Junior Term Paper Authors

2014-2015

Mrs. Bernet

Choose what interests you!

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Harpeth Hall

Junior

Margaret Atwood

Canadian novelist whose novels focus on political themes such as feminism, censorship, and human

rights.

Set in the near future, America has become a puritanical theocracy and Offred tells her story as a Handmaid under the new social order. The society attempts to correct a declining birthrate by delegating fertile women to be the breeders of society.

Additional Atwood Books: The Edible Woman, the Robber Bride, The Cat’s Eye, etc…

Jane AustenBorn in 1775, the daughter of a rector, Austen was “an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism, biting irony and social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics "Criticism, 1870–1940", The Jane Austen Companion, 102.

This is the most serious of Jane Austen’s novels. Fanny Price, is a modest and poor cousin cared for

by the Bertram family at their country estate.

Fanny's moral strength eventually wins her complete acceptance by

the family.

Anthony Burgess

Published in 1962, A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian novella. Set in a not-so-distant future English society that has a culture of extreme youth violence, the novel's teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him.[1] When the state undertakes to reform Alex—to "redeem" him—the novel asks, "At what cost?". The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat". According to Burgess it was a jeu d'esprit written in just three weeks. (wikipedia)

Joseph Conrad

Polish born English novelist and short story writer who is noted for the richness of his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. His initial reputation as a masterful teller of colorful adventures of the sea grew as his deeply pessimistic vision of the complexity of the human struggle was revealed.

This novella was first published in 1902. The story reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890, when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo.

Dickens was an English novelist and was considered to be the greatest of the Victorian period. His works include attacks on social evils and inadequate institutions.

Charles Dickens

Great Expectations charts the progress of Pip from childhood through often painful experiences to adulthood. He encounters a variety of extraordinary characters ranging from Magwitch, the escaped convict, to Miss Havisham, locked up with her unhappy past and living with her ward, the arrogant, beautiful Estella. Pip must discover his true self, and his own set of values and priorities.

Lucie Manette had been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris’s most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the Manettes’s fortunes become inextricably intertwined with those of two men, the heroic aristocrat Darnay, and the dissolute lawyer, Carton. Their story, which encompasses violence, revenge, love and redemption, is grippingly played out against the backdrop of the terrifying brutality of the French Revolution.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”

“You have been the last dream of my soul”

George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans was a Victorian novelist and became one of the free-thinkers of the day. She developed the method of psychological analysis present in modern-day fiction.

Silas Marner is the story of a poor weaver who is unjustly accused and becomes bitter and miserly until he is transformed by the love of an abandoned baby girl.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

One Novel & 2 Novellas or

Shorty Stories

Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character; It is lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.

E. M. ForsterForster was a British novelist and essayist.

His novels showed strong social comment based on observation of middle class life. Maurice, a novel about a homosexual relationship, was not published until after his death in 1971.

John Fowles

John Fowles was born in London in 1926. His fiction is rich in narrative suspense, romantic drama, and erotic conflict.

In this contemporary, Victorian-style novel Charles Smithson, a nineteenth-century gentleman with glimmerings of twentieth-century perceptions, falls in love with enigmatic Sarah Woodruff, who has been jilted by a French lover.

From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist that he both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, Fowles’ book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England.

The Magus is the story of Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching assignment on a remote Greek island. There his friendship with a local millionaire evolves into a deadly game, one in which reality and fantasy are deliberately manipulated, and Nicholas must fight for his sanity and his very survival.

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell was a British novelist and short story writer and was born in 1810. She was

concerned about issues affecting the poor as well as separate standards of morality for men and women.

Nadine GordimerSouth African novelist and short story writer

whose major themes are exile and alienation. Her fiction records the negative effects of

apartheid. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

English novelist, short story writer, playwright, and journalist whose novels treat life's moral ambiguities in the context of contemporary political settings.

Graham Greene

End of the Affair is set in wartime London. Maurice, a novelist, is having affair with Sarah, a married woman. When a bomb explodes, she fears that he is killed and she promises God that she will end the affair if he survives.

Thomas HardyHardy was an English poet and was his nation's foremost regional novelist . His most impressive novels are set in Wessex, an imaginary county in southwestern England that were based on the actual county of Dorset.

The Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy's sixth published novel. It first appeared in the magazine Belgravia, a publication known for its sensationalism, and was presented in twelve monthly installments from January to December 1878.

Because of the novel's controversial themes, Hardy had some difficulty finding a publisher; reviews, however, though somewhat mixed, were generally positive.

In the twentieth century, The Return of the Native became one of Hardy's most popular novels

Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly contemporary style, the classic themes of courage in the face of defeat and of personal triumph won from loss. Written in 1952, this hugely successful novella confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a large part in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist, who later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He is also well known for his use of psychedelic drugs. By the end of his life Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.

Brave New World was written in 1931 and is set in London of 2540, the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and operant conditioning that combine to profoundly change society.

Huxley answered this book with a reassessment in an essay, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with Island (1962), his final novel. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Kazuo IshiguroKazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960 when he was 5 years old. Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations, and winning the 1989 award for his novel The Remains of the Day. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

A moving novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now. A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance-and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving "a great gentleman." But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness" and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served. A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England.

P.D. JamesPhyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, commonly known as P. D. James, is an English crime writer and a life peer in the House of Lords. She is most famous for a series of detective novels starring policeman and poet Adam Dalgliesh.

Told with P. D. James’s trademark suspense, insightful characterization, and riveting storytelling, The Children of Men is a story of a world with no children and no future.

The human race has become infertile, and the last generation to be born is now adult. Civilization itself is crumbling as suicide and despair become commonplace. Oxford historian Theodore Faron, apathetic toward a future without a future, spends most of his time reminiscing. Then he is approached by Julian, a bright, attractive woman who wants him to help get her an audience with his cousin, the powerful Warden of England. She and her band of unlikely revolutionaries may just awaken his desire to live . . . and they may also hold the key to survival for the human race

James JoyceIrish novelist noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods

Dubliners is a book of short stories set in the city of Dublin. The stories are arranged to represent childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The final story, The Dead, is considered a world masterpiece.

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel.

D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence was a major British author of the 20th Century. He explored themes of human sexuality and questions of moral behavior.

Inspired by the long-standing affair between Frieda, Lawrence's German wife, and an Italian peasant who eventually became her third husband, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the story of Constance Chatterley, who, while trapped in an unhappy marriage to an aristocratic mine owner whose war wounds have left him paralyzed and impotent, has an affair with Mellors, the gamekeeper.

Somerset MaughamEnglish novelist, playwright, and short story

writer whose work is characterized by a clear, unadorned style, cosmopolitan settings, and a shrewd understanding of human nature.

Born with a club foot, Philip Carey is acutely sensitive of his handicap. As a medical student in London, he meets selfish and unfaithful Mildred Rogers, a waitress for whom he develops an all-consuming passion and whom he cannot leave, no matter how often she humiliates, betrays, and abandons him. When Philip finishes medical school, he enters a loving relationship with Sally Athelney. Her possible pregnancy forces him to examine his life.

Ian McEwan

British novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter whose restrained, refined prose style accentuated the horror of his dark humor and perverse subject matter.

Imaginative thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, misinterpreting a scene between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper's son, later accuses Robbie of a crime she has no proof he committed and spends years trying to atone for her actions.

Herman Melville

David MitchellDavid Mitchell is an English novelist, who has written five novels, two of which, number9dream and Cloud Atlas, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has lived in Italy, Japan and Ireland.

A collection of disparate characters from different countries and centuries find their stories linked through a bizarre series of events.

George OrwellEric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism and commitment to democratic socialism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the allegorical novella Animal Farm, which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skillfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

Dorothy SayersScholar and writer best known for her mystery stories featuring the witty and charming Lord Peter Wimsey.

Mystery novelist Harriet Vane knows all about poisons, and when her fiancé dies in a manner described in one of her books, a jury of her peers think a hangman's noose is the answer. But Lord Peter Wimsey is determined to find Harriet innocent--and make her his wife.

Three books required

Peter ShafferPeter Shaffer was born in 1926 and is known as one of Britain’s best modern playwrights. He is versatile and has a knack for creating smash hits.

William Shakespeare

History

DramaComedy

John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. , was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and the novella Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception".

Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

J. R. R. Tolkien

“The Ring Cycle”Three books required

Evelyn Waugh

English writer regarded by many as the most brilliant satirical novelist of his day. Waugh's novels, although always derived from firsthand experience, are unusually highly wrought and precisely written.

H. G. Wells

English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian, best known for his science fiction novels.

Oscar Wilde

Wilde was born in Dublin and was a playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. Wilde was criticized for his homosexuality and lifestyle choices.

Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American playwright and author of many stage classics.

After years of obscurity, he became suddenly famous with The Glass Menagerie (1944), closely reflecting his own unhappy family background. This heralded a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth. His later work attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences, and alcohol and drug dependence further inhibited his creative output.

Virginia Woolf

British author who made an original contribution to the form of the novel and was one of the most distinguished critics of her time.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf details Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess, exploring the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman’s life. The novel "contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century" (Michael Cunningham).

Samuel BeckettWaiting for Godot (Play)

George Bernard ShawPlayright: Pygmalion

Modern Playwrights

Athol Fugard- South African Playwright

Anthony Burgess

Dystopian Literature

Sir Thomas More

• Aldous Huxley

• H.G. Wells

• George Orwell

• Kazuo Ishiguro

• David Mitchell

• J.G. Ballard

• Sir Thomas More

Utopian Literature

The Epic, the Quest, &The Fantastical

The Horror

Mystery

Junior Term Paper Authors

2014-2015