A Modern Instance
10 best books like A Modern Instance (William Dean Howells): Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line, Billy Budd and Other Tales, Selected Tales and Sketches, Stella Dallas, Selected Writings, Fortunata and Jacinta, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, A Rage to Live, The Damnation of Theron Ware: Or Illumination, The Portable Henry James
| Author | Charles W. Chesnutt |
| ISBN | 0141185023 |
Unlike the popular "Uncle Remus" stories of Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt's tales probe psychological depths in black people unheard of before in Southern regional writing. They also expose the anguish of mixed-race men and women and the consequences of racial hatred, mob violence,...
| Author | Herman Melville |
| ISBN | 0451526872 |
Unbelievably, Melville had a hard time making a living from his writing.
[That was sarcasm.]
His style is overly archaic. I read a fair amount of classic literature, but this is just ridiculous. In the mid to late 19th century, were people still saying "Hark!"? And "Blah, blah,...
| Author | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
The short fiction of a writer who helped to shape the course of American literature. With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected...
| Author | Olive Higgins Prouty |
| ISBN | 0060964499 |
She's ambitious, she's relentless, she's unstoppable - but she can't hide the stain of her working-class roots. A woman big enough for both Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Midler, Stella Dallas was a best-seller in its time - and a terrific read today.
One of the most entertaining, excellently...
| Author | William Hazlitt |
| ISBN | 0192838008 |
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) developed a variety of identities as a writer: essayist, philosopher, critic of literature, drama and art, biographer, political commentator, and polemicist. Praised for his eloquence, he was also reviled by conservatives for his radical politics. This edition,...
| Author | Benito Pérez Galdós |
| ISBN | 0140433058 |
Capturing a ninteenth-century Spanish world of political tumult and personal obsession, Benito Pérez Galdós's Fortunata and Jacinta tells of two women who love the same man unfailingly—one as his mistress, the other as his wife.
In this new and complete translation, Agnes Moncy Gullón...
| Author | Jerrold E. Hogle |
| ISBN | 0521794668 |
Fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying genre from the 1760s to the end of the twentieth century. Essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theater, Romantic...
| Author | John O'Hara |
| ISBN | 0812971353 |
A momentous bestseller when it was first published in 1949, John O’Hara’s sprawling novel A Rage to Live offers up a gorgeous pageant of idealists and libertines, tradesmen and crusaders, men of violence and goodwill, and women of fierce strength and tenderness. These memorable characters and...
| Author | Harold Frederic |
| ISBN | 0140390251 |
A candid inquiry into the intertwining of religious and sexual fervor, and a telling portrait of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, this novel foreshadows the rise of naturalism in American literature. The Damnation of Theron Ware (published in England as Illumination) is an 1896...
| Author | Henry James |
| ISBN | 0142437670 |
Henry James wrote with an imperial elegance of style, whether his subjects were American innocents or European sophisticates, incandescent women or their vigorous suitors. His omniscient eye took in the surfaces of cities, the nuances of speech, dress, and manner, and, above all, the microscopic...
| Author | Jacob Abbott |
| ISBN | 1406802409 |
Alfred is a remarkable figure in the history of England. He is credited with founding the English monarchy, codifying laws, founding the University of Oxford, and inventing the lantern.
I found Abbott's book a bit of a slog. And there is that section on pp 34-36 where he evaluates the Indian,...
| Author | Anthony Trollope |
| ISBN | 0192837141 |
I read Trollope’s The American Senator immediately after a memorable experience with The Way We Live Now, which many see as Trollope’s masterpiece. The two books aren’t in the same league at all, although The American Senator was still a pleasant enough read.
The title is misleading,...
| Author | Harriet Martineau |
| ISBN | 0141439394 |
When the Ibbotson sisters, Hester and Margaret, arrive at the village of Deerbrook to stay with their cousin Mr. Grey and his wife, speculation is rife that one of them might marry the local apothecary, Edward Hope. Although he is immediately attracted to Margaret, Hope is ultimately persuaded to marry...
| Author | Wilkie Collins |
| ISBN | 1426404751 |
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not...
| Author | Edith Wharton |
| ISBN | 0684184931 |
One of Edith Wharton's unjustly neglected novels, Hudson River Bracketed features two strong protagonists - Vance Weston and Halo Spear. The former is an undereducated young man who arrives in New York with a keen desire to write. Halo Spear is a brilliant, accomplished young woman who introduces...
| Author | Anna Katharine Green |
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not...
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
| Author | Harriet Beecher Stowe |
| ISBN | 0807856851 |
Harriet Beecher Stowe's second antislavery novel was written partly in response to the criticisms of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by both white Southerners and black abolitionists. In Dred (1856), Stowe attempts to explore the issue of slavery from an African American perspective.
Through...
