Résultats lu par "John Burlinson" dans Toutes les catégories

Queen Marguerite de Navarre was one of the most powerful women of her age. Her masterpiece, The Heptameron, is a collection of some 72 stories told by five gentlemen and five ladies who find themselves stranded in an abbey. Proposed as an edifying way of passing the time while a bridge is being repaired, the tale-telling - as well as the conversations that follow each story - quickly becomes a battle of wits between the sexes, with tales concerning illicit lovers, romantic conquests, lecherous monks, manly honor, and women's virtue.

This translation, by an unknown hand, of D'Aurevilly's salacious miscellany, which consists of six novellas, was published in 1900 under the title Weird Women and is in the public domain. When the collection was first published in France in 1874, it caused up an uproar; it was declared a danger to public morality and the prosecutor issued orders for its seizure on the grounds of blasphemy and obscenity.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) is a science-fiction drama that was first presented in Czech in 1921. It introduced the term "robot", which is derived from a Czech word meaning "worker," to international vocabulary. The action opens in a factory that has successfully produced thousands of robots, who are essentially mindless drones. An idealistic humanitarian activist launches a plan to imbue some of the robots with human traits. The robots which have been humanized then assume leadership over the other robots and seek to organize them in a revolution to take over the world.

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad … “So begins this historical tale of romantic adventure. Andre-Louis Moreau is an orphan and cousin of the beloved Aline. He is raised by his godfather, the Lord of Gavrillac, and matures into an educated lawyer—while Aline sets her mind on marrying the rich but dishonorable Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr. But when Moreau’s closest friend is killed by the Marquis in a duel, Moreau vows vengeance. After publicly denouncing the aristocracy and stirring up the crowds, Moreau is forced to go into hiding.

The notorious pirate Captain Flint is dead, and his great horde of stolen treasure lies lost, stashed and buried on an island far, far away. Jim Hawkins, the humble son of a country innkeeper, comes into possession of the only map to Flint's treasure and is soon swept away on a high seas adventure of treachery and survival.

After the death of their father, Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene return to Thebes. The ruler is their unyielding uncle by marriage, Creon, who assumed command after the death of the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles, and Polynices in a fratricidal struggle to take control of the city. Creon has the body of one brother buried with full civic honors but forbids the burial of the body of the other, whom he regards as a traitor. Antigone's challenge to Creon's decree, which she considers unjust, results in the extinction of the family line of Oedipus.

Carlo Collodi's whimsical recasting of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea was first published in 1883 and has since become an established classic of children's literature. Geppetto, a poor wood carver, receives a piece of wood from which he carves a marionette. Much to his surprise, the puppet springs to life and embarks on a wild series of adventures.

Endymion is the largest work by John Keats and was composed between April and November 1817. It was published in April 1818, and the critical reception was almost universally hostile. The plot is built around the ancient Greek legend of Endymion, the young shepherd whose beauty was such that the goddess of the Moon entreated Zeus to cast him into a permanent sleep so that she could gaze on him without interruption. Keats expands this story into an epistle on beauty and love, and weaves into it elements from several other Greek legends.

The Lonely Spirit is a short story collection sprawled across the Old West. As the only half-Comanche US marshal, L.S. Quinn straddles two worlds, searching for peace in both. Quinn is one of the best marshals, well-respected for finding criminals and bringing them to justice. His adventures pit him against criminals like Florence Finnegan, the famous brothel owner and gunslinger, and Jack Mattherson, whose attack on US Senator William Quincy brings out Quinn’s desire for revenge.

In Specters of God, John D. Caputo returns to the original impulse of his work, the "mystical element" in things, here under the name of an "anxious apophatics," as distinct from an "edifying apophatics" anchored in unity with God. In dialogue with Schelling, a new turn for him and the lynchpin of this argument, Caputo addresses the nocturnal powers in being, the specters that haunt our being and bring us up short.

This play is a dramatization of Boccaccio’s story of Gillette of Narbonne. Only the comic parts were of Shakespeare’s invention; he added the characters of the pusillanimous Parolles, the lofty courtier Lafew, the Clown Lavatch, and the long suffering Countess. He gave new depth and vitality to the leading characters, who are mere outlines in Boccaccio’s tale.

Of all the Texas feuds, the one between the Sutton and Taylor forces lasted longer and covered more ground than any other. The Sutton-Taylor Feud in Texas began shortly after the Civil War ended, and continued into the 1890s. William E. Sutton was the only Sutton involved, but he had many friends to wage warfare against the large Taylor family.

This collection contains a mixture of stories about ghosts and contacts from spirits, some by celebrated authors, together with essays on psychical research. As Joseph French notes in the preface, even for the skeptic, tales of ghostly activity retain a distinct fascination. The widespread interest in psychic phenomena in the early twentieth century proved to be a significant stimulus to literary production.

In 1870, a 26-year-old Paiute, Sarah Winnemucca, wrote to an army officer requesting that Paiutes be given a chance to settle and farm their ancestral land. The eloquence of her letter was such that it made its way into Harper’s Weekly. Ten years later, as her people languished in confinement as a result of the Bannock War, she convinced Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz to grant the requests in her letter and free the Paiutes as well.

This collection presents eleven of Dreiser’s best tales, ranging from trenchant social analysis to penetrating character study.

As the first important, book-length academic study in English of four of Shakespeare's major tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth—Bradley's work both influenced and enabled modern Shakespearean literary criticism even as it engaged with, and often rebutted, conventional Romantic and Victorian interpretations of the plays and their author. Bradley's achievement has been widely praised for its philosophical and psychological insights and has never been out of print.

World-famous detective Hercule Poirot has retired to the English village of King's Abbot, determined to dedicate his little grey cells to the growing of vegetable marrows. But when Roger Ackroyd, a local businessman and former acquaintance, is stabbed to death, the man's niece begs Poirot to investigate. Poirot enlists the local doctor to be his assistant and scribe, and the two of them sift through clues to try to discern the ones that will lead them to the killer.

This book examines the hearings that followed Mormon apostle Reed Smoot’s 1903 election to the US Senate and the subsequent protests and petitioning efforts from mainstream Christian ministries disputing Smoot’s right to serve as a senator. Exploring how religious and political institutions adapted and shapeshifted in response to larger societal and ecclesiastical trends, The Reed Smoot Hearings offers a broader exploration of secularism during the Progressive Era and puts the Smoot hearings in context with the ongoing debate about the constitutional definition of marriage.

Socrates, perhaps the most famous philosopher of the ancient world, left no writings. The method of philosophical investigation for which he is celebrated has come down to us in the form of dialogues, composed by his student, Plato. The four dialogues in this collection are known by the names of the chief characters in each: Lysis, Charmides, Laches, and Euthyphro. As they fall into a more or less natural group due to the fact that each one deals with a single ethical abstract—friendship, temperance, courage, and piety, respectively—they have been renamed based on their subjects.

Moby Dick, which has been considered the great American novel, was first published in 1851. For material, Melville drew on his experience on whaling ships between 1841 and 1844, the sinking of the whaling vessel Essex in 1820, and extensive perusal of literature on whaling and many other subjects.