An Introduction to the Study of Literature sets forth, in a simple and lucid manner, the issues and questions to be kept in mind while studying the vast canon of English literature. It takes much of its substance from a series of twenty - five lectures delivered before University Extension audiences at the Municipal Technical Institute, West Ham and the Polytechnic, Woolwich. This book compresses the matter from these lectures, along with a good deal of additional information, to provide a compact and handy guide that should prove extremely useful to new students of literature as well as veterans in the subject. Comprising ways and methods to study various genres such as poetry, prose fiction, drama, essay and short story, it covers every facet of literature. It also analyses the task of critiquing literature to bring out the necessity of studying the subject. A must - read for all literature aficionados.

Here 'Downland' refers to the chalk countriside of Southern England and the Isle of Wight.

One of the most significant novels in Latin American literature, written by Cuba's most important modern novelist—to win a bet with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the early 1970s, friends Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Roa Bastos and Alejo Carpentier reached a joint decision: they would each write a novel about the dictatorships then wreaking misery in Latin America. García Márquez went on to write The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos I, the Supreme. The third novel in this remarkable trinity is Reasons of State, hailed as the most significant novel ever to come out of Cuba. As with Garcia Marquez, Reasons of State is a bold story, boldly told --- daring in its perceptions, rich in lush detail, inventive in prose, and deadly compelling in its suspenseful plot. Inexplicably out of print for years, it tells the tale of the dictator of an unnamed Latin American country who has been living the life of luxury in high-society Paris. When news reaches him of a coup at home, he rushes back and crushes it with brutal military force. But returning to Paris he is given a chilly welcome, and learns that photographs of the atrocities have been circulating among his well-to-do friends. Meanwhile World War One has broken out, and another rebellion forces the dictator back across the ocean. As he struggles with the Marxist forces beginning to find footing in his own country, and Europe is devastated, Carpentier constructs a masterful and biting satire of the new world order.

Reproduction of the original: Birds in Town & Village by William Henry Hudson