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Hedda Gabler was published in 1890 before opening in Munich, Germany in 1891 to terrible reviews. Indeed, Ibsen was not happy with the premiere, citing the overly declamatory inflections of the lead actress. The play seemed destined to fail. Hedda...

The nineteenth century offered two important developments to Russia which are manifested in the play. In the 1830's, the railroads arrived, an important step in Russia's move into a more international sphere. More importantly, in February of 1861,...

Tess of the d'Urbervilles, like the other major works by Thomas Hardy, although technically a nineteenth century work, anticipates the twentieth century in regard to the nature and treatment of its subject matter. Tess of the d'Urbervilles was the...

The first edition of Dracula was published in June 1897. As late as May of that year, Stoker was still using his original working title for the novel, The Un-Dead. "Undead," a word now commonly used in horror novels and movies, was a term invented...

Oscar Wilde's one-act play, Salome, is a loose interpretation of the account of the beheading of St. John the Baptist in the 1st century A.D. as recorded in the New Testament (Gospel of Mark 6:15-29 and Gospel of Matthew 14:1-12). While Salome is...

Published in 1910, Howards End was E.M. Forster's fourth novel, and served to strengthen his reputation as an esteemed author. The novel addresses some of life's most serious questions, including how people relate to each other and what kinds of...

Published just two years after The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) was the second in H.G. Wells's great science fiction quartet. It validated his presence on the international literary scene. Many writers, "private gentlemen" like...

Although it was not popular duing Behn's lifetime, today Oroonoko (1688) is Aphra Behn's most widely read and most highly regarded work. Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave remains important. It also influenced the development of the English novel,...

Coleridge first published his famous ballad, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", in Lyrical Ballads, his 1798 joint effort with his close friend and colleague William Wordsworth. The collection's publication is often seen as the Romantic Movement's...

Thoreau's Walden was written for a very specific audience. At its smallest, its intended audience is comprised of those Concord residents who had attended his lectures at the village lyceum and who had questions about the two years he had lived...

"Benito Cereno," one of Melville's most enduring and intriguing works, was first published in Putnam's Monthly in October, November and December, 1855. Melville later collected it in The Piazza Tales (1856), a collection that also included...

Though Frisch published nine novels in his lifetime, three clearly stand out as his most masterful works. Among these, Homo Faber (1957) is often linked with its predecessor Stiller (1954; translated as I'm Not Stiller), primarily because Oedipal...

In addition to brilliant explorations of the mother-daughter relationship and its relationship with themes of colonialism, Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy (1990) offers sharp, perceptive commentary on American culture. The author, an Antiguan who came to...

The Color of Water (1997) is the bestselling memoir of James McBride, a biracial journalist, jazz saxophonist, and composer whose Jewish mother gave birth to twelve children, all of whom she raised in a housing project in Brooklyn. His mother...

The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is a twentieth-century rendition of Mark Twain's classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After Bellow published his first two novels, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to live in...

E.M. Forster wrote A Passage to India in 1924, the last completed novel that he published during his lifetime. The novel differs from Forster's other major works in its overt political content, as opposed to the lighter tone and more subdued...

Easily Anthony Burgess's most famous book - and his personal least favorite - A Clockwork Orange would have become a controversial work in the 20th-century canon even if not for Stanley Kubrick's stylized 1971 film adaptation. The futuristic novel...

The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929, although it was one of the first novels Faulkner wrote. Many critics and even Faulkner himself think that it is the best novel that he wrote. Its subject is the downfall of the Compson family, the...

Madame Bovary, written by Gustave Flaubert, was published in 1857 in French. Flaubert wrote the novel in Croisset, France, between 1851 and 1857 and set the action in the same period of time, the mid-1800s, in the French towns of Tostes, Yonville,...

Friedrich Duerrenmatt's The Visit premiered in Zurich in 1956. Duerrenmatt was 35 at the time, and the play's performance immediately won him international acclaim, cementing his reputation as a dramatist.

Duerrenmatt describes "The Visit" as a...

Snow Falling on Cedars is a novel strongly committed to engaging with the ideals of justice, law, love, and morality. Structured around the trial of an American citizen of Japanese ancestry and set in an island community in the Puget Sound, the...

Lord Jim, published in 1900, initially began as a short story based on a real incident involving a steamship called Jeddah, which carried Muslim pilgrims from Singapore to Mecca. Conrad had spent much of the time between 1883 and 1888 in the area...

As I Lay Dying was published in 1930, immediately following the work that many consider to be Faulkner's masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury. The Sound and the Fury is widely considered to be among the greatest of the modernist novels, and is...

Robert Louis Stevenson began writing Kidnapped in March of 1885. In February, he had finished writing The Black Arrow and was working on The Great North Road when he read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A month later, he put aside...