First of all, the title. Jean-Phillippe Rameau (1683-1764) was one of the dominant composers of 18th-century France, and one of the most...

For a story so crowded with incident, “Castle Rackrent” is surprisingly short. This works largely because the first-person narrator,...

The most obvious difference between “The Expedition Of Humphry Clinker” and Tobias George Smollett's other work is undoubtedly that, in...

I find “A Sentimental Journey Through France And Italy” a trifle confusing. This may be due to the fact that Laurence Sterne never...

At the end of Volume 6 of this work, Mr. Shandy as the teller of his own life story provides a drawing of his narrative line over the...

In many cases (though certainly not all), the most influential works of art took the shortest amount of time to produce. Take “Candide”....

I confess that I'm not sure what I can say about “The Adventures Of Peregrine Pickle” that will distinguish it from other English novels...

My question is, how is one to encounter an early novel like "Tom Jones"? When Fielding wrote it, there wasn't much in the way of...

If I'm not mistaken, Tobias George Smollett is not one of the best-known authors of his age, which is a shame, because man was he good....

John Arbuthnot, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. Wow. Why so many authors? There was a society in Britain...

Henry Fielding was the author of one of the most popular novels of early English literature, "Tom Jones". Before that, however, came...

At roughly 20 pages, this may be the shortest item on "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" – we'll see. If we measure by the amount...

Among the most famous images that literature has given rise to – along with the skinny knight charging at windmills on horseback and the...

Our original title is Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, and our author's full name was Hans Jakob Christoffel von...

Everybody knows what "Don Quixote" is about, don't they? Not exactly. The story's basics are among the most famous in all of literature,...

Toward the beginning of this short work, the narrator, Jack Wilton, an upper-class soldier in the army of England's Henry VIII fighting...

Not too many authors have seen their very names add words to the English language. There's Kafka and Lovecraft and a few others, but even...

I don't know about you, but "The Life Of Lazarillo de Tormes" strikes me as kind of a late-period work to carry "Anonymous" in the...

I learned a lot of Jewish history growing up – slavery in Egypt, the Temples and their destruction, millennia of exile, the Holocaust....

We learn that "The Golden Ass" by Lucius Apuleius is the only work of prose fiction to survive in its entirety from ancient Rome. Good...