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Hello! I have a love for 19th century literature, and incidentally I'm fresh out of good reading material! Do you all have any favorites from this time period? I'm also particularly interested in satire and Russian literature, and I would love to hear of any 19th century works that encompass those interests as well.
I loved Tess of the d'Urbevilles, but only watched not read it. Like Russia, it's gloomy. As is Frankenstein, which I didn't find scary at all but instead very sad.
1899 Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis
1897 Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson
1897 Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
1897 La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler
1896 A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman
1896 Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry
1896 The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
1894 Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw
1894 The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
1892 The Weavers by Gerhart Hauptmann
1892 Poems by Ho Xuan Huong
1891 Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind
1891 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
1891 Simple Verses by Jose Marti
1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
1890 Hunger by Knut Hamsun
1890 Poems by Emily Dickinson
1888 Azul by Ruben Dario
1888 The Maias by Eca de Queiros
1888 Miss Julie by August Strindberg
1887 A Study in Scarlett by Arthur Conan Doyle
1885 The Makado by Gillbert and Sullivan
1885 Germinal by Emile Zola
1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
1884 Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans
1883 Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
1881 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
1880 The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1880 Ball of Fat by Guy De Maupassant
1879 A Doll's House by Heinrik Ibsen
1877 Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu
1876 Afternoon of a Faun by Stephane Mallarme
1876 The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins
1874 The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson
1873 A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
1872 Martin Fierro by Jose Hernandez
1872 Middlemarch by George Eliot
1871 Rhymes and Legends by Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
1869 The Songs of Maldoror by Comte de Lautreamont
1869 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
1866 Saturnine Poems by Paul Verlaine
1865 Hymn to Satan by Giosue Carducci
1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
1862 Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
1862 Goblin Market and other Poems by Christina Rossetti
1862 Divan by Mirza Ghalib
1862 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
1859 Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
1859 A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
1859 The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald
1859 The Storm by Aleksandr Ostrovsky
1857 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
1857 Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
1856 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
1855 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
1854 Elegy for Imam Hussein by Qa'ani
1853 El Desdichado by Gerard de Nerval
1853 Poems by Bibi Hayati
1851 Moby Dick by Hermann Melville
1850 The Scarlett Letter by Nathanael Hawthorne
1850 Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1850 Death's Jest Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes
1849 In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred Lord Tennyson
1849 The Kalevala by Elias Lonnrot
1848 The Lady of the Camellias by Alexander Dumas, fils
1848 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
1847 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
1847 Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1847 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
1847 The Shark by Dionysios Solomos
1846 The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
1846 Toldi by Janos Arany
1845 Janos Vitez by Sandor Petofi
1844 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, Pere
1844 The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen
1842 Dramatic Lyrics by Robert Browning
1842 Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
1842 Eight Dog Chronicles by Kyokutei Bakin
1842 The Complete Works of Friedrich Holderlin
1841 A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
1837 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
1835 Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac
1835 Danton's Death by Georg Buchner
1834 Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz
1832 Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1831 Kanshi by Taigu Ryokan
1830 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
1827 Book of Songs by Heinrich Heine
1827 The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
1826 The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
1824 Don Juan by George Gordon Byron
1821 First Idylls by Giacomo Leopardi
1821 Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey
1819 Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
1819 Oraga Haru by Kobayashi Issa
1818 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
1818 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock
1818 Endymion by John Keats
1818 Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
1817 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1816 The Sandman by ETA Hoffman
1813 The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du
1813 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
1812 Grimms' Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
1808 Milton: a poem by William Blake
1807 Poems in Two Volumes by William Wordsworth
1805 The Broken Jug by Heinrich von Kleist
1804 William Tell by Friedrich Schiller
1802 Rene by Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand
1800 Hymns to the Night by Novalis
I'm reading The Idiot by Dostoyevsky at the moment. I can reccomend it, it entertains on many levels. Certainly satire and farce are in there.
A varied international list. I specially liked the first title, but there are other favorites too, like Kleist, that are not so easily found in an international list.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
For Charles Dickens, I wouldn't choose The Tale of Two Cities which in my opinion is his least typical book. Bleak House or Great Expectations would be far more appropriate.
For Anthony Trollope although Barchester Towers is probably his most popular, it is not typical of his later work. I'm reading The Last Chronicles of Barset at the moment which has all the same characters plus a tragic central figure.
Ivanhoe is a fine work of Scott's, but The Heart of Midlothian is far more interesting and it is set in Scotland, as his most interesting works are.
And I'm very glad to see Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey here. A fine work.
So many wonderful possibilities! Right now I'm working through William Blake's poetry, namely "Songs of Innocence" which is a good read (though all of his poetry is in my opinion!) Also, George Macdonald's Lilith is an amazing read I had the pleasure of discovering this year. With Russian literature, I'm a Dostoevsky fan (though I'm hoping to read some of Tolstoy and Chekov's works this next year) and a good novel of his that isn't spoken of as much but is very good is "The Humiliated and Insulted" which is a very touching novel. And of course there are always the wonderful "Brothers Karamazov" and "The Idiot"
I notice nothing by Dickens' friend, Wilkie Collins, whose two detective stories, The Woman in White and The Moonstone are probably the earliest examples of whodunnits. And worthwhile novels as well.
T. S. Eliot called The Moonstone"the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe". Collins' use of multiple narrators is the sort to thing that interests critics nowadays.
This made me wonder if it could be said that Collins invented the English detective story while Poe invented the American form.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jackson Richardson
Although it's not from the 19th century, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov fits the satire and Russian criteria.
In all fairness to Poe, his first detective short story "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was written in 1840-1841 while Collins The Woman in White and The Moonstone was written in 1859 and 1868, respectively. Poe was influenced by the Memoires of Vidocq a true-life French detective under Napoleon. I think Poe should get a lot of the credit. He worked in extreme poverty and persecution while Collins was a well-respected author of the establishment.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jackson Richardson
Poe also wrote "Thou art the Man" and "The Gold Bug" --- the latter used by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes short story "The Adventure of the Dancing Men." I used to be a huge fan of detective novels and short stories when I was a pro-establishment teenager. When I was 19 I read the 56 short stories and 4 novels of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes and I read a good deal of Poe and Agatha Christie too. Nowadays, I don't give a flying fudge about detective novels; they bore me to death but I'll have to read the two novel of Wilkie Collins, just to be knowledgeable.
"The Humiliated and Insulted" is at least partly inspired by Dickens´"Old Curiosity Shop"Quote:
Originally Posted by Boblloyd91
T S Eliot wasn't infallible and Poe probably should get the credit. He is head and shoulders above Sherlock Holmes (who I find irritating) or Christie (who is so cliche ridden in her characterization and dialogue as to be funny - she could do plots, though). Collins's books are worthwhile Victorian novels in their own right whether or not they are detective novels, but they are long Victorian novels. Not least of Poe's virtues is that he wrote short stories.
PS It is pretty obvious who dunnit in The Woman in White as soon as the sinister and charming character comes on the scene. The question is how and why did he do it. And it is not strictly speaking a murder plot.
I've just started The Moonstone and I'm very impressed. I might post about it elsewhere when I've finished.
I will contribute to this post, not for the sake of the OP who is obviously never to return, but for those who may be following this thread: Middlemarch by Eliot.