Bøger i Literary Classics serien

Features a depiction of a pilgrimage to Lourdes. This book offers commentary on suffering and the belief in miracles as the last desperate refuge from pain. It contains various characters and describes the physical effects of their illnesses, their hopes, beliefs, fears, and above all endurance.

Novelist Harold Frederic (1856-1898) played a critical role in the development of realistic American fiction. His best work analyzes the narrow-mindedness of the small towns of his native upper New York State. Frederic's most famous novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), chronicles the life of an idealistic young Methodist minister who, as he falls under the influence of progressive ideas, becomes a skeptic. He comes to regard his old religion as intellectually and spiritually bankrupt, but in the process is nearly destroyed by those who condemn him for "going to the bad".

This is the only extant play by the great Irish novelist andis of interest both for its autobiographical content and for formal reasons. In the characters and their circumstances details of Joyce's life are evident. The main character, Richard Rowan, the moody, tormented writer who is at odds with both his wife and the parochial Irish society around him, is clearly a portrait of Joyce himself. The character of Rowan's wife, Bertha, is certainly influenced by Joyce's lover and later wife, Nora Barnacle, with whom he left Ireland and lived a seminomadic existence in Zurich, Rome, Trieste, and Paris. As in real life, the play depicts the couple with a young son and, like Joyce, Rowan has returned to Ireland because of his mother's illness and subsequent death.Though lesser-known, Exiles, written after Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and while Joyce was working on Ulysses, provides interesting insights into the development of the creative gifts of a literary genius.