Tony Tanner

In the final ten years of his life, Tony Tanner tackled the largest project any critic in English can take on, writing a preface to each of Shakespeare's plays. This collection serves as a comprehensive introduction for the general reader. Tanner brings Shakespeare to life, explicating everything from big-picture issues such as the implications of shifts in Elizabethan culture to close readings of Shakespeare's deployment of complex words in his plays.--[book...

During the 1800s in America, the rise of industrialization reduced the cost of goods allowing people to have more possessions than ever before. However, a group known as the Transcendentalists believed that possessions created vanity. Instead, they valued the individual's relationship with divinity. One of the movement's most famous members, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote prolifically about his beliefs and experiences. A representative selection of his...

Of all Jane Austen's books, Pride and Prejudice has earned a special place in the hearts of the reading public as her best-loved and most intimately known novel. From its famous opening sentence the story of the Bennet family and of the novel's two protagonists, Elizabeth and Darcy, told with a wit that its author feared might prove 'rather too light and bright, and sparkling', delights its most familiar readers as thoroughly as it does those who...