Heart of darkness by J. Conrad

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Historical background Towards the end of the 18th. century imperialism was at its zenith in the UK. However it had differing interpretations...

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

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Historical Context The Victorian era (1837-1901) was characterised by industrial expansion, cultural flourishing, and the expansion of the B...

Jekyll and Hyde by Stevenson

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Historical background   Victorian ethics, which were contradictory to the point of hypocrisy, featured a code of repressive sexual morality,...

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

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  Historical context Victorian society at end of the 19th century in the UK continued the painful social changes involved in the gradual tra...

Middlemarch by George Eliot

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  Historical background   When  Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life  was published in 1891, the U.K. was in a rapid process of industria...

Hard Times by Dickens

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Philosophical background Hard Times is a criticism of Jeremy Bentham's ethical philosophy, Utilitarianism , which proposed that an acti...

Vanity Fair by W.M. Thackeray

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   Historical background In Vanity Fair , William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) penned a critical review of contemporary Victorian England...

The Scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Outline Historical context In the 19th. century the U.S. was marked by westward expansion, increasing national consciousness, political orga...

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

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  Discussion Social background Wuthering Heights  (1847) was published a decade into the Victorian Age when the UK was changing from a mainl...

Frankenstein by Mary Shellley

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Discussion Social and economic background The French Revolution in 1789 was a reference point for the Romantic movement. It marked the shift...

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

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Discussion Historical context At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Augustan Age continued its advances in capitalism and industria...

The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith

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Discussion Historical Background When  The Vicar of Wakefield  was published in 1766 the British Empire was in expansion and the Industrial ...

Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne

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Discussion   1. Literary background Narrative presentation : In  Don Quixote  (1605 & 1615) the knight lives out his own fiction by re-e...

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

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Discussion Literary context Henry Fielding's (1707-1754) picaresque narrative Tom Jones (1749) draws on the Spanish tradition of Don Qu...

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

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  Discussion Literary background Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Irish clergyman. He visited England briefly and joined The Scriblerus Clu...