The Skeptical Romancer

Author : W. Somerset Maugham
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307947637
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Skeptical Romancer written by W. Somerset Maugham and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. Somerset Maugham was one of the seminal writers of the twentieth century, and his travel writing has long been considered among his finest work. Now, acclaimed travel writer Pico Iyer maps out a masterful tour of these vivid, evocative pieces that are collected here for the first time. Maugham worked as a secret agent in Russia, published novels in London, staged plays in New York, and traveled throughout Europe, Asia, India, and the United States, chronicling his travels, wherever he went, with exceptional insight. Beginning with “In the Land of the Blessed Virgin” and culminating in “A Partial View,” Iyer selects vignettes of Maugham’s razor-sharp prose that track his transformation from a boyish traveler in Spain to a worldly man of letters. This is Maugham at his most keenly observant, direct, and powerful.

Author : W. Somerset Maugham
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0307272125
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Skeptical Romancer written by W. Somerset Maugham and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. Somerset Maugham was one of the seminal writers of the twentieth century, and his travel writing has long been considered among his finest work. Now, acclaimed travel writer Pico Iyer maps out a masterful tour of these vivid, evocative pieces that are collected here for the first time. Maugham worked as a secret agent in Russia, published novels in London, staged plays in New York, and traveled throughout Europe, Asia, India, and the United States, chronicling his travels, wherever he went, with exceptional insight. Beginning with “In the Land of the Blessed Virgin” and culminating in “A Partial View,” Iyer selects vignettes of Maugham’s razor-sharp prose that track his transformation from a boyish traveler in Spain to a worldly man of letters. This is Maugham at his most keenly observant, direct, and powerful.

Author : W. Somerset Maugham
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781841593241
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Skeptical Romancer written by W. Somerset Maugham and published by . This book was released on 2009-10-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : William Somerset Maugham
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Skeptical Romancer written by William Somerset Maugham and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : W. Somerset Maugham
Publisher : Graphic Arts Books
ISBN 13 : 1513288253
Total Pages : 573 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Of Human Bondage written by W. Somerset Maugham and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2021-05-28 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of Human Bondage (1915) is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Inspired by his experiences as an orphan and young student, Maugham composed his masterpiece. Adapted several times for film, Of Human Bondage is a story of tragedy, perseverance, and the eternal search for happiness which drives us as much as it haunts our every move. Orphaned as a boy, Philip Carey is raised in an affectionless household by his aunt and uncle. Although his Aunt Louisa tries to make him feel welcome, William proves an uncaring, vindictive man. Left to fend for himself most days, Philip finds solace in the family’s substantial collection of books, which serve as an escape for the imaginative boy. Sent to study at a prestigious boarding school, Philip struggles to fit in with his peers, who abuse him for his intelligence and club foot. Despite his struggles, he perseveres in his studies and chooses his own path in life, moving to Heidelberg, Germany and denying his uncle’s wish that he attend Oxford. As he struggles to become a professional artist, Philip learns that one’s dreams are often unsubstantiated in the world of the living. Of Human Bondage is a tale of desire, disappointment, and romance by a master stylist with a keen sense of the complications inherent to human nature. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.

Author : Brian Yothers
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317017056
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876 written by Brian Yothers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to engage with the full range of American travel writing about nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, and the first to acknowledge the influence of the late-eighteenth-century Barbary captivity narrative on nineteenth-century travel writing about the Middle East. Brian Yothers argues that American travel writing about the Holy Land forms a coherent, if greatly varied, tradition, which can only be fully understood when works by major writers such as Twain and Melville are studied alongside missionary accounts, captivity narratives, chronicles of religious pilgrimages, and travel writing in the genteel tradition. Yothers also examines works by lesser-known authors such as Bayard Taylor, John Lloyd Stephens, and Clorinda Minor, demonstrating that American travel writing is marked by a profound intertextuality with the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and with British and continental travel narratives about the Holy Land. His concluding chapter on Melville's Clarel shows how Melville's poem provides an incisive critique of the nascent imperial discourse discernible in the American texts with which it is in dialogue.

Author : Judith L. Fisher
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351895397
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Thackeray’s Skeptical Narrative and the ‘Perilous Trade’ of Authorship written by Judith L. Fisher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the rhetorical work of James Phelan, Wayne Booth's ethical criticism, recent work on William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as an understanding of the role of skepticism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English thought, Thackeray's Skeptical Narrative and the "Perilous Trade" of Authorship makes a substantial contribution to nineteenth-century reading practices, as well as narratology in general. Judith Fisher combines in this study rhetorical and ethical analysis of Thackeray's narrative techniques to trace how his fiction develops to educate his reader into what she terms a "hermeneutic of skepticism." This is a kind of poised reading which enables his readers to integrate his fiction into their life in what Thackeray called "a world without God" without becoming pessimistic or fatalistic. Although Thackeray's narrative strategies have been the subject of study, most have focused on Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond only, and none look as closely as does this study at actual rhetorical techniques such as his use of pronominalization to interpolate the reader into his skeptical discourse. Fisher also brings her analysis to bear on The Adventures of Philip and The Virginians, Thackeray's last two complete novels, both of which were critical failures even as contemporary critics acknowledged their stylistic excellence. This is the first study to attempt to understand the puzzle of those two books; Fisher recovers them from their marginalized position in Thackeray's oeuvre. Fisher expertly weaves an accessible narrative theory with thoroughgoing knowledge of Thackeray's life in an integrated reading of his entire works. Reading Thackeray holistically in spite of his own disruptive practices, she does full justice to his critical skepticism while elucidating his canon for a new readership.

Author : Mark Wollaeger
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804766819
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism written by Mark Wollaeger and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1990-11-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "You want more scepticism at the very foundation of your work. Scepticism, the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth - the way of art and salvation." Joseph Conrad wrote these words to John Galsworthy in 1901, and this study argues that Conrad's skepticism forms the basis of his most important works, participating in a tradition of philosophical skepticism that extends from Descartes to the present. Conrad's epistemological and moral skepticism - expressed, forestalled, mitigated, and suppressed - provides the terms for the author's rethinking of the peculiar relation between philosophy and literary form in Conrad's writing and, more broadly, for reconsidering what it means to call any novel 'philosophical'. Among the issues freshly argued are Conrad's thematics of coercion, isolation, and betrayal; the complicated relations among author, narrator, and character; and the logic of Conradian romance, comedy, and tragedy. The author also offers a new way of conceptualizing the shape of Conrad's career, especially the 'decline' evidenced in the later fiction. The uniqueness of Conrad's multifarious literary and cultural inheritance makes it difficult to locate him securely in the dominant tradition of the British novel. A philosophical approach to Conrad, however, reveals links to other novelists - notably Hardy, Forster, and Woolf - all of whom share in the increasing philosophical burden of the modern novel by enacting the very philosophical issues that are discussed within their pages. Conrad's interest as a skeptic is heightened by the degree to which he resists the insights proffered by his own skepticism. The first chapter introduces the idea of the Conradian 'shelter', and the next two use Schopenhauer to show how the language of metaphysical speculation in Tales of Unrest and 'Heart of Darkness' spills over into a religious impulse that resists the disintegrating effect of Conrad's skepticism. The author then turns to Hume to model the authorial skepticism that in Lord Jim contests the continuing visionary strain of the earlier fiction and Descartes to analyze the ways in which Romantic vision is more stringently chastened by irony in Nostromo and The Secret Agent. The concluding chapter touches on several late novels before examining how competing models of political agency in Conrad's last great fiction of skepticism, Under Western Eyes, situate it somewhere between ideology critique and a mystified account of the exigencies of individual consciousness.

Author : Randy Rosenthal
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1666775290
Total Pages : 166 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Orient Express written by Randy Rosenthal and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-01-30 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When yoga studios are ubiquitous and meditation apps are on millions of smart phones, once exotic terms like karma, zen, and nirvana have entered into everyday English, business consultants have appropriated the meditation terms "mindfulness" and "equanimity," and Buddha statues and Shinto shrines are common in American yards, we forget that things weren't always this way, and that what is now considered cliche was once unknown. So how did the spirituality of the East come to permeate the culture of the West? Answering that question is what The Orient Express is about. To do so, Harvard scholar Randy Rosenthal explores the four works of fiction he finds most responsible for bringing Eastern religion to the Western mainstream: The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, and The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. Through the lives of their characters, these authors introduced countless readers to the spiritual practices and philosophies of yoga, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and the hesychast prayer tradition of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. A compendium of spiritual wisdom in the form of literary criticism, The Orient Express tells the story of these stories, providing illuminating context and clarifying misconceptions along the way.

Author : Christina Pishiris
Publisher : Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 172821761X
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Love Songs for Skeptics written by Christina Pishiris and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Voicy, heartfelt, hilarious, propulsive—this book is brilliant."—Christina Lauren, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author For fans of Josie Silver and Emily Henry comes a debut romcom about the life-changing magic of second chances. This charming and quirky debut has it all: childhood friends, love triangles, enemies-to-lovers, and a dash of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Zoë Frixos gets the whole love song thing. Truly, she does. As an editor at a major music magazine in London, it's part of her job description. But love? Let's just say Zoë's been a bit off-beat in that department. After falling hard for her best friend, Simon, at thirteen and missing every chance to tell him how she felt before he left town, Zoë came to one grand conclusion: Love stinks. Twenty years later, Simon is returning to London, newly single and as charming as ever, and Zoë vows to take her second chance. But Zoë's got other problems now: In order to save her magazine from closure, she has to land the biggest interview of her career with a notoriously elusive rock idol. There's just one problem: Nick, the arrogant publicist who seems determined to stop the story and ruin Zoë's life. With her brother's big(ish) fat(ish) Greek wedding on the horizon, Zoë begins to wonder if her first love is the right love. In the wake of a life-changing choice, Zoë must decide if she's right to be skeptical about love, or if it's time to change her tune...