A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, one of the many in Howells’ movement into strong anti-romantic realism and social criticism. As a novel of the realism movement, The Rise of Silas Lapham began Howells’ trend of incorporating Christian Socialism in his writing—a theory that the common welfare could be improved along guidelines of Christian ethical principles. Moreover, Howells is considered to be the father of American realism. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Howells’ classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work - Character Summaries - Plot Guides - Section and Chapter Overviews - Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

A popular subject in sociology and cultural studies, divorce has until recently been overlooked by literary critics. Spanning nearly a century during which the divorce rate skyrocketed, Love American Style traces the treatment of divorce in the American novel. This book draws upon popular, sociological, political and architectural history to illustrate how divorce reflects conflicting ideologies and notions of American identity. Focusing primarily on work by William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Mary McCarthy and John Updike, Kimberly Freeman delineates a system of tropes particular to divorce in American novels, such as the association of divorce with the West and modernity, the dismantling of the home, and the disruption of the boundary between the public and the private. These tropes suggest a literary tradition of love, marriage and divorce that is central to twentieth century American fiction. Offering an explanation for both the treatment of divorce in the American novel as well as its predominance in American culture, this book should appeal to scholars of American literature and popular culture, or anyone interested in how divorce has become so 'American'.

Best known as the founder of the Bible College of Wales, Rees Howells was a man of little worldly fame, yet through Norman Grubb's best-selling biography, his life story is known to millions. Born in a Welsh mining village, he left school at twelve and worked in a tin mill and a coal mine. As he came to know the redeeming power of his Lord and Saviour he faced the implications of an entire surrender, learned to love the unlovely and found the key to the power of prayer. As a result he became a man of great Christian inspiration to others in both Britain and Southern Africa where he became the channel of a mighty revival. Norman Grubb describes all this, but also the foundation of the Bible College of Wales at Swansea, perhaps the greatest monument of his work, and the intercessory prayer that became the hallmark of Rees Howells, impacting as it did on national policy and international affairs. Rees Howells' life was so great that the Church of Christ still feels the impact of his truths of the Spirit and the Scriptures in a unique and amazing way. Every chapter in this biography is full of drama and light. Rees Howells, Intercessor is an enthralling story, told with simplicity, humanity and humour, and it has proved an inspiration for nearly half a century.

Recently discovered papers in the Barrett family collection shed light on Howells's extensive career as a man of letters and the role he played in the nascent American theatrical tradition. The letters also illuminate the economics of popular theatrical production and audience response in the Gilded Age.