaustible book. Through the frame of a medical treatise, Burton begins with melancholy and slowly deals with various mental states, frequently digre ...
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is historically recognized as the first woman to make a living through writing; her plays, novels, poems and pamphlets have met with fresh notoriety since the 20th Century. Her work was particularly significant to a group of contemporary writers known as The Female Wits, as well as to later feminist writers like Virginia Woolf. Stories of comedy and intrigue, complete with and masks, mistaken identities, visual deceptions, ...
Thomas De Quincey was an English author during the Romantic movement, associating with writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Best known for his command of the psychological fantasy story, De Quincey produced stories of the curious and obscure, but always with the traditional Romantic emphasis on feeling. His masterwork, «Confessions of an English Opium Eater» (1821), stemmed from his own laudanum addiction, and was followe ...
This collection of the first series of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson collects some of the classic thoughts of this important American and leader of the Transcendentalist movement. Contained in this volume are the following essays: History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect, and Art. ...
David Hume (1711-1776) is regarded as one of the most significant literary figures in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment and Western philosophy. A Scottish born historian, philosopher, economist, and essayist, Hume is especially known for his concentration in philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He is often grouped with a handful of other British Empiricists of the time such as John Locke and George Berkeley. As a strong empiricist an ...
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was a gifted poet, literary critic and translator of the Augustan Age, whose powerful poetic satire and perfection of the English heroic couplet makes him one of the most famous and respected poets of all time. Pope embodied eighteenth-century neoclassical ideals like order, beauty, sophisticated wit, and refined moral sentiment. Included in this collection is «The Rape of The Lock», a satirical poem that mocks ancient ...
Thomas De Quincey, an English essayist during the turn of the nineteenth century, began life as a fairly sickly child, and would spend much of his life in the grips of one illness or another. Through a series of misguided attempts at getting an education, De Quincey dropped out of college and instead became a vagrant. The youth barely had enough food to eat and resorted to begging in order to survive. These years served as a depressing foundatio ...
