The Common Reader First Series (Virginia Woolf)

Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. Its target audience was the middle- and upper-class members of society—those who were more likely to be well educated— and exposes the poverty existing in two prosperous cities: Paris and London. The first part is an account of living in near-extreme poverty destitution in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens. The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins. Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English. Uyarı: Agora Bilim Pazarı'ndaki diğer birçok kitabın aksine, bu kitap İngilizcedir.

Flush: A Biography, an imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, is a cross-genre blend of fiction and nonfiction by Virginia Woolf published in 1933. Written after the completion of her emotionally draining The Waves, the work returned Woolf to the imaginative consideration of English history that she had begun in Orlando: A Biography, and to which she would return in Between the Acts. Commonly read as a modernist consideration of city life seen through the eyes of a dog, Flush serves as a harsh criticism of the supposedly unnatural ways of living in the city. The figure of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the text is often read as an analogue for other female intellectuals, like Woolf herself, who suffered from illness, feigned or real, as a part of their status as female writers. Most insightful and experimental are Woolf's emotional andphilosophical views verbalised in Flush's thoughts. As he spends more time with Barrett Browning, Flush becomes emotionally and spiritually connected to the poet and both begin to understand each other despite their language barriers. For Flush smell is poetry, but for Barrett Browning, poetry is impossible without words. In Flush Woolf, examines the barriers that exist between woman and animal created by language yet overcome through symbolic actions. Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English. Uyarı: Agora Bilim Pazarı'ndaki diğer birçok kitabın aksine, bu kitap İngilizcedir.

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens’s second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens’s weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens’s most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens’s themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media. Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English. Uyarı: Agora Bilim Pazarı'ndaki diğer birçok kitabın aksine, bu kitap İngilizcedir.

Burmese Days is the first novel by English writer George Orwell, published in 1934. Set in British Burma during the waning days of empire, when Burma was ruled from Delhi as part of British India, the novel serves as “a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj.” At the centre of the novel is John Flory, “the lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better side of human nature.” The novel describes “both indigenous corruption and imperial bigotry” in a society where, “after all, natives were natives—interesting, no doubt, but finally...an inferior people”. Burmese Days was first published “further afield,” in the United States, because of concerns that it might be potentially libelous; that the real provincial town of Katha had been described too realistically; and that some of its fictional characters were based too closely on identifiable people. A British edition, with altered names, appeared a year later. Nonetheless, Orwell’s harsh portrayal of colonial society was felt by “some old Burma hands” to have “rather let the side down”. In a letter from 1946, Orwell wrote, “I dare say it’s unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen”. Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English. Uyarı: Agora Bilim Pazarı'ndaki diğer birçok kitabın aksine, bu kitap İngilizcedir.