Bachelors, Manhood and the Novel, 1850-1925

Katherine Snyder's study explores the significance of the bachelor narrator, a prevalent but little recognized figure in premodernist and modernist fiction by male authors, including Hawthorne, James, Conrad, Ford, and Fitzgerald. Snyder demonstrates that bachelors functioned in cultural and literary discourse as threshold figures who, by crossing the shifting, permeable boundaries of bourgeois domesticity, highlighted the limits of conventional masculinity.

The World Set Free

The World Set Free was first published in 1914. The novel foretells atomic weapons.The World Set Free is a novel published in 1914 by H. G. Wells. The book is considered to foretell nuclear weapons. A constant theme of Wells's work, such as his 1901 nonfiction book Anticipations, was the effect of energy and technological advance as a determinant of human progress. The novel begins: "The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal."

Tono-Bungay

Tono-Bungay is widely regarded as Wells's finest novel, combining futuristic science fiction and contemporary social satire. In it, George Ponderovo is apprenticed to his Uncle Edward, a dynamic chemist who invents a bogus medicine, Tono-Bungay, and earns a vast fortune. But as he witnesses Edward's spectacular rise, he also contemplates the corrupt English society that allows his uncle to wield so much power. At the end of the novel, George sails down the Thames to the open sea, toward the hopeful new world that awaits him.

Victorian England produced some of the greatest novelists in Western history, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. Critical analysis focuses on the development of the Victorian novel through the second half of the 19th century.

Early English novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, and Laurence Sterne helped create the formula for the modern novel.