Зарубежная литература - Страница 137

Description

In early 1787, the Congress of the United States called a meeting of delegates from each state to try to fix what was wrong with the Articles of Confederation. The Articles had created an intentionally weak central government, and that weakness had brought the nation to a crisis in only a few years. Over the next several months, the delegates worked to produce the document that would become the U.S. Constitution.

When Congress released the proposed Constitution to the states for ratification in the fall of 1787, reaction was swift: in newspapers throughout each state, columnists were quick to condemn the radical reworking of the nation’s formative document. In New York State, a member of the convention decided to launch into the fray; he and two other men he recruited began writing their own anonymous series defending the proposed Constitution, each one signed “Publius.” They published seventy-seven articles in four different New York papers over the course of several months. When the articles were collected and published as a book early the following year, the authors added another eight articles. Although many at the time guessed the true identities of the authors, it would be a few years before the authors were confirmed to be Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, Hamilton and Madison both being delegates at the convention.

Although the articles’ influence on the Constitution’s ratification is debated—newspapers were largely local at the time, so few outside New York saw the articles—their influence on the interpretation of the Constitution within the judiciary is immense. They are a window not only into the structure and content of the document, but also the reasons for the structure and content, written by men who helped author the document. Consequently, they have been quoted almost 300 times in Supreme Court cases. They remain perhaps the best and clearest explanation of the document that is the cornerstone of the United States government.

Description

The popular history of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody remains more myth than anything else, yet it’s undeniable that he was a central figure in the American Old West. Pony Express rider, stagecoach driver, trapper, soldier, bison hunter, scout, showman—his résumé reads like the quintessential record of all that makes up the Old West mythology, and it’s all documented in this, his original 1879 autobiography.

While The Life of Buffalo Bill is rife with the dramatic stylings of the dime novels and stage melodramas so popular at the time, in it Cody presents his version of his life: from his boyhood settling in the newly-opened Kansas territory, to his early life as a frontiersman. It was written when Cody was only thirty-three years old, just after he started his career as a showman and a few years before he created his world famous Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Originally titled The Life of Hon. William F. Cody Known as Buffalo Bill the Famous Hunter, Scout, and Guide: An Autobiography, it is an arguably more accurate account of both his life and the American West than the later 1917 autobiography The Great West That Was: “Buffalo Bill’s” Life Story which was ghostwritten by James Montague and published after his death. Although it makes many claims that are disputed today, The Life of Buffalo Bill reveals much about both the historical William F. Cody and the Buffalo Bill of American legend, and gives insight into the history of the American West.

Description

Thomas Paine was an American political commentator and activist in the latter part of the eighteenth century. His writing covered a wide range of subjects, but were centered on his core beliefs of republicanism and the inherent rights of people. An early pamphlet of his, “Common Sense,” was written soon after he arrived in America from Great Britain; with its focus on the ills of colonialism and the King’s veering between rational debate and righteous outrage, it has been cited as one of the major catalysts for the American Revolution. Later work attempted to correct the mistakes he perceived in post-revolution French government—written from experience after his election to the French National Convention—and even suggested a costed plan for a universal basic income funded by an inheritance tax.

Collected here are his essays and pamphlets written between 1776 and 1797, including the aforementioned “Common Sense” and other influential works like “The Republican Proclamation” and the “Declaration of Rights.”

Description

Five Weeks in a Balloon tells the tale of three Englishmen who attempt to cross Africa, from east to west, in a balloon. Dr. Ferguson is the rational scientist leading the trio, accompanied by loyal sidekick Joe and the doctor’s sporting friend Kennedy.

The three embark on many adventures: They encounter natives and dangerous animals, experience problems with their ballooning technology, and struggle with the winds and the weather. Throughout the novel, the author liberally sprinkles descriptions of flora, fauna, and geography, as seen through nineteenth century eyes.

Though this is Verne’s first published book, he already demonstrates much of the formula that drive his later works: the well-defined characters led by a rational scientist, the focus on science and technology, and of course the adventure-filled plot.

The novel, first published in 1863, was topical for its time, as European interest in African exploration was strong. At the time the book was published, David Livingstone was midst-exploration in south-east Africa, and Burton and Speke had recently returned from exploring the Great Lakes region. The novel itself contains many references to actual expeditions that would have been current or recent for the original readers of the novel.

Description

Orthodoxy is G. K. Chesterton’s response to his critics’ assertion that his earlier collection of essays, Heretics, had “merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy.” In his intellectual journey from pagan to agnostic to positivist philosopher, he had attempted to build a philosophy “some ten minutes in advance of the truth.” But when he compared his modern philosophy with Christian theology, he realized that he was “the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.” Thus, Orthodoxy is a work of Christian apologetics, where Chesterton tries to show that Christianity is a universal answer to the everyday needs of humanity, and not just an arbitrary philosophy handed down from on high.

Description

Thomas Paine wrote the first part of The Rights of Man in 1791 as a response to the furious attack on the French Revolution by the British parliamentarian Edmund Burke in his pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France, published the previous year. Paine carefully dissects and counters Burke’s arguments and provides a more accurate description of the events surrounding the revolution of 1789. He then reproduces and comments on the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens” promulgated by the National Assembly of France.

The manuscript of The Rights of Man was placed with the publisher Joseph Johnson, but that publisher was threatened with legal action by the British Government. Paine then gave the work to another publisher, J. S. Jordan, and on the advice of William Blake, Paine went to France to be out of the way of possible arrest in Britain. The Rights of Man was published in March 1791, and was an immediate success with the British public, selling nearly a million copies.

A second part of the book, subtitled “Combining Principle and Practice,” was published in February 1792. It puts forward practical proposals for the establishment of republican government in countries like Britain.

The Rights of Man had a major impact, leading to the establishment of a number of reform societies. After the publication of the second part of the book, Paine and his publisher were charged with seditious libel, and Paine was eventually forced to leave Britain and flee to France. Today The Rights of Man is considered a classic of political writing and philosophy.

Description

The American Crisis is a collection of articles by Thomas Paine, originally published from December 1776 to December 1783, that focus on rallying Americans during the worst years of the Revolutionary War. Paine used his deistic beliefs to galvanize the revolutionaries, for example by claiming that the British are trying to assume the powers of God and that God would support the American colonists. These articles were so influential that others began to adopt some of their more stirring phrases, catapulting them into the cultural consciousness; for example, the opening line of the first Crisis, which reads “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Description

While perhaps best known for his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the Russian author and religious thinker Leo Tolstoy was also a prolific author of short fiction. This Standard Ebooks production compiles all of Tolstoy’s short stories and novellas written from 1852 up to his death, arranged in order of their original publication.

The stories in this collection vary enormously in size and scope, from short, page-length fables composed for the education of schoolchildren, to full novellas like “Family Happiness.” Readers who are familiar with Tolstoy’s life and religious experiences—as detailed, for example, in his spiritual memoir A Confession—may be able to trace the events of Tolstoy’s life through the changing subjects of these stories. Some early stories, like “The Raid” and the “Sevastopol” sketches, draw from Tolstoy’s experiences in the Caucasian War and the Crimean War when he served in the Imperial Russian Army, while other early stories like “Recollections of a Scorer” and “Two Hussars” reflect Tolstoy’s personal struggle with gambling addiction.

Later stories in the collection, written during and after Tolstoy’s 1870s conversion to Christian anarcho-pacifism (a spiritual and religious philosophy described in detail in his treatise The Kingdom of God is Within You), frequently reflect either Tolstoy’s own experiences in spiritual struggle (e.g. “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch”) or his interpretation of the New Testament (e.g. “The Forged Coupon”), or both. Many later stories, like “Three Questions” and “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” are explicitly didactic in nature and are addressed to a popular audience to promote his religious ideals and views on social and economic justice.

Description

The Autobiography of Mark Twain is a collection of reminiscences and reflections. Twain began dictating them in 1870, and in 1906 he published Chapters from My Autobiography in twenty-five installments in the North American Review. He continued to write stories for his autobiography, most of which weren’t published in his lifetime due to a lack of access to his papers, or their private subject matters. After Twain’s death, numerous editors have tried to organize this collection of published and unpublished autobiographical works, producing various differing editions. The most recent attempt is by the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, which published a three-volume edition; but, through what many consider legal trickery, the University of California, Berkeley has claimed copyright on that edition until 2047—137 years after Twain’s death.

This Standard Ebooks production is based on Harper and Brothers’ 1924 collection, compiled by Albert Bigelow Paine.

Description

Denis, a young writer and poet, travels to an English countryside manor to spend the summer alongside a cast of outlandish leisure class intellectuals. The younger guests of the manor grapple with navigating love and sex within a post-Victorian society. Older guests and inhabitants obsess over trivialities from their vast libraries, eager to give a show of their knowledge to each other. The novel uses these interactions to paint a scathing representation of their insecurities and world views.

Crome Yellow is Aldous Huxley’s first published novel. His inspiration for many of the characters came from his time spent at Garsington Manor, a haven for many writers and poets of the time.