Contrary to a long-established usage, a summer had been passed within the walls of a large town : but, the moment of liberation arrived, the bird does not quit its cage with greater pleasure, than that with which post-horses were commanded. We were four in a light travelling caliche, which strong Norman cattle transported merrily towards their native province. For a time we quitted Paris, the q…
THIS work has already appeared in Graham's Magazine, under the title of " Rose Budd." The change of name is solely the act of the author, and arises from a conviction that the appellation given in this publication is more appropriate than the one laid aside. The necessity of writing to a name, instead of getting it from the incidents of the book itself, has been the cause of this departure from…
THE history of the borders is filled with legends of the sufferings of isolated families, during the troubled scenes of colonial warfare. Those which we now offer to the reader are distinctive in many of their leading facts, if not rigidly true in the details. The first alone is necessary to the legitimate objects of fiction. One of the misfortunes of a nation is to hear little besides its o…
In ThermoPoetics, Barri Gold sets out to show us how analogous, intertwined, and mutually productive poetry and physics may be. Charting the simultaneous emergence of the laws of thermodynamics in literature and in physics that began in the 1830s, Gold finds that not only can science influence literature, but literature can influence science, especially in the early stages of intellectual devel…
THIS little book was written before either "Jane Eyre" or " Shirley," and yet no indulgence can be solicited for it on the plea of a first attempt. A first attempt it certainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn a good deal in a practice of some years. I had not indeed published anything before I commenced " The Professor," but in many a crude effort, destroyed almost a…
Gornick on V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and the intimate relationship between emotional damage and great literature. Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, a Nation…
For generations, scholars have imagined American puritans as religious enthusiasts, fleeing persecution, finding refuge in Massachusetts, and founding 'America'. The puritans have been read as a product of New England and the origin of American exceptionalism. This History challenges the usual understanding of American puritans, offering new ways of reading their history and their literary cult…