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Family Saga
The family saga is a genre of literature which chronicles the lives and doings of a family or a number of related or interconnected families over a period of time. In novels (or sometimes sequences of novels) with a serious intent, this is often a thematic device used to portray particular historical events, changes of social circumstances, or the ebb and flow of fortunes from a multitude of perspectives. The word ''saga'' comes from Old Norse, where it meant "what is said, utterance, oral account, notification" and "(structured) narrative, story (about somebody)", and was originally borrowed into English from Old Norse by scholars in the eighteenth century to refer to the Old Norse prose narratives known as ''sagas''. , ''OED Online'', 1st edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2019). The typical family saga follows generations of a famil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Literature
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment, and can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role. Literature, as an art form, can also include works in various non-fiction genres, such as biography, diaries, memoir, letters, and the essay. Within its broad definition, literature includes non-fictional books, articles or other printed information on a particular subject.''OED'' Etymologically, the term derives from Latin ''literatura/litteratura'' "learning, a writing, grammar," originally "writing formed with letters," from ''litera/littera'' "letter". In spite of this, the term has also been applied to spoken or s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Williamson
Henry William Williamson (1 December 1895 – 13 August 1977) was an English writer who wrote novels concerned with wildlife, English social history and ruralism. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 for his book ''Tarka the Otter''. He was born in London, and brought up in a semi-rural area where he developed his love of nature, and nature writing. He fought in World War I and, having witnessed the Christmas truce and the devastation of trench warfare, he developed first a pacifist ideology, then fascist sympathies. He moved to Devon after World War II and took up farming and writing; he wrote many other novels. He married twice. He died in a hospice in Ealing in 1977, and was buried in North Devon. Early years Henry Williamson was born in Brockley in south-east London to bank clerk William Leopold Williamson (1865-1946) and Gertrude Eliza (1867-1936; née Leaver). In early childhood his family moved to Ladywell, and he received a grammar school educati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Covenant (novel)
''The Covenant'' is a historical novel by American author James A. Michener, published in 1980. Overview The novel is set in South Africa, home to five distinct populations: Bantu (native Black tribes), Coloured (the result of generations of racial mixture between persons of European descent and the indigenous occupants of South Africa along with slaves brought in from Angola, Indonesia, India, Madagascar and the east Coast of Africa), British, Afrikaner, and Indian, Chinese, and other foreign workers. The novel traces the history, interaction, and conflicts between these populations, from prehistoric times up to the 1970s. Chapters The text is divided into 14 chapters, each accompanied by local fauna (which sometimes feature in the events of that chapter): # "Prologue" (Eland): Set circa 13,000 BC, it follows a wandering group of San, including their hunting and cave painting practices. # "Zimbabwe" (Rhinoceros): Starting in 1453, it covers the culture of areas economica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taylor Caldwell
Janet Miriam Caldwell (September 7, 1900August 30, 1985) was a British-born American novelist and prolific author of popular fiction under the pen names Taylor Caldwell, Marcus Holland and Max Reiner. She was also known by a variation of her married name, J. Miriam Reback. In her fiction, she often used real historical events or persons. Taylor Caldwell's best-known works include '' Dynasty of Death'', ''Dear and Glorious Physician'' (about Saint Luke), ''Ceremony of the Innocent'', ''Pillar of Iron'' (about Cicero), ''The Earth is the Lord's'' (about Genghis Khan) and ''Captains and the Kings''. Her last major novel, ''Answer As a Man'', appeared in 1980. Biography Janet Miriam Caldwell was born in Manchester, England, into a family of Scottish background. Her family descended from the Scottish clan of MacGregor of which the Taylors are a subsidiary clan. At the age of six, she won a medal for an essay on Charles Dickens. In 1907, she emigrated to the United States with her ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Captains And The Kings
''Captains and the Kings'' is a 1972 historical novel by Taylor Caldwell chronicling the rise to wealth and power of an Irish immigrant, Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh, who emigrates as a penniless teenager to the United States, along with his younger brother and baby sister, only for their parents to die shortly afterwards. Joseph Armagh befriends a Lebanese immigrant, and both are taken under the tutelage of an American plutocrat. The novel is an inter-generational saga that focuses on the themes of the American dream, discrimination, bigotry, and history that is being made by a cabal of the rich and powerful. The saga nears its end when Armagh succeeds in making his eldest son, Rory (modeled after John Fitzgerald Kennedy), a senator. When Rory is going to become the first Catholic President of the United States, he is assassinated by the cabal of the rich and powerful. The novel was adapted as a 1976 Captains and the Kings (miniseries), television miniseries of the same name, st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Mann
Paul Thomas Mann ( , ; ; 6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer. Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel, ''Buddenbrooks''. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of Mann's six children – Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann – also became significant German writers. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, then returned to Swit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Buddenbrooks
''Buddenbrooks'' () is a 1901 novel by Thomas Mann, chronicling the decline of a wealthy north German merchant family over the course of four generations, incidentally portraying the manner of life and mores of the Hanseaten (class), Hanseatic bourgeoisie in the years from 1835 to 1877. Mann drew deeply from the history of his own family, the Mann family of Lübeck, and their milieu. It was Mann's first novel, published when he was twenty-six years old. With the publication of the second edition in 1903, ''Buddenbrooks'' became a major literary success. Its English translation by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter was published in 1924. The work led to a Nobel Prize in Literature for Mann in 1929; although the Nobel award generally recognises an author's body of work, the Swedish Academy's citation for Mann identified "his great novel ''Buddenbrooks''" as the principal reason for his prize. Mann began writing the book in October 1897, when he was twenty-two years old. The novel was comple ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eka Kurniawan
Eka Kurniawan (born November 28, 1975) is an Indonesian writer and screenwriter. In 2016, Kurniawan became the first Indonesian writer to be nominated for the Man Booker International Prize. Early life He was born in Tasikmalaya, West Java, and grew up in a small coastal town Pangandaran. He studied philosophy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. Kurniawan currently lives in Jakarta. He writes novels, short stories, movie scripts, and blog, as well as essays. His works are translated into more than 24 languages. Career His novel '' Beauty Is a Wound'' was included in the list of 100 notable books by ''The New York Times''. The use of magic realism in the book has led to comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez. Kurniawan has insisted that ''Beauty Is a Wound'' is neither a historical novel nor a book about Indonesian history. Kurniawan's style of "approaching social concerns at an angle rather than head-on, with hefty doses of surrealism and wry humour" also draws compariso ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beauty Is A Wound
Beauty is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes these objects pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics, one of the major branches of philosophy. As a positive aesthetic value, it is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart. Along with truth and goodness it is one of the transcendentals, which are often considered the three fundamental concepts of human understanding. One difficulty in understanding beauty is because it has both objective and subjective aspects: it is seen as a property of things but also as depending on the emotional response of observers. Because of its subjective side, beauty is said to be "in the eye of the beholder". It has been argued that the ability on the side of the subject needed to perceive and judge beauty, sometimes referred to as the "sense of taste", can be trained and that the verdicts of experts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires ''Decline and Fall'' (1928) and ''A Handful of Dust'' (1934), the novel ''Brideshead Revisited'' (1945), and the Second World War trilogy ''Sword of Honour'' (1952–1961). He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century. Waugh was the son of a publisher, educated at Lancing College and then at Hertford College, Oxford. He worked briefly as a schoolmaster before he became a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends and developed a taste for country house society. He travelled extensively in the 1930s, often as a special newspaper correspondent; he reported from Ethiopian Empire, Abyssinia at the time of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935 Italian invasi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brideshead Revisited
''Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder'' is a novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of the protagonist Charles Ryder, most especially his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion called Brideshead Castle. Ryder has relationships with two of the Flytes: Sebastian and Julia. The novel explores themes including nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy and Catholicism. A faithful and well-received Brideshead Revisited (TV serial), television adaptation of the novel was produced in an 11-part miniseries by Granada Television in 1981. Plot The novel is divided into three parts, framed by a prologue and epilogue. ''Prologue'' The prologue takes place during the final years of the Second World War. Charles Ryder and his battalion are sent to a country estate called Brideshead, which prompts hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (russian: link=no, Алексе́й Макси́мович Пешко́в; – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (russian: Макси́м Го́рький, link=no), was a Russian writer and socialist political thinker and proponent. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing. Gorky's most famous works are his early short stories, written in the 1890s (" Chelkash", " Old Izergil", and " Twenty-Six Men and a Girl"); plays '' The Philistines'' (1901), '' The Lower Depths'' (1902) and '' Children of the Sun'' (1905); a poem, " The Song of the Stormy Petrel" (1901); his autobiographical trilogy, '' My Childhood, In the World, My Universities'' (1913–1923); and a novel, ''Mother'' (1906). Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, and ''Mother'' has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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