Metamorfosi

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Thomas Hardy

<p>Like many of <a href=" novels, <i>The Mayor of Casterbridge</i> is set in the fictional county of Wessex in the mid 1800s. It begins with Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, drunk on rum, auctioning off his wife and baby daughter at a village fair. The next day, overcome with remorse, Henchard resolves to turn his life around. When we meet Henchard eighteen years later, temperance and hard work have made him wealthy and respectable. However, he cannot escape his past. His secret guilt, his pride, and his impulsive temper all serve to sabotage his good name.</p> <p><i>The Mayor of Casterbridge</i> was published in 1886, first as a magazine serial and then later that year as a book. It is perhaps most noteworthy for the psychological portrait of Michael Henchard, a tragic character who remains sympathetic while simultaneously being deeply flawed. Typical of other Hardy novels, it also vividly depicts life in the rural countryside at that time.</p>

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Oscar Wilde

Set in England during the late Victorian era, the play's humour derives in part from characters maintaining fictitious identities to escape unwelcome social obligations. It is replete with witty dialogue and satirises some of the foibles and hypocrisy of late Victorian society. It has proved Wilde's most enduringly popular play. - [*Wikipedia*][1] [1]:

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Jane Austen

Northanger Abbey is both a perfectly aimed literary parody and a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naïve but sweetly appealing heroine, Catherine Morland, a willing victim of the contemporary craze for Gothic literature who is determined to see herself as the heroine of a dark and thrilling romance. When Catherine is invited to Northanger Abbey, the grand though forbidding ancestral seat of her suitor, Henry Tilney, she finds herself embroiled in a real drama of misapprehension, mistreatment, and mortification, until common sense and humor—and a crucial clarification of Catherine’s financial status—puts all to right. Written in 1798 but not published until after Austen’s death in 1817, Northanger Abbey is characteristically clearheaded and strong, and infinitely subtle in its comedy.

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Jan Nederveen Pieterse

"White on Black is a compelling visual history of the development of Western stereotypes of black people over the last two hundred years. Its purpose is to show the pervasiveness of prejudice against blacks in Europe and America as expressed in stock-in-trade racist imagery and caricature. Reproducing a wide range of powerful illustrations - from engravings and lithographs to advertisements, chocolate wrappers, biscuit tins, dolls, posters and comic strips - the book exposes the hidden assumptions of even those who view themselves as unprejudiced." "Jan Nederveen Pieterse sets Western images of Africa and blacks in a chronological framework, analysing representations from medieval times, from the colonial period with its explorers, settlers and missionaries, from the eras of slavery and abolition, and from the present day. He examines the persistence of stereotypical images in the multicultural societies of the twentieth century, and in their relations with Africa." "Pieterse reveals the key images by which Blacks have commonly been depicted in the West: as servants, entertainers, and athletes, and as mythical figures such as Sambo and Uncle Tom in the United States, Golliwog in Britain, Bamboula in France and Black Peter in The Netherlands. Looking at conventional portrayals of blacks in the nursery, in the area of sexuality, and in commerce and advertising, Pieterse explores the conceptual roots of these recurring stereotypes." "The images presented in the book, selected from a substantial collection of negrophilia from around the world, have a direct and dramatic impact. They raise disturbing questions about the expression of power within popular culture, and the force of caricature, humour and parody as instruments of oppression."--BOOK JACKET.