Зарубежная литература - Страница 140
Description
Hulda, the daughter of an innkeeper in the Norwegian countryside, is engaged to Ole, a fisherman. When Ole fails to return, Hulda fears him dead, until she receives a message that he has scribbled on the back of a lottery ticket. Newspapers broadcast the story, fueling excitement and speculation ahead of the lottery drawing.
The novel, based in part on the Verne’s travel through Scandinavia in 1861, belongs to the collection Voyages Extraordinaires which contains some of his best-known works, like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days. Un Billet de Loterie appeared first in installments in the magazine Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation, followed immediately by a book edition published by Hetzel.
Description
King Henry IV’s plan to lead a crusade to Jerusalem is put on hold after he hears about skirmishes along England’s Welsh and Scottish borders. The Welsh rebel Glendower has fought off the English forces and has managed to capture Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March. Meanwhile, Harry Percy’s fight is successfully keeping the Scottish rebels, led by Douglas, at bay. Meanwhile Harry Perry, better known as Hotspur, has taken numerous political prisoners, including Douglas’s son Mordake.
The king is also concerned about his son Hal. During this time of political unrest, Hal has been spending most of his time drinking with criminals and highwaymen in taverns on the poor side of London—behavior unbefitting a future king. His closest friend and partner in crime is Sir John Falstaff, a fat old drunk and a charismatic thief. When the king calls for his wild son to return to court, Falstaff and his street-smart group of friends are ready to support their prince on the battlefront.
This Standard Ebooks production is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.
Description
Claude Wheeler is the son of a successful Nebraskan farmer and a very devout mother. He’s sent to a private religious college because his mother feels it’s safer, but he yearns for State college where he might be able expand his knowledge of the real world. Claude doesn’t feel comfortable in any situation, and almost every step he takes is a wrong one. While he’s struggling to find his way in a questionable marriage, the U.S. decides to enter World War I, and Claude enlists. He’s commissioned as a lieutenant, and he and his outfit are deployed to France in the waning months of the war. There Claude finds the purpose he’s been missing his whole life.
One of Ours is Cather’s first novel following the completion of her Prairie Trilogy, which she finished before the U.S. had entered the war. Cather’s cousin Grosvenor had grown up on the farm next to hers, had many of the traits she gave to Claude, and, like her protagonist, went with the Army to France towards the end of the war. After the war was over, she felt compelled to write something different than the novels she had become known for, saying that this one “stood between me and anything else.” Although today it’s not considered her best work, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1923.
Description
As the dust settles on the battlefield at Shrewsbury, news spreads that the rebel forces fighting against King Henry IV have suffered a terrible defeat. Their leader, Harry “Hotspur” Percy, was killed by Prince Hal. The rebel troops quickly abandon the fight after seeing their leader die. Two powerful cohorts, the Earl of Worcester and Douglas, are taken as prisoners by the King’s men. The Earl of Northumberland vows to avenge his son’s death and plans to seek support from the Archbishop of York.
Meanwhile, the Archbishop has convened his group of allies—Thomas Mowbray, Lord Hastings, and Lord Bardolph—to plan the next battle against King Henry. If they want a chance of winning, they fight on three separate fronts: one to fight King Henry’s forces, one to fight the Welsh rebels led by Owen Glendower, and one to maintain the fight in France. They decide to follow this plan regardless of whether or not Northumberland lends them his army.
As the Prince’s merry team of misfits return to London, Falstaff continues to create mischief wherever he goes. After hearing that his father has fallen sick, Hal starts to regret the days when he used to drink and steal with Falstaff. If he is to be the next king, he must leave behind his past along with his partners in crime.
This Standard Ebooks production is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.
Description
Jane Addams was a famous social activist living in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. She’s perhaps most famous for introducing the Settlement movement to the United States and for founding Hull House, a hugely influential settlement house in Chicago.
Settlement houses were founded on the idea of uplifting the poor working class by quartering the rich and poor together in close proximity. By living together under the guidance of settlement workers, the poor would have access to communal education, healthcare, day care, food, and shelter, allowing them to improve their positions in society instead of being ground under heel by the privations of poverty and the brutality of workhouses. Immigrants in particular could take advantage of the settlement’s safety net, helping them naturalize more easily in their new country as they struggled to find stability while both working and raising children.
Hull House, named after the house’s original owner, was Addams’ life work. It brought together the urban poor—mostly recently-settled immigrants—together into a vast thirteen-building complex near the heart of Chicago’s downtown. In this book Addams describes the house, its founding, and its operations; because running the house was such a major part of her life, she considered this book to be her autobiography of sorts. Hull House remained open until 2012, operating continuously for over 120 years.
For her work at Hull House and for her involvement in the Peace Movement of World War I, Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the award’s first American woman recipient. At the time of her death she was the most well-known female public figure in America.
Description
The Conquest of Bread is a political treatise written by the anarcho-communist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Written after a split between anarchists and Marxists at the First International (a 19th-century association of left-wing radicals), The Conquest of Bread advocates a path to a communist society distinct from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, rooted in the principles of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation.
Since its original publication in 1892, The Conquest of Bread has immensely influenced both anarchist theory and anarchist praxis. As one of the first comprehensive works of anarcho-communist theory published for wide distribution, it both popularized anarchism in general and encouraged a shift in anarchist thought from individualist anarchism to social anarchism. It was also an influential text among the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and the late anarchist theorist and anthropologist David Graeber cited the book as an inspiration for the Occupy movement of the early 2010s in his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
Description
Christopher Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta at the height of his career, and it remained popular until England’s theaters were closed by Parliament in 1642. Many have critiqued it for its portrayal of Elizabethan antisemitism, but others argue that Marlowe criticizes Judaism, Islam, and Christianity equally for their hypocrisy. This antisemitism debate continues on to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which was written about ten years later and which some consider to be directly influenced by The Jew of Malta.
The play focuses on a wealthy Jewish merchant named Barabas who lives on the island of Malta. When the island’s governor strips Barabas of all his wealth in order to pay off the invading Turks, Barabas plots and schemes to get his revenge, killing all who get in his way and ultimately pitting Spanish Christians against Ottoman Muslims in an attempt to punish them all.
Scholars dispute the authorship of the play, with some suggesting that the last half was written by a different author. Though the play is known to have been performed as early as 1594, the earliest surviving print edition is from 1633, which includes a prologue and epilogue written by another playwright for a planned revival.
Description
Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! was first published in June of 1913 by Houghton Mifflin to high praise. Cather was immensely proud of the work and considered it her first “true” novel, having discovered her own form and subject.
Told in five parts, O Pioneers! follows the Bergsons, a family of Swedish-American immigrants farming the prairie of Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century. After the death of her father, heroine Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm, using her insight to transform it from a precarious enterprise to a prosperous one over the following decade. As the Nebraskan farming community grows and her older brothers build families and comfortable lives, Alexandra remains independent, attached only to the land, her youngest brother, Emil, and her neighbor, Marie Shabata. These three central characters navigate duty, familial pressures, tragedy, and uncertain romance.
With its independent, entrepreneurial female main character, O Pioneers! can be read as a deeply feminist novel that nevertheless upholds American ideals of national destiny through pastoral settlement.
Description
Two decades after Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, the Baltimore Gun Club returns with its sights on the North Pole’s rich coal deposits. Access to the area would be facilitated under a more temperate climate, which, the team believes, can be achieved by slightly altering the Earth’s axis of rotation. This climate change would affect every region of the globe to various degrees, thus creating anxiety and opposition worldwide.
Sans Dessus Dessous, number 34 in the Voyages Extraordinaires collection, appeared in French in 1889 and was published in English the following year by J. G. Ogilvie as Topsy-Turvy.
Description
A Sicilian Romance begins when a tourist meets a local monk at the crumbling ruins of the castle Mazzini. The monk invites her to the monastery to view a manuscript that records the mysterious happenings that occurred hundreds of years ago in the once-great castle. The manuscript tells of the plight of two sisters, Julia and Emilia Mazzini, who, after the return of their tyrannical father, witness supernatural phenomena around the castle’s neglected southern wing.
Radcliffe was viewed as the greatest writer of the Gothic literary style by most early 19th century critics and literary historians despite Horace Walpole seemingly “inventing” the genre in The Castle of Otranto. A Sicilian Romance was first published anonymously in 1790, making it the second of her published works.