Barnes Noble: 2826 books

In this influential 1873 essay, Arnold professes his skepticism about Christianity as a revealed religion yet argues for the utility of its ethical precepts. Therefore he proposes a liberal reading of scripture and secular faith that incorporates the civilizing aspects of religion. 

This 1882 collection contains “The Incompjatibles,” about the Irish Land Bill, and "An Unregarded Irish Grievance," as well as the prefaces to a number of Arnold's poems. Also included are other essays on social and literary topics, such as "Copyright" and ""The Future of Liberalism."

Each essay in this 1880 edition of Mixed Essays is on a different subject yet all exhibit “unity of tendency,” in Arnold’s words. It contains the works "Democracy," "Equality," "Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism," "'Porro unum est Necessarium,'" "A Guide to English Literature," "Falkland," "A French Critic on Milton," "A French Critic on Goethe," and "George Sand."

In this 1861 collection of the lectures he delivered at Oxford the previous year, Arnold finds fault with contemporary translations of Homer by Pope, Chapman, Newman, and others, setting forth his own criteria for successful translation, among which is the adoption of hexameter verse, as well as respect for Homer's cardinal virtues and his “grand style.”

The popular success of Lowell’s Among My Books series encouraged him to publish this eclectic collection, which includes “My Garden Acquaintance,” “A Good Word for Winter,” “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners,” “A Great Public Character,” “Abraham Lincoln,” “Carlyle,” and “Library of Old Authors.”

This skeptical, critical 1909 study treats the Bible as a literary record rather than the word of God. The author’s survey of history takes in early Christianity, the middle ages, Protestant and Lollard times, the Church’s “Silver Age,” “The Bible of our Fathers,” morals, and social evolution.

This 1866 volume, the second installment of Renan's monumental History of the Origins of Christianity, picks up from the death of Jesus and continues with the lives of the apostles, the organization of the Church of Jerusalem, and the spread of Christianity up to the time of St. Paul's first mission, always against the backdrop of Roman civilization.

The author said he preferred “the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith.” The title essay in this 1892 collection of five lectures on skepticism and religion asserts, “An honest god is the noblest work of man.” Includes “Humboldt,” “Thomas Paine,” “Individuality,” and “Heretics and Heresies.”

In Florentine Histories Machiavelli wrote about his native city, which he loved with a passion -- more than his soul, he said -- and by which he was exasperated. He was not just the famously cold, ironic analyst of ruthless power politics, evident in much of his most famous work, The Prince; he had a...

This 1919 volume features essays on four women novelists:  Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.  Johnson argues that women writers have contributed to literature qualities lacking in writing by men.  Chief among these qualities is a natural proclivity to domestic themes....

Described at the time of its publication in 1892 as “a popular and dainty volume,” this work includes sketches of writers whom the author has designated as “Twelve Caesars of English Literature.” Among them are Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Brönte, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett...

This philosophical novel, published in 1885, uses the backdrop of Antonine Rome to elaborate Pater's ideas about Aestheticism.  His hero, Marius, is a young Italian employed as private secretary to the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Pater developed a style in this novel, and elaborated on it in his later Imaginary Portraits, which later influenced such writers as Oscar Wilde and James Joyce.

In this 1721 satire, two Persian noblemen, Usbek and Rica, travel to France, commenting on their adventures in letters to family and mullahs back home. This early model for the epistolary novel sends up Parisian culture and society, including cafés, salons, the theater, fashion, religion, royalty, and even the emerging mass media of prints and periodicals.

This 1888 collection brings together the abolitionist poet’s writings from the Civil War. Included are “The American Tract Society,” “The Election in November,” “E Pluribus Unum,” “The Pickens-And-Stealin’s Rebellion,” “The Rebellion: Its Causes and Consequences,” “McClellan...