Reproduction of the original: The Queen ́s Twin and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Queen's Twin and Other Stories" by Sarah Orne Jewett. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This final volume of Vernon Louis Parrington's Pultzer Prize-winning study deals with the decay of romantic optimism. It shows that the cause of decay is attributed to three sources: stratifying of economics under the pressure of centralization; the rise of mechanistic science; and the emergence of a spirit of skepticism which, with teachings of the sciences and lessons of intellectuals, has resulted in the questioning of democratic ideals. Parrington presents the movement of liberalism from 1913 to 1917, and the reaction to it following World War I. He notes that liberals announced that democratic hopes had not been fulfilled; the Constitution was not a democratic instrument nor was it intended to be; and while Americans had professed to create a democracy, they had in fact created a plutocracy. Industrialization of America under the leadership of the middle class and the rise of critical attitudes towards the ideals and handiwork of that class are examined in great detail. Parrington's interpretation of the literature during this time focuses on four divisions of development: the conquest of America by the middle class; the challenge of that overlordship by democratic agrarianism; the intellectual revolution brought about by science and the appropriation of science by the middle class; and the rise of detached criticism by younger intellectuals. A new introduction by Bruce Brown highlights Parrington's life and explains the importance of this volume.

This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.

A sharply observed, affectionate, and unsentimental portrait of life in a Maine fishing village, The Country of the Pointed Firs is Sarah Orne Jewett’s most enduring work, and commonly regarded as the finest example of American regionalist literature in the nineteenth century. It was originally published in four installments of the Atlantic Monthly in 1896; this Broadview Edition is based on the Atlantic serialization and also includes the four other stories set in Dunnet Landing. The critical introduction situates the text in its historical, cultural, and literary milieu, attending to its place in Jewett’s oeuvre and in her biography. Appendices include earlier “local color” writing by Jewett and others, Jewett’s letters, and contemporary reviews of the novel.

Little seems to have changed since Queen Victoria's day in the instant magnetism of British royalty across the Atlantic Ocean; yet for the first generations liberated by revolution, the British Isles and its sovereigns seemed as remote as the moon. In theyoung nation, Americans who were little interested in the sons and daughters of their last king, George III, developed a love-hate relationship with Victoria, his granddaughter, that lasted for all her sixty-four years on the throne, ending only with herdeath in the first weeks of the twentieth century. Victoria's long reign encompassed much of the time in which the young United States was growing up. The responses of Americans toward Victoria reveal not only what they thought of her (and her husband) as people and as monarchs, but reflect their own ambitions, confidence, smugness, insecurities-and sense of loss. Parting from England brought a surge of pride, but it also carried with it an unanticipated price. American encounters with Queen Victoria asperson and as symbol evoke the costs of relinquishing a history, a tradition, a ceremonial texture. The brash, bewildered and beguiled Americans in these pages, from lion tamer Isaac Van Amburgh, Barnum's midget "Tom Thumb" and sharpshooter Annie Oakley,to literary lions like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Henry James evince not only another dimension of the remote woman who might have been their queen, but what Americans were like, and what they thought they were like, in her time.