English Literature

“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.” The life of Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, takes a horrifying turn when he wakes up one day to find that he has tran...

The Republic is a Socratic dialogue, written by Plato around 380 BC regarding the definition of justice, the order and character of the just city-state and the just man. It has been widely acknowledged as one of the world’s most influential works ...

“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” This tremendously famous novella, written in 1952, underlined Hemingway's influence and presence in the literary world. The Old Man and the Sea is a story of fr...

“Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history.” In the words of a poet and in the shape of a prose, Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism is the culmination of his l...

Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel, To the Lighthouse, was widely praised and has remained the most popular of all her novels. It is considered among the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century. There is minimal action. The novel works t...

Animal Farm is a dystopian allegorical novella. It reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II. Orwell, being a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and was against Moscow-directed Stalinism. The nove...

The task of the economist is not to predict the future but to explain the present. Ten Great Economists, originally published in 1914, offers an insightful exploration of the influential minds who shaped the field of economics. Through a blend of ...

In the delightful social comedy of Pride and Prejudice (1813) Jane Austen delicately handles the problem of love and money in marriage where, in spite of many hurdles, eventually love triumphs over 'pride' and 'prejudice'. With a mild satiric tone...

A classic that took the world by storm, raising havoc among scientists and religious people as its exposition apparently contradicted the account of the creation of the world of Genesis in the Bible, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species remains ...

Before Jane Eyre, The Professor was the first novel written by Charlotte Bronte. It was published posthumously in 1857 and remains a classic among her other novels Jane Eyre and Villette. The novel is a trajectory of the protagonist William Crims...

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, or Julius Caesar, is believed to have been written in 1599 and is one of Shakespeare's works based on the true historical events. Though Caesar is the title character, his role is not as large as that of Marcus Brutus...

Rudyard Kipling’s works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”; “Three and An Extra”; “On Greenhow Hill”; “The Limitations of Pambé Serang”; “The Disturber of Traffic”; “The...

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” Relativity as a concept was not new to physics when Albert Einstein developed an interest in the field. Dissecting Relativity into the General Theory and ...

The Waves by Virginia Woolf The Waves is Virginia Woolf’s most audacious exploration of the possibilities of the novel form. Instead of narrating her characters’ outward actions, Woolf enters their minds and reports their thoughts and perceptions ...

The Communist Manifesto is a political pamphlet by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels pub-lished in 1848. When the revolutions began to erupt, the Manifesto came to be recognized as one of the world’s most influential political man...

In Persuasion, Jane Austen’s last completed novel, unpublished until her death, satire and ridicule become milder and the tone is more grave and tender. This novel depicts her most memorable heroine – Anne Elliot, a young woman of perfect breeding...

The Tragedy of Macbeth, or Macbeth, is one of his Shakespeare's shorter tragedies, and was probably written between 1599–1606, and is thought to have been first performed in 1606. This play was penned the play during the region of James V1, who wa...

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, usually shortened to just Hamlet, was written by Shakespeare sometime between 1599–1602. It is arguably one of his most famous tragedies. The lines from Hamlet's monologue in act three that begin "To be, o...

Women in Love, the book Lawrence considered his best, was written during World War I, and while that conflict is never mentioned in the novel, a sense of background danger, of lurking catastrophe, continually informs its drama of two couples dynam...

Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, is a humorous account of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of loca...

The Return of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of thirteen very interesting Sherlock Holmes stories that were published in 1903-04 in the Strand Magazine in UK and Collier’s in the United States. The first story, “The Adventure of the Empty House”,...

Dante Alighieri's The Inferno is the first part of his epic Divine Comedy, which takes readers on a journey through Hell. Guided by the Roman poet Virgil, Dante traverses the nine circles of the damned, reflecting on humanity's moral and spiritual...

H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is a groundbreaking science fiction novel that depicts humanity's struggle against a devastating alien invasion. Set in late 19th-century England, it narrates the catastrophic arrival of Martians, showcasing the e...

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a gothic and moral fantasy novel by Oscar Wilde. This is the only novel he wrote and published in 1891 after heavy editing because critics and editors deemed it immoral and indecent. However, it flourished to be a mas...

The Kama Sutra, an ancient Indian Hindu text written by Vātsyāyana, is widely considered to be the standard work on human sexual behavior. A portion of the work consists of practical advice on sexual intercourse. It is largely in prose, but some v...

“I think everyone in the world is friends if you can only get them to see you don't want to be un-friends.” Edith Nesbit's The Railway Children, a beloved classic of children's literature, unfolds the lives of three siblings—Roberta, Peter and Ph...

The Prince contains a number of maxims concerning politics. It states that in order to retain power, the hereditary prince must carefully maintain the socio-political institutions which the people are accustomed to, whereas a new prince must first...

Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, marks an important stage in her development as a writer. In this novel she finally departs from the form of the traditional English novel, establishing herself as a writer of genius. Her stream of consc...

The story revolves around young and amorous but capricious Bathsheba Everdene and her enviable problem of coping with her three suitors simultaneously. The first is shepherd Gabriel Oak, financially ruined by his sheepdog driving his flock over a ...

Lewis Carroll's masterpieces, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, mark an epoch in the history of dream literature, having as much appeal for adults as for children. The story is of a girl Alice, who chasing ...

The Great Gatsby is generally considered to be the finest novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Written in an easy style, without complex literary experiment, at the height of the author’s maturity, it is now an undisputed classic of American lite...

The Time Machine is a social allegory set in the year 802701 A.D., describing a society divided into two classes, the subterranean workers, called Morlocks, and the decadent Eloi. The central character, referred to throughout as the Time Traveller...

The book contains the best short stories written by Hector Hugh Munro under his pen name, Saki. "Reginald" was written after he had given up foreign reporting and settled in London. It features three short stories "Reginald at the Theater"; "Regin...

Dracula, published in 1897, is the most famous of all tales of vampirism. Presented in diaries, letters and news items, this story of the bloodsucking vampire who preys on the living and can be repelled by garlic, crucifix and a wooden stake is bo...

Kipling's allegory, The Jungle Books, set in India and filled with high adventure and extraordinary characters that touch both our intellect and our emotions, is an unforgettable mythic tale of a boy Mowgli, the fearless man-cub, looking for where...

Politics is a work of political philosophy by Aristotle. The title of the book literally means “the things concerning the polis.” The end of the Nicomachean Ethics declared that the inquiry into ethics necessarily follows into politics, and the tw...

When the starving French masses rise in hate to overthrow a corrupt and decadent government, both the guilty and innocent become victims of their frenzied anger. Soon nothing stands in the way of the chilling figure they enlist for their cause - L...

“I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics.” A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett follows the heartwarming story of Sara Crewe, a young girl with a vivid imagination, who attends Miss Minchin’s school in London....

Interest in supernatural phenomena was high during the time of Charles Dickens. He was open-minded, willing to accept, and put to test the existence of spirits. A fascinating and lesser known side of Dickens’s work is his flair for ghost stories. ...

Two Treatises of Government is a work of political philosophy published anonymously in 1689 by John Locke. The First Treatise is a scathing criticism of patriarchalism and presents a forceful refutation of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha. Locke proceed...

The book contains 41 stories written by Flora Annie Steel and illustrated by Arthur Rackham. The stories are very interesting to read and engage the readers' Attention from the beginning to the end. Each story has some moral lesson which inculcate...

Dubliners is one of the most magnificent short story collections in the English language. The manuscript was sent to the English publisher, Grant Richards in late 1905. After initial enthusiasm for the book, Richards became uncomfortable about sex...

The Merchant of Venice is a 16th century play written by Shakespeare between 1596-1598 in which a merchant in Venice must default on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock. It is usually classified as a romantic comedy though its d...

It is a fantasy novel published in 1928. It traces the career of the androgynous Orlando through four centuries from the late sixteenth century. It contains a great many well-observed literary and historical insights into the ages through which it...

Oliver Twist, Dickens's critique of the harsh Poor Law of 1834, and a grim picture of the sordid reality the London underworld of Dickens's times, shows Dickens's deep concern for the underprivileged. The only token of identity left by his dying m...

Man and Superman, a four-Act drama, was written in 1903 as a response to those who had questioned Shaw as to why he had never written a play based on the Don Juan theme. It deserves the position of Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece. The plot revolves aro...

Jacob Flanders is flawed, but also quite a brilliant man. An embodiment of solitude, Jacob is unable to concoct his affinity in life for traditions, contemporary society, intimacy with women, and philosophical contemplations. His life from childho...

Candide, a privileged and sheltered young man, is under the folly of optimism and believes he lives in the ‘best of all possible worlds’ as his mentor, Pangloss, espoused the worldly goodness of German Philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. But fa...

Rated among the most excellent works of American fiction, Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer paints an unforgettable picture of Mississippi frontier life, combining picaresque adventure with challenging satire and great innovative p...

When Frankenstein, a young idealist Genevan student of natural philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt, stumbled into the secret of infusing life into matter, and created a living thing out of an assemblage of bones from charnel houses, little ...

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, originally published in 1894 by Arthur Conan Doyle. In the American edition there are eleven stories, while in others there are twelve. All these stories appeared in the St...

The initial fame of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 was due to Gitanjali which was published from London in 1912, although Tagore had published another Gītānjali in Bengali in 1910. Deeply rooted...

The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, or simply Othello, is a tragedy written in approximately 1603. One of Shakespeare's most tightly woven works, it explores themes of racism, betrayal, love, revenge, and forgiveness, and has spawned multi...

The Tempest, a play in five acts, is believed to have been written in 1610-1611 and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. The play was first performed about 1611 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from an ...

The Secret Garden is one of the most delightful and enduring classics of children’s literature, which has remained a firm favorite with children the world over ever since it made its first appearance in The American Magazine in 1910. It was brough...

The Alchemist is considered Jonson’s best and most characteristic comedy. It was first performed in 1610 by King’s Men. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a great romantic poet, claimed that it had one of the three most perfect plots in literature. The play...

Hemingway's words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a book.' In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway's most celebrated novel, his stark and emotive style of writing reaches its zenith. The plot follows the doomed lov...

Sense and Sensibility, the first of Austen’s novels to be published, remains as fresh as ever it was. The basic theme of the novel is concerned with the personalities of the two sisters of contrasting temperaments who share comparable experiences ...

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a famous children’s novel written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W.W. Denslow, was originally published in 1900. It has since been reprinted on numerous occasions, most often under the title The Wizard of Oz. The ...

Rated among the most excellent works of American fiction, Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn paints an unforgettable picture of Mississippi frontier life, combining picaresque adventure with challenging satire and great innova...