Risultati letto da "Charlton Griffin" in Tutte le categorie

Only four years after publishing his fable Animal Farm, a biting satire of Joseph Stalin’s horrific regime of terror, George Orwell turned his attention to the future. But his next book was to be no satire, no fable. What emerged from Orwell’s pen in 1949 was the most grimly dystopian novel ever written: 1984.

Animal Farm is an allegorical satire of the events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Orwell described the book as a satirical tale against Stalin and went on to say that it was the first book in which he tried “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole”. All of the leading figures involved in this period are parodied as various animals.

One of the most remarkable historical works of the 19th century came from the pen of French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a native of Paris. This amazing analysis of family and religious life among the ancient Greeks and Romans is the key to understanding ancient Mediterranean civilizations. The story begins in the misty period of the Bronze Age as the Indo-Europeans began to filter down into the Italian and Greek peninsulas. They brought with them a patriarchy that was based on ancestor worship and the veneration of hearth gods.

Don Quixote is widely considered to be the first modern novel. As a classic of Western literature, it is regarded by scholars worldwide to be one of the finest works of fiction ever written, and a magnificent product of the Spanish Golden Age of literature. Cervantes’ influence on the Spanish language has been so great that his work is often called “la lengua de Cervantes.” The work was written in two separate volumes, both of which are contained in this production. It introduces the character of Don Quixote de la Mancha, a hero who carries his enthusiasm and self-deception to unintentional and comic ends.

Volume two in this series consists of one novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and two collections of short stories, which include "Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" and "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" (a total of 23 stories). These creations by Doyle represent the finest work of his Holmes series, and certainly the most famous.

Plutarch (c. AD 46-AD 120) was born to a prominent family in the small Greek town of Chaeronea, about 20 miles east of Delphi in the region known as Boeotia. His best known work is the Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs to illuminate their common moral virtues and vices. The surviving lives contain 23 pairs, each with one Greek life and one Roman life as well as four unpaired single lives.

The Wind in the Willows is a pastoral fantasy by Scottish writer Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. By turns slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. They live in a rural version of Edwardian England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie. It is universally celebrated for its charming evocation of the Thames Valley countryside.

Wuthering Heights is a ghost story with the atmosphere of ancient tragedy. An epic poem in prose, it is widely considered to be one of the greatest English novels. The book was published in 1848 and did not meet with approval at first because of its bleak descriptions of physical and mental cruelty. Essentially, it is a tale of revenge set in the North Yorkshire moorlands.

If you want to understand the daily life and psychology of the late Middle Ages, Ronald Ecker’s classic translation of The Canterbury Tales provides one of the very best means of doing so. Within its audio is to be found a broad range of society - high and low, male and female, rich and poor - who express their innermost beliefs and extravagant fantasies in a series of stories they tell as they make their way to Canterbury Cathedral.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is one of the most beautiful and celebrated of all English poems. It is also the precursor of what would become the artistic movement known as Romanticism. In addition to this masterpiece, this recording includes some of Coleridge's finest poems, including the haunting "Kubla Kahn" and "Christabel."

When Gone with the Wind appeared in 1936, it became on overnight sensation. Nothing like it in American literature had ever been seen. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and become one of the most celebrated films of all time. It has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and been translated into 27 languages. Gone with the Wind is both an historical novel and an examination of the bewildering changes that swept Georgia in the 1860s.

Considered his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter is Hawthorne's story of Hester Prynne and her daughter, Pearl, conceived through an adulterous affair with a Puritan pastor in 17th century Boston. From start to finish, the book explores the themes of law, guilt, and sin. Since its appearance in 1850, this magnificent book has been a perennial favorite among young and old, though it was extremely controversial when it was first published.

The moral cesspool that Rome had become in the first century AD is the subject of The Satyricon by Petronius. The work itself was originally quite a long one, perhaps as long as a thousand pages. The extant portion, however, is only a small fraction of the original. The work contains a mixture of prose and verse, serious and comic elements, and erotic and decadent passages. It possesses a sophisticated humor and a very ironic tone. It is the creation of a Roman gentleman whose insights were keen.

In his Poetics, Aristotle puts forward that everything we create is a kind of imitation of life, merely using different types of media, objects and manners, whether painting, music, or language. We shape the images, sounds or words to make some particular point and tell a unique story. But if you want an audience to respond to what you have to say, whatever you create must be connected logically to the real world. The rules of doing this successfully are laid out in Poetics.

Here in a single volume is the entire, unabridged recording of Gibbon's masterpiece. Beginning in the second century A.D. at the apex of the Pax Romana, Gibbon traces the arc of decline and complete destruction through the centuries across Europe and the Mediterranean. It is a thrilling and cautionary tale of splendor and ruin, of faith and hubris, and of civilization and barbarism. Follow along as Christianity overcomes paganism... before itself coming under intense pressure from Islam.

Byron's Don Juan is a comic masterpiece written in a satirical, mock heroic style. Based on the legend of Don Juan, (which is here pronounced JOO-AN), Byron completely reverses the portrayal of Juan, instead showing him as someone easily seduced by women instead of seducing them. He called this form of poetry "epic satire". It is generally considered to be Byron's masterpiece.

Herodotus was a Greek historian born in Halicarnassus, subject at the time of the great Persian Empire. He lived in the fifth century BC (c. 484 - c. 425 BC), a contemporary of Socrates. He is often referred to as "The Father of History", a title originally conferred by Cicero. Herodotus was the first historian known to have broken from Homeric tradition in order to treat historical subjects as a method of investigation, specifically by collecting his materials in a critical, systematic fashion and then arranging them into a chronological narrative.

Louis XIV, known as the Grand Monarch, or the Sun King, was a sovereign of the House of Bourbon who reigned as King of France from 1643 until his death in 1715. His reign of 72 years is the longest recorded of any monarch in European history. In the age of absolutism, Louis XIV's France was the leader in the growing centralization of power.

Tom Jones is a splendid Hogarthian panorama of 18th century English life and morals, encompassing both city and country, and comprising some of the greatest comic characters in British literature. First published in 1749, it was an instant success and has gone on to become a classic of its genre. Quite simply, there has never been anything like it.

Accustomed as we are to accepting as accurate the judgements of ancient Roman history handed down to us by primary sources like Suetonius and Tacitus, it may come as a surprise that some scholars consider these ancient historians to be misleading and biased. According to Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero, who pointedly took exception to the narrative provided by ancient historians, the narrative we have taken to be indisputable may be entirely false.