Best of
19th-Century

1819

La Belle Dame Sans Merci


John Keats - 1819
    It exists in two versions, with minor differences between them. The original was written by Keats in 1819. He used the title of a 15th century poem by Alain Chartier, though the plots of the two poems are different. The poem is considered an English classic, stereotypical to other of Keats' works. It avoids simplicity of interpretation despite simplicity of structure. At only a short twelve stanzas, of only four lines each, with a simple ABCB rhyme scheme, the poem is nonetheless full of enigmas, and has been the subject of numerous interpretations.

Keats's Poetry and Prose


John Keats - 1819
    Readers can trace the poems through letters, reviews, and related material chronologically interleaved with the texts themselves. This edition offers extensive apparatus to help readers fully appreciate Keats s poetry and legacy, including an introduction, headnotes, explanatory annotations, and a wealth of contextual documents. Criticism includes twelve important commentaries on Keats and his poetry, by Paul de Man, Marjorie Levinson, Grant F. Scott, Margaret Homans, Nicholas Roe, Stuart Sperry, Neil Fraistat, Jack Stillinger, James Chandler, Alan Bewell, and Jeffrey N. Cox.

The Masque of Anarchy: Written on Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester


Percy Bysshe Shelley - 1819
    The Masque of Anarchy (or The Mask of Anarchy) is a British political poem written in 1819 following the Peterloo massacre of that year.

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr


E.T.A. Hoffmann - 1819
    T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) who first explored many of the themes and techniques which were later used by writers from Dickens to Dostoyevsky, Poe to Kafka, Baudelaire to Marquez. His career reached a glorious climax in The Tomcat Murr, perhaps the strangest novel of the nineteenth century.. "Hoffmann was a follower of Cervantes and Sterne, a pioneering 'magic realist', fascinated by Gothic horror, extreme mental states and supernatural events occurring within sharply (and sometimes satirically) rendered social settings. A talented composer and painter, he portrayed himself in the guise of Johannes Kreisler - the hypochondriac, antisocial and moody but brilliant musician. In this astonishing book, a vain and very bourgeois tomcat sets out to write his memoirs, using a biography of Kreisler as a blotting pad. By a printer's error, the two lives get spliced together into a bizarre double narrative. A supreme example of literary bravado, The Tomcat Murr is also shot through with the warmth, humanity and almost uncanny ability to captivate his readers which make Hoffmann the greatest of German story-tellers.

The Serapion Brethren Volume I


E.T.A. Hoffmann - 1819
    T. A. Hoffmann and several of his friends. The Serapion Brethren also is the title of a four-volume collection of Hoffmann's novellas and fairytales that appeared in 1819, 1820, and 1821. Hoffmann's stories were very influential during the 19th century. He is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.The Serapion Brethren Volume I contains: THE STORY OF SERAPION; AN INTERRUPTED CADENCE; THE POET AND THE COMPOSER; A FRAGMENT OF THE LIVES OF THREE FRIENDS; THE MINES OF FALUN; NUTCRACKER AND THE KING OF MICE; THE DOGE AND THE DOGARESSA; MASTER MARTIN, THE COOPER, AND HIS MEN; THE STRANGER CHILD. Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann better known by his pen name E.T.A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann), was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. He is the subject and hero of Jacques Offenbach's fictional opera 'The Tales of Hoffmann', and the author of the novelette 'The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'.

The Serapion Brethren Volume II


E.T.A. Hoffmann - 1819
    T. A. Hoffmann and several of his friends. The Serapion Brethren also is the title of a four-volume collection of Hoffmann's novellas and fairytales that appeared in 1819, 1820, and 1821.Hoffmann's stories were very influential during the 19th century. He is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.Contents of Vol II include: THE LIFE OF A WELL-KNOWN CHARACTER; ALBERTINE'S WOOERS; THE UNCANNY GUEST; MADEMOISELLE SCUDERI; GAMBLERS' FORTUNE; SIGNOR FORMICA; PHENOMENA; THE MUTUAL INTERDEPENDENCE OF THINGS; THE KING'S BETROTHED. Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann better known by his pen name E.T.A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann), was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. He is the subject and hero of Jacques Offenbach's fictional opera 'The Tales of Hoffmann', and the author of the novelette 'The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'.