Best of
Literature

1897

The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll


Lewis Carroll - 1897
    Included are: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Sylvie and Bruno, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, "The Hunting of the Snark," and Lewis' poetry, phantasmagoria, stories, miscellany, and "acrostics, inscriptions, and other verse."The following have also never appeared in print except in their original editions: "Resident Women Students," "Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection," "Lawn Tennis Tournaments," "Rules for Court Circular," "Croquet Castles," "Mischmasch," "Doublets," "A Postal Problem," "The Alphabet-Cipher," and "Introduction to The Lost Plum Cake."

De Profundis


Oscar Wilde - 1897
    Wilde wrote the letter between January and March 1897; he was not allowed to send it, but took it with him upon release. In it he repudiates Lord Alfred for what Wilde finally sees as his arrogance and vanity; he had not forgotten Douglas's remark, when he was ill, "When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting." He also felt redemption and fulfillment in his ordeal, realizing that his hardship had filled the soul with the fruit of experience, however bitter it tasted at the time.

The Gadfly


Ethel Lilian Voynich - 1897
    The story centers on the life of the protagonist, Arthur Burton, as a member of the Youth movement, and his antagonist, Padre Montanelli. A thread of a tragic relationship between Arthur and his love Gemma simultaneously runs through the story. It is a story of faith, disillusionment, revolution, romance, and heroism.

De Profundis and Other Writings


Oscar Wilde - 1897
    This collection contains, too, many examples of that humorous and epigrammatic genius which captured the London theatre and, by suddenly casting light from an unexpected angle, widened the bounds of truth.

Cyrano de Bergerac


Edmond Rostand - 1897
    Set in Louis XIII's reign, it is the moving and exciting drama of one of the finest swordsmen in France, gallant soldier, brilliant wit, tragic poet-lover with the face of a clown. Rostand's extraordinary lyric powers gave birth to a universal hero--Cyrano De Bergerac--and ensured his own reputation as author of one of the best-loved plays in the literature of the stage.This translation, by the American poet Brian Hooker, is nearly as famous as the original play itself, and is generally considered to be one of the finest English verse translations ever written.

Classics of Horror: Dracula & Frankenstein


Bram Stoker - 1897
    It was 1st published as a hardcover in 1897 by Archibald Constable & Co. Dracula has been assigned to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel & invasion literature. Structurally it's an epistolary novel, told as a series of letters, diary entries, ships' logs, etc. Literary critics have examined many themes in the novel, such as the role of women in Victorian culture, conventional & conservative sexuality, immigration, colonialism, folklore & postcolonialism. Altho Stoker didn't invent the vampire, the novel's influence on the popularity of vampires has been singularly responsible for many theatrical, film & tv interpretations since its publication.FRANKENSTEIN or The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed artificial life experiment that's produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley. She started writing the story when she was 18. It was published when she was 21. The 1st edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the 2nd edition, published in France in 1823. She'd travelled the region in which the story takes place. The topics of galvanism & other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. The storyline was taken from a dream. She was talking with three writer-colleagues, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron & John Polidori. They decided they would have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for weeks about what her storyline could be, she dreamt about a scientist who created life & was horrified by what he'd made. Then Frankenstein was written. Frankenstein is infused with some elements of the Gothic novel & the Romantic movement & is also considered to be an early example of sf. Brian Aldiss has argued it should be considered the 1st true sf story, because unlike in previous stories with fantastical elements resembling those of later sf, the central character "makes a deliberate decision" & "turns to modern experiments in the laboratory" to achieve fantastic results. The story is partially based on Giovanni Aldini's electrical experiments on dead & living animals & was also a warning against the expansion of modern man in the Industrial Revolution, alluded to in its subtitle, The Modern Prometheus. It's had a considerable influence across literature & popular culture & spawned a complete genre of horror stories & films.

Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-Century Novel about Colonial India


Fakir Mohan Senapati - 1897
    A text that makes use—and deliberate misuse—of both British and Indian literary conventions, Six Acres and a Third provides a unique "view from below" of Indian village life under colonial rule. Set in Orissa in the 1830s, the novel focuses on a small plot of land, tracing the lives and fortunes of people who are affected by the way this property is sold and resold, as new legal arrangements emerge and new types of people come to populate and transform the social landscape. This graceful translation faithfully conveys the rare and compelling account of how the more unsavory aspects of colonialism affected life in rural India.

The Three Weavers


Annie Fellows Johnston - 1897
    As the story goes, once upon a time there were three weavers, and to each was born a daughter. The "Watcher of Weavers" prophesied to each saying, "A royal prince shall seek to wed thy child" on the condition that she weave a mantle for the prince that will be fair to look upon with rich cloth of gold, and it must fit him as perfectly as the falcon's feathers fit the falcon. Each father is responsible to teach his daughter how to prepare for her prince. When should he begin? Each father's approach coupled with his daughter's cooperation will decide the fate of their future. This is a must read for every father and daughter of all ages!

The Woman Who Was Poor


Léon Bloy - 1897
    

The Demi-Sexes and The Androgynes


Jane de La Vaudère - 1897
    Presented here in English for the first time, in a bravura translation by Brian Stableford, are two highly unusual novels from one of the fin-de-siEcle's most eccentric writers.The Demi-Sexes, originally published in 1897, was the first of Jane de La VaudEre's novels seriously to explore the territory of the conventionally unmentionable, which it does forthrightly, in its first chapter, when its heroine, Camille, asks a doctor, in secret, for "an operation."The Androgynes, first published in 1903, a tale of faithfulness and fickleness amidst the vicious rivalries of the literary and artistic worlds, presents a lush and decadent Paris, replete with cross-dressers, opium smoking, and a provocative miscellany of amour.

Asphodels


Bernardo Couto Castillo - 1897
    In the twelve stories of Asphodels, Mexican author Bernardo Couto Castillo (1879-1901), a cult figure in Mexico due to his short life and French-influenced Decadent writings, explores death in its many varieties, from Lady Death wandering the streets of the city in merciless search of her next victim, to a hypochondriac who goes mad out of fear of death, to an ultra-refined killer turning to murder due to the beauty of its “symphony in White and Red”, to the extraordinary final metaphysical account of the torture of a soul. Although asphodels do not make a single appearance in this collection, they are like death itself: invisible, everywhere.Asphodels, originally published in 1897, was the only book to appear in the author’s lifetime. Presented here for the first time in English, in a superb translation by Jessica Sequeira, it will be sure to gratify lovers of Decadent fiction, horror and modernismo.

The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales


Thomas Hardy - 1897
    Those contained within this volume are among his finest and most representative and include The Withered Arm, one of his best known and most gripping; Barbara of the House of Grebe, said by T. S. Eliot to portray 'a world of pure evil'; The Son's Veto, regarded by Hardy as his best story; and, of course, The Distracted Preacher, possibly the most flawless of all. Like the novels, the short stories reveal Hardy's preoccupation with affairs of the heart, with love requited and frustrated, fulfilled or doomed. They contain many of his most powerful portraits of women; they are streaked with the grotesque, the macabre and bizarre; and they are permeated by that atmosphere, narrative power, and vivid sense of place and its intimate relation to character which are the essentials of Hardy's genius.