Analyzing the Content of Fiction - CLEP Humanities

Jane Austen, who published between 1811 and 1816, wrote novels that centered on the romantic interests and pursuits of well-born women in England during the early nineteenth century. Some of her best-known works are Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma, which all deal with women finding their husbands.

Mary Shelley's landmark gothic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, is told first from the perspective of an explorer who meets the inventor Victor Frankenstein. After an introductory chapter, the story is told by Frankenstein himself in a series of flashbacks, or scenes that take place in the past of the novel's timeframe.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick; or, The Whale, first published in 1851, tells the story of a whaling vessel, led by the intense Captain Ahab, as it tracks down the great white whale who gives the book its name. Told through the perspective of the sailor Ishmael, it is a highly allegorical tale featuring allusions to biblical themes, classical mythology, and historical issues.

Ebenezer Scrooge is the main character of the novella A Christmas Carol, written by Charles Dickens in 1843. The story features three Christmas ghosts who each visit the miserly rich man Scrooge on Christmas Eve night. The three ghosts show Scrooge his past, present, and future, which make him reconsider his life and become more charitable and generous.

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace focuses on the lives of two young members of the Russian nobility, Pierre Bezhukov and Andrei Bolkonsky, who struggle with their identities during the Napoleonic wars. Bezhukov is a student who has spent time in Paris, and Bolkonsky is his old friend who is a carouser and bon vivant. War and Peace is considered one of the great novels of world literature.

The Scarlet Letter was written in 1850 by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who often wrote about the colonial period in his native Massachusetts. The Scarlet Letter is the story of Hester Prynne, a young woman who is castigated by Puritan society for becoming pregnant and refusing to reveal the father of her child. The book's title derives from the bright red "A" she is required to wear by the town's magistrates.

Even though Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are the titular Three Musketeers in Alexandre Dumas' 1844 novel_,_ the story is told through the point of view of D'Artagnan, a new recruit to the Musketeers of the Guard for French King Louis XIV. Dumas' novel was so popular that the story of D'Artagnan would get picked up in his later works Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne.

Pride and Prejudice is perhaps Jane Austen's most famous novel. Like most of her work, it focuses on the romantic travails of upper class women in her own early nineteenth-century England. Pride and Prejudice specifically details the two very different approaches taken by the two Bennett sisters, the suspicious and harsh Elizabeth and the sweet, shy Jane, in finding appropriate marriages.

Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Miserables is an epic tale about Jean val Jean, a man who spends years on the run after escaping prison. Val Jean famously enters the harsh French prison system after stealing a loaf of bread, and is chased by the ruthless Inspector Javert. The book uses val Jean's story as a way to deal with French history, taking place from the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 to the June Rebellion of 1832.

Published in 1820, Ivanhoe was Sir Walter Scott's fifth novel. Like his previous novels, it was a historical novel, but it was his first to focus on the medieval era. Telling the story of the roguish hero Wilfred of Ivanhoe during the last part of the twelfth century, Scott's book brought about a revival of interest in medievalism, chivalry, and Anglo-Saxon England during the nineteenth century in Britain.

Middlemarch, written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was akin to many nineteenth-century English novels in that it had a wide scope in terms of characters and plot. In contrast to other novels of the time, however, Middlemarch featured a biting tone regarding its subjects, and did not feature a strong moral or societal lesson.

Jules Verne was a French author who rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century from a series of novels with overlapping themes, known as Les Voyages Extraordinaires. His 1865 book From the Earth to the Moon detailed a space fight, 1870's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea chronicled a submarine voyage, and 1872's Around the World in Eighty Days followed a circumnavigation of the globe in a hot-air balloon.

Charles Dickens' next-to-last novel, 1861's Great Expectations is often considered Dickens' most well-constructed and best-written novel. The story follows, in first person narrative, a young boy named Pip as he grows up and navigates Victorian London society through various connections he makes. The book is able to provide Dickens a platform to criticize Victorian manners and mores, as well as class structures.

In Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens, the Artful Dodger is an orphan that mentors Oliver when he first arrives in London. The Dodger introduces Oliver to Mr. Finnegan, a gentleman that feeds and clothes a small army of orphans. In exchange, he teaches them to pick pockets and keeps the proceeds for himself.

Peter Pan was written by James Barrie; Treasure Island was written by Robert Louis Stephenson; The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written by Victor Hugo; and Of Mice and Men was written by John Steinbeck.

Gulliver's Travels is a satirical novel by the Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift, published in 1726. In it, Swift satirizes the popular "travelogue" by having his main character, Lemuel Gulliver, visit various odd worlds and locations. Among these are the civilized horses called the Houyhnhnms, the giant Brobdingnagians, and the diminutive Lilliputians.

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was based on the true story of the lost Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk. Defoe's work, first published in 1719, is often considered the first novel to be written in English, as Defoe recounted the story of Crusoe in a manner not unlike a prose account of a real event.

John Updike was a prolific, successful, and critically acclaimed American author whose work was centered in the middle of the twentieth century. Updike's style, which was fairly consistent over his more than twenty novels and dozens of short stories, featured an intense realism in storytelling about middle class Americans that often had frank descriptions of sexual activity and discussions of Protestant beliefs.

Virtually the entire canon of William Faulkner is set in the fictional Yoknapatawtha County. Even the stories set elsewhere refer back to or feature characters from Faulkner's other stories set there. William Faulkner’s literary achievements earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis is a landmark novella that tells the story of Gregor Samsa, who finds himself transformed one morning into a massive bug. The Metamorphosis is Kafka's most famous story, and has many of the hallmarks of Kafka's style, including surreal situations, ironic plots, and dark humor.

Raymond Chandler wrote his first book when he was in his 40s during the Great Depression. Nonetheless, he instantly became one of America's bestselling authors, writing several books in a "pulp" vein about the detective Phillip Marlowe. In doing so, Chandler pioneered literary detective fiction, with its hard-boiled investigator, sparse language, complex plots, and dark mood. Chandler's typical Los Angeles settings also saw many of his books, like The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, made into films.