Tales from Shakespeare was written in 1807 by a young clerk called Charles Lamb in the offices of the East India Company. Lamb co-authored them with his beloved sister Mary. The pair lived together for life, having gone through immense trauma caused by mental illness and tragedy. However, far from being a melancholy duo, they led an active and ample social life in the company of some of the literary greats of the Romantic movement of the 19th century. His glittering circle included contemporary poets like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey and Leigh Hunt, the Chinese sch...
In The Adventures of Ulysses, Charles Lamb re-tells the story of Ulysses’s journey from Troy to his own kingdom of Ithaca. The book uses Homer’s The Odyssey as the basis for the story, but it isn’t a direct translation of the Greek classic. The book is considered a modern version of the epic tale when it was published in 1808. In the preface of the book, Lamb said that he made the narration of the story faster so that more readers would be attracted to it.
To begin with, Homer’s Odyssey is already a classic and in re-telling this story, Charles Lamb aimed to make this epic poem more comprehensible to the average person. And he was successful in doing what he aime...
This book can be used to improve vocabulary for reading, writing and speaking alike. Through mastery of words, the most powerful and perfect expression of thought can be delivered orally. Choosing the correct words conveys ideas in a crisp and clear way that will hold and audience's attention. Language can also act as an instrument to reach the human heart and awaken the soul.
Th...
Written originally for his own children, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories have continued to delight generations of youngsters since they were first published in 1902. The thirteen stories collected in this book are meant for very young children, but they engage older kids and adults too with their charming conversational style and simple plot lines.
These stories are typical examples of the “origin” story, where children are provided with imaginative rather than practical explanations for the “why” “what” “how” “where” “who” “when” questions of childhood. The Just So Stories were tales that Kipling would tell his own daughter who tragically died in infancy of p...
The Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781 with a second edition in 1787, has been called the most influential and important philosophical text of the modern age.
Kant saw the Critique of Pure Reason as an attempt to bridge the gap between rationalism (there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience) and empiricism (sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge) and, in particular, to counter the radical empiricism of David Hume (our beliefs are purely the result of accumulated habits, developed in response to accumulated sense experiences). Using the methods of science, Kant demonst...
Banned in the United States and United Kingdom throughout the 1920s, Ulysses turned conventional ideas of the novel inside out with its bold new form, style and theme. Deeply rooted in the Greek myth of the hero of the Trojan War, Joyce bases his novel on Ulysses or Odysseus, who is doomed to voyage for ten years before returning home to Ithaca. Joyce had been deeply influenced by the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he had read from Charles Lamb's adaptations as a child. In fact, he considered him the epitome of the heroic ideal and constantly thought of giving the myth a new dimension in modern literature.
However, the reader must be cautioned that it is not an easy bo...
His family name is derived from a Greek craftsman who created the Labyrinth and designed wings for himself and his son to fly away from the island they were imprisoned in. But Stephen Dedalus, the young hero of James Joyce's first novel, is a young man who rises above his baser instincts and seeks a life devoted to the arts.
This quintessential coming of age novel describes the early life of Stephen Dedalus. It is set in Ireland during the nineteenth century which was a time of emerging Irish nationalism and conservative Catholicism. Highly autobiographical in nature, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man draws heavily on real events and characters from Joyce's own l...
Christmas Eve. Guests round a fireside begin telling each other ghost stories. One of them relates a true incident involving the governess of his little nephew and niece. Strange events begin to take place, involving the housekeeper, a stranger who prowls round the grounds, a mysterious woman dressed in black and an unknown misdemeanor committed by the little nephew.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James was published in 1893 and it remains one of the best-known and admired works of this great American writer. One of the factors that makes it so appealing is that the structure and ending are open to the reader's interpretation. Over the years, many critics, readers and ...
Jack the Giant-Killer, Tom Thumb, Goldilocks and The Three Bears, Henny Penny, Dick Whittington, The Three Little Pigs, Red Riding Hood and a host of immortal characters are found in this delightful collection of English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs. The book made its first appearance in 1890 and has remained a firm favorite with both young and old ever since.
Fairy tales have traditionally emanated from France and Germany. The famous compilations by La Fontaine and the Brothers Grimm have overshadowed children's literature for centuries. Yet, many of the stories we recount to children today have an English origin, something that we were unaware of.
The author, Jo...
Reputed to have been composed nearly three thousand years ago, its authorship is sti...