When Fathers and Sons was first published in Russia, in 1862, it was met with a blaze of controversy about where Turgenev stood in relation to his account of generational misunderstanding. Was he criticizing the worldview of the conservative aesthete, Pavel Kirsanov, and the older generation, or that of the radical, cerebral medical student, Evgenii Bazarov, representing the younger one? The critic Dmitrii Pisarev wrote at the time that the novel "stirs the mind . . . because everything is permeated with the most complete and most touching sincerity." N. N. Strakhov, a close...

This introduction to Waugh's complete fiction devotes a chapter to each of his novels in chronological order, providing a lucid outline of his creative and spiritual trajectory from carefree unbeliever to committed Catholic, from modernist to traditionalist, from comic satirist to ironic realist. The critical analysis of each novel is preceded by a biographical introduction with an unprecedented focus on apparently trivial experiences in Waugh's life which had a significant impact on the themes, images, and structures peculiar to that novel. Waugh always rated his linguistic and structural...

This introduction to Waugh's complete fiction devotes a chapter to each of his novels in chronological order, providing a lucid outline of his creative and spiritual trajectory from carefree unbeliever to committed Catholic, from modernist to traditionalist, from comic satirist to ironic realist. The critical analysis of each novel is preceded by a biographical introduction with an unprecedented focus on apparently trivial experiences in Waugh's life which had a significant impact on the themes, images, and structures peculiar to that novel. Waugh always rated his linguistic and structural...

E. M. Forster's beloved Italian novels, now in a single hardcover volume.

Forster's most memorably romantic exploration of the liberating effects of Italy on the English, A Room with a View follows the carefully chaperoned Lucy Honeychurch to Florence. There she meets the unconventional George Emerson and finds herself inspired by his refreshingly free spirit-- which puts her in mind of "a room with a view"--to escape the claustrophobic snobbery of her guardians back in England. The wicked tragicomedy Where Angels Fear to Tread chronicles a young English widow's trip to...