Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  British Short Story The - Volume...

  Rudyard Kipling, H G Wells,...

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  These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves.  Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language. 
   
  Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind.  These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology’s boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles - which as a geographical definition is the UK mainland and the island of Ireland - and wrote in a familiar form of English. 
   
  Whilst Daniel Defoe is the normal starting point we begin a little earlier with Aphra Behn, an equally colourful character as well as an astonishing playwright and poet.  And this is how we begin to differentiate our offering; both in scope, in breadth and in depth.  These islands have raised and nurtured female authors of the highest order and rank and more often than not they have been sidelined or ignored in favour of that other gender which usually gets the plaudits and the royalties. 
   
  Way back when it was almost immoral that a woman should write.  A few pages of verse might be tolerated but anything else brought ridicule and shame.  That seems unfathomable now but centuries ago women really were chattel, with marriage being, as the Victorian author Charlotte Smith boldly stated ‘legal prostitution’.  Some of course did find a way through - Jane Austen, the Brontes and Virginia Woolf but for many others only by changing their names to that of men was it possible to get their book to publication and into a readers hands.  Here we include George Eliot and other examples. 
   
  We add further depth with many stories by authors who were famed and fawned over in their day.  Some wrote only a hidden gem or two before succumbing to poverty and death. There was no second career as a game show guest, reality TV contestant or youtuber. They remain almost forgotten outposts of talent who never prospered despite devoted hours of pen and brain. 
   
  Keeping to a chronological order helps us to highlight how authors through the ages played around with characters and narrative to achieve distinctive results across many scenarios, many styles and many genres. The short story became a sort of literary laboratory, an early disruptor, of how to present and how to appeal to a growing audience as a reflection of social and societal changes.  Was this bound to happen or did a growing population that could read begin to influence rather than just accept? 
   
  Moving through the centuries we gather a groundswell of authors as we hit the Victorian Age - an age of physical mass communication albeit only on an actual printed page.  An audience was offered a multitude of forms: novels (both whole and in serialised form) essays, short stories, poems all in weekly, monthly and quarterly form.  Many of these periodicals were founded or edited by literary behemoths from Dickens and Thackeray through to Jerome K Jerome and, even some female editors including Ethel Colburn Mayne, Alice Meynell and Ella D’Arcy. 
   
  Now authors began to offer a wider, more diverse choice from social activism and justice – and injustice to cutting stories of manners and principles.  From many forms of comedy to mental meltdowns, from science fiction to unrequited heartache.  If you can imagine it an author probably wrote it.  
   
  At the end of the 19th Century bestseller lists and then prizes, such as the Nobel and Pulitzer, helped focus an audience’s attention to a books literary merit and sales worth. Previously coffeehouses, Imperial trade, unscrupulous overseas printers ignoring copyright restrictions, publishers with their book lists as an appendix and the gossip and interchange of polite society had been the main avenues to secure sales and profits.

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  Afterward

  Edith Wharton

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  Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Among her most popular and terrifying tales are the many masterly ghost stories which she wrote in her early career.Afterward is a dramatic story of the most mysterious ghost of all. When Ned and Mary Boyne move to a remote and unrenovated manor house in Dorsetshire, their list of desired features includes a resident ghost. Their friend Alida Stair confirms that there is indeed a ghost, but "you will never know it until long, long afterward."Ned and Mary keep a look out for the ghost at first, but there is no sign of it. Or is there? As the foundations of their comfortable and prosperous life slowly begin to crumble, the import of a figure they once fleetingly glimpsed on the driveway begins to dawn. And then a strange and very terrible event takes place ...

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  The Swoop! - Unabridged

  P. G. Wodehouse

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  The Swoop! tells of the simultaneous invasion of England by several armies—"England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standing-room." The invaders are the Russians under Grand Duke Vodkakoff, the Germans under Prince Otto of Saxe-Pfennig—the reigning British monarch of the day was Edward VII of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha—the Swiss Navy, the Monegasques, a band of Moroccan brigands under Raisuli, the Young Turks, the Mad Mullah from Somalialand, the Chinese under Prince Ping Pong Pang, and the Bollygollans in war canoes…

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  Anne Of The Island

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

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  This is book #3 in the Anne of Green Gables series.  Anne is growing up and leaving the Island to spend four years of her life at Redmond College.  She meets a wonderful new friend in Philippa Gordon, offspring to an old and exclusive "bluenose" family. Phil's family ties, combined with her beauty and charm, open the gates of all the social cliques and clubs at Redmond.  And where Phil went, Anne went.  Thus, Anne found her social pathway at Redmond made very easy while other freshettes were doomed to remain on the fringe of things.

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  Walk in a Workhouse A (Unabridged)

  Charles Dickens

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  Charles Dickens was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.A WALK IN A WORKHOUSE: On a certain Sunday, I formed one of the congregation assembled in the chapel of a large metropolitan Workhouse. With the exception of the clergyman and clerk, and a very few officials, there were none but paupers present. The children sat in the galleries; the women in the body of the chapel, and in one of the side aisles; the men in the remaining aisle.

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  The Murders In The Rue Morgue -...

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  With this absorbing and surprising story, Edgar Allan Poe introduced amateur Parisian sleuth C. August Dupin to the world, and invented the modern detective story. This classic tale has lost none of its ability to startle and intrigue. 
  Narrated by Robin Reads.

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