ARCHITECTURE
in FICTION
Lorca, garcia
THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA [in Three Tradgies]
PQ6613 A763 A2
Mann, Thomas BUDDENBROOKS (Lubeck Mansion, Mengstrasse House) PT 2625 A44 Bu Reviews Book Description Introduction by T. J. Reed; Translation by John E. Woods Synopsis A new translation of Mann's classic story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany captures the triumphs and tragedies, successes and failures, relationships, loves, and ordinary events of middle-class life.
Pasternak, Boris DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (Great Houses of Moscow) PG3076 P27 Do Reviews Book Description n celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is theonly paperback edition now available of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature , April 1, 1995 Novel by Boris Pasternak, published in Italy in 1957. This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller. Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks; wandering throughout Russia, he is unable to take control of his fate, and dies in utter poverty. The poems he leaves behind constitute some of the most beautiful writing in the novel. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Synopsis First published in 1959 to international controversy, Pasternak's classic evokes the life and loves of the poet-physician Zhivago during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. This edition features a thorough introduction by the distinguished Oxford University scholar John Bayley.
Poe, Edgar Allen FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (Haunted Victorian) PS2614 C35 Reviews Synopsis Follow the macabre events that sweep the narrator into the haunted world of Roderick Usher--a morbid recluse and slave to fear--whose descent into madness inevitably brings the great House of Usher to its most sinister fate. Also included are Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Man of the Crowd, The Oval Portrait, The Masque of the Red Death and The Tell-Tale Heart.
Rand, Ayn THE FOUNTAINHEAD (Modern Architecture) PS3535 A547 F6 Reviews Amazon.com The Fountainhead has become an enduring piece of literature, more popular now than when published in 1943. On the surface, it is a story of one man, Howard Roark, and his struggles as an architect in the face of a successful rival, Peter Keating, and a newspaper columnist, Ellsworth Toohey. But the book addresses a number of universal themes: the strength of the individual, the tug between good and evil, the threat of fascism. The confrontation of those themes, along with the amazing stroke of Rand's writing, combine to give this book its enduring influence. The New York Times Book Review, Lorine Pruette Ayn Rand is a writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly. Synopsis Howard Roark is an architect whose genius and integrity will not be comprised. He has ideas that work against conventional standards.
Rhys, Jean WIDE SARGASSO SEA (Coulibri) PR6035 H95 Wi Reviews The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature , April 1, 1995 Novel by Jean Rhys, published in 1966. A well-received work of fiction, it takes its theme from the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The book details the life of Antoinette Mason (known in Jane Eyre as Bertha), a West Indian who marries an unnamed man in Jamaica and returns with him to his home in England. Locked in a loveless marriage and settled in an inhospitable climate, Antoinette goes mad and is frequently violent. Her husband confines her to the attic of his house at Thornfield. Only he and Grace Poole, the attendant he has hired to care for her, know of Antoinette's existence. The reader gradually learns that Antoinette's unnamed husband is Mr. Rochester, later to become the beloved of Jane Eyre. Synopsis Beautiful, wealthy Antoinette Cosway's passionate love for the arrogant Mr. Rochester threatens to destroy her idyllic Caribbean existence and her very life, in a novel based on Jane Eyre. (General Fiction).
Stoker, Bram DRACULA (Dracula's Castle) PR6037 T617 D7 Reviews From the Publisher One of the most popular stories ever told, Dracula (1897) has been re-created for the stage and screen hundreds of times in the last century. Yet it is essentially a Victorian saga, an awesome tale of thrillingly bloodthirsty vampire whose nocturnal atrocities reflect the dark underside of a supremely moralistic age. Above all, Dracula is a quintessential story of suspense and horror, boasting one of the most terrifying characters in literature: centuries-old Count Dracula, whose diabolical passions prey upon the innocent, the helpless, the beautiful. Bram Stoker, who was also the manager of the famous actor Sir Henry Irving, wrote seventeen novels. Dracula remains his most celebrated and enduring work -- even today this Gothic masterpiece has lost none of the spine-tingling impact that makes it a classic of the genre.
Tolstoy, Leo WAR AND PEACE (Russian city and country houses) PG3366 V6 K7 Reviews The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature , April 1, 1995 Epic historical novel by Leo Tolstoy, originally published as Voyna i mir in 1865-69. This panoramic study of early 19th-century Russian society, noted for its mastery of realistic detail and variety of psychological analysis, is generally regarded as one of the world's greatest novels. War and Peace is primarily concerned with the histories of five aristocratic families- -particularly the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Rostovs--the members of which are portrayed against a vivid background of Russian social life during the war against Napoleon (1805-14). The theme of war, however, is subordinate to the story of family existence, which involves Tolstoy's optimistic belief in the life-asserting pattern of human existence. The heroine, Natasha Rostova, for example, reaches her greatest fulfillment through her marriage to Pierre Bezukhov and her motherhood. The novel also sets forth a theory of history, concluding that there is a minimum of free choice; all is ruled by an inexorable historical determinism.
Tomasi Di Lampedusa, Giuseppe THE LEOPARD (Donnafugata Palace) PQ4843 O53 Le Reviews Amazon.com In Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification grows inevitable, the smallest of gestures seems dense with meaning and melancholy, sensual agitation and disquiet: "Some huge irrational disaster is in the making." All around him, the prince, Don Fabrizio, witnesses the ruin of the class and inheritance that already disgust him. His favorite nephew, Tancredi, proffers the paradox, "If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change," but Don Fabrizio would rather take refuge in skepticism or astronomy, "the sublime routine of the skies." Giuseppe di Lampedusa, also an astronomer and a Sicilian prince, was 58 when he started to write The Leopard, though he had had it in his mind for 25 years. E. M. Forster called his work "one of the great lonely books." What renders it so beautiful and so discomfiting is its creator's grasp of human frailty and, equally, of Sicily's arid terrain--"comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung waves into frenzy." The author died at the age of 60, soon after finishing The Leopard, though he did live long enough to see it rejected as unpublishable.
Wharton, Edith THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (Gilded Age) PS3545 H16 Ag Reviews Amazon.com Somewhere in this book, Wharton observes that clever liars always come up with good stories to back up their fabrications, but that really clever liars don't bother to explain anything at all. This is the kind of insight that makes The Age of Innocence so indispensable. Wharton's story of the upper classes of Old New York, and Newland Archer's impossible love for the disgraced Countess Olenska, is a perfectly wrought book about an era when upper-class culture in this country was still a mixture of American and European extracts, and when "society" had rules as rigid as any in history. In gas-lit 1870s New York, when society people "dread scandal more than disease", affable and affluent Newland Archer is deeply troubled. Seemingly content to live out his years in a conventional and moribund marriage to May, he is forced to confront an overwhelming passion for the bizarre and challenging Countess Ellen Olenska. To follow such a passion would ut everything at risk - his family, his name, and his position in New York society. But is not an all-consuming love worth more than the superficial values of the elite . . ?
Waugh, Evelyn BRIDESHEAD REVISITED (English Country Manor, Oxford) PR6045 A97 Br Reviews Amazon.com One of Waugh's most famous books, Brideshead Revisited tells the story of the difficult loves of insular Englishman Charles Ryder, and his peculiarly intense relationship with the wealthy but dysfunctional family that inhabited Brideshead. Taking place in the years after World War II, Brideshead Revisited shows us a part of upper-class English culture that has been disappearing steadily. The New York Times Book Review, John K. Hutchens . . . Mr. Waugh is very definitely an artist, with something like a genius for precision and clarity not surpassed by any novelist writing in English in his time . . . Brideshead Revisited has the depth and weight that are found in a writer working in his prime, in the full powers of an eager, good mind and a skilled hand . . . The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature , April 1, 1995 Satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1945. According to Waugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism, the novel was intended to show "the operation of divine grace" in the affairs of a particular group of people. This is revealed through the story of the wealthy Roman Catholic Marchmain family as told by Charles Ryder, a friend of the family. Despite the seeming indifference to, or outright repudiation of, the church by various members of the family, particularly Lord Marchmain, his daughter Julia, and his son Sebastian, by the end of the novel each has shown some sign of acceptance of the faith. Synopsis Evelyn Waugh's best-loved novel and the basis for the PBS television production, Brideshead Revisited, the epic story of a great Catholic family in a doomed aristocratic age.
Wilde, Oscar THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY (House on Grosvenor Square) PR5819 A1 Reviews Amazon.com A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden." As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment." Book Description Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence, and a few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted in his imprisonment. Of the book's value as autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be--in other ages, perhaps." The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature , April 1, 1995 Moral fantasy novel by Oscar Wilde, published in an early form in Lippincott's Magazine in 1890. The novel had six additional chapters when it appeared in book form in 1891. An archetypal tale of a young man who purchases eternal youth at the expense of his soul, the novel was a romantic exposition of Wilde's Aestheticism. Dorian Gray is a wealthy Englishman who gradually sinks into a life of dissipation and crime. Despite his unhealthy behavior, his physical appearance remains youthful and unmarked by dissolution. Instead, a portrait of himself catalogues every evil deed by turning his once handsome features into a hideous mask. When Gray destroys the painting, his face turns into a human replica of the portrait, and he dies.Gray's final negation, "ugliness is the only reality," neatly summarizes Wilde's Aestheticism, both his love of the beautiful and his fascination with the profane. Publication of the novel scandalized Victorian England, and The Picture of Dorian Gray was used as evidence against Wilde in his 1895 trial for homosexuality. The novel became a classic of English literature. Synopsis Scandalous and immoral in its time, this Faustian tale follows a young rake's progress toward complete moral decay as he pledges his soul for youth and beauty. 4 cassettes.