Books like Jude the obscure by Frank H. Thompson

A guide to unlocking the hidden meanings in literature, showing readers how to decode symbols and symbols and find deeper meanings in texts.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles follows Tess Durbeyfield, a rural woman from a poor family, as she confronts poverty, social injustice, and the rigid expectations of early 20th-century English society.

Thomas Hardy’s bleak final novel follows Jude Fawley, a stonemason from rural Wessex, whose search for faith, love and independence collides with society’s harsh conventions and leads to tragedy.

The Return of the Native follows Clym Yeobright, who returns to his Wessex home from Paris and soon marries the provocative Eustacia Vye, setting off a chain of personal turmoil.

A country girl’s return home after school leads Grace Melbury into a love triangle with a woodsman and a sophisticated newcomer, revealing how outside influences disrupt a rural community.

An approachable entry into literary theory, guiding readers through major critical approaches, their historical and political contexts, practical examples, and further reading, to show how theory transforms the act of reading.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Tales gathers six concise stories that explore class, marriage, and gender attitudes in rural England, reflecting the social customs and manners of the time.

Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here--spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism--are thirty-six immediately relevant, elegantly written, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.Following the title essay, which explores fourteen definitions of "the classic," Calvino offers writings that are at once critical appraisals and personal appreciations of, among others: Homer, Xenophon, Ovid, Pliny, Nezami, Ariosto, Cardano, Galileo, Defoe, Voltaire, Diderot, Ortes, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Twain, Henry James, Stevenson, Conrad, Pasternak, Gadda, Montale, Hemingway, Ponge, Borges, and Queneau.At a time when the Western canon and the very notion of "literary greatness" have come under increasing disparagement by the vanguard of so-called multiculturalism, Why Read the Classics? gives us an inspiriting corrective.From the Hardcover edition.