Melville: His World and Work
10 best books like Melville: His World and Work (Andrew Delbanco): White Jacket or, the World in a Man-of-War, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, Freud: A Life for Our Time, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, Hawthorne: A Life, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire
| Author | Herman Melville |
| ISBN | 1598180703 |
"White Jacket" written by Herman Melville (best known for his classic whaling novel) was first published in 1850 and is considered to be a semi-biographical book, written from Melville's own personal experiences while returning home to the Atlantic Coast from the South Seas with the American Navy...
The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition
| Author | Gerda Lerner |
| ISBN | 0807855669 |
A landmark work of women's history originally published in 1967, Gerda Lerner's best-selling biography of Sarah and Angelina Grimke explores the lives and ideas of the only southern women to become antislavery agents in the North and pioneers for women's rights. This revised and expanded edition...
| Author | Alan Trachtenberg |
| ISBN | 0809058286 |
A classic examination of the roots of corporate culture, newly revised and updated for the twenty first century
Alan Trachtenberg presents a balanced analysis of the expansion of capitalist power in the last third of the nineteenth century and the cultural changes it brought in its wake....
| Author | Peter Gay |
| ISBN | 0393328619 |
Brilliant biography of Freud (probably the best since Ernest Jones’s three v. effort). Heavy emphasis on ideas, especially within the nineteenth century context (both bourgeois Vienna & 19th c. scientific -- e.g., Darwin & physiological school). Treats the psychoanalytic movement,...
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 0393312569 |
Patriotic Gore (1962) is the big book of Wilson’s final decade and in the dust jacket photo he looks just the toothless, growling old cuss one meets in “The Critic in Winter,” Updike’s worthwhile review of the late journals. Wilson spent his last summers in a decaying corner of Upstate New York,...
| Author | Brenda Wineapple |
| ISBN | 0812972910 |
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said.
Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable...
Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871
| Author | Joseph Frank |
| ISBN | 0691015872 |
This long-awaited volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, does cover a truly miraculous period of his life-the six most remarkably productive years in the great novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced...
| Author | Robert Douglas-Fairhurst |
| ISBN | 0674050037 |
"Becoming Dickens" tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England's greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens's early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the...
| Author | Jonathan Bate |
| ISBN | 1400062063 |
“One man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s...
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire
With the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, the empire that had lasted three hundred years and "upon which the sun never set" finally lost its hold on the world and slipped into history. But the question of how we understand the British Empire--its origins, nature, purpose, and effect...
| Author | Jack Miles |
| ISBN | 0679781609 |
With the same passionate scholarship and analytical audacity he brought to the character of God, Jack Miles now approaches the literary and theological enigma of Jesus. In so doing, he tells the story of a broken promise–God’s ancient covenant with Israel–and of its strange, unlooked-for...
| Author | M.H. Abrams |
| ISBN | 0393006093 |
In this remarkable new book, M. H. Abrams definitively studies the Romantic Age (1789–1835)—the age in which Shelley claimed that "the literature of England has arisen as it were from a new birth." Abrams shows that the major poets of the age had in common important themes, modes of expression,...
| Author | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| ISBN | 1590170423 |
On July 28, 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife Sophia and daughters Una and Rose left their house in Western Massachusetts to visit relatives near Boston. Hawthorne and his five-year-old son Julian stayed behind. How father and son got along over the next three weeks is the subject of this tender and...
| Author | Francis Steegmuller |
| ISBN | 1590171160 |
Francis Steegmuller's beautifully executed double portrait of Madame Bovary and her maker is a remarkable and unusual biographical study, a sensitive and detailed account of how an unpromising young man turns himself into one of the world's greatest novelists. Steegmuller starts with the young...
| Author | Matthew Frye Jacobson |
| ISBN | 0809016281 |
How a new American identity was forged by immigration and expansion a century ago.
In Barbarian Virtues, Matthew Frye Jacobson offers a keenly argued and persuasive history of the close relationship between immigration and America's newly expansionist ambitions at the turn of the twentieth...
| Author | C. Vann Woodward |
| ISBN | 0807100196 |
After more than two decades, Origins of the New South is still recognized both as a classic in regional historiography and as the most perceptive account yet written on the period which spawned the New South.
Historian Sheldon Hackney recently summed it up this way:“The pyramid still stands....
| Author | Charles Postel |
| ISBN | 0195176502 |
In the late nineteenth century, monumental technological innovations like the telegraph and steam power made America and the world a much smaller place. New technologies also made possible large-scale organization and centralization. Corporations grew exponentially and the rich amassed great...
| Author | John Ruskin |
| ISBN | 0300092601 |
John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, first published in 1865, stands as a classic nineteenth-century statement on the natures and duties of men and women. Although widely popular in its time, the work in its entirety has been out of print since the early twentieth century. This volume returns Sesame...
In White's view, beyond the surface level of the historical text, there is a deep structural, or latent, content that is generally poetic and specifically linguistic in nature. This deeper content - the metahistorical element - indicates what an appropriate historical explanation might be.
In...
Did you study the works of Charles Dickens at school? Was he pushed down your throat so much that you now yawn when you hear his name? Then please, think again. Don't think of a staid Victorian writer, closeted in his room writing lengthy, boring screeds and rarely venturing out. Dickens was the life and...
In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical...
