12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Theme
Language / Storytelling
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Works
This entry joins Claude Shannon's 1938 master's thesis on relay and switching circuits with his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The thesis made a decisive engineering move: it showed that Boolean algebra could describe and simplify relay circuits.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
An Investigation of the Laws of Thought is George Boole's attempt to express logic, probability, and reasoning in mathematical form. The book begins from a bold premise: the operations of the mind in reasoning can be studied through symbols and laws analogous to those of algebra.
As We May Think is a speculative essay about the problem of intellectual abundance. Written at the end of World War II, it asks what scientists should do when their wartime energies turn toward peace and when the record of human knowledge has grown too large for traditional methods of indexing, filing, and retrieval.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Characters is a collection of brief sketches of recognizable social types: the dissembler, flatterer, chatterer, boor, complaisant man, reckless man, tactless man, mean man, show-off, coward, oligarchic sympathizer, late learner, slanderer and many others. Each sketch begins with a definition and then offers small scenes in which the type reveals himself through repeated behavior.
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H.
This Paine anthology gathers the pamphlets that made revolutionary argument feel urgent, portable, and democratic. Common Sense, published in January 1776, attacks monarchy, hereditary succession, reconciliation with Britain, and political hesitation.
Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias reworks Kraepelin's deteriorating psychosis into a broader and more psychologically complex group of disorders. Its most famous act is terminological: Bleuler introduces schizophrenia to name a splitting or disjunction in psychic functions, not a split personality in the popular sense.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric appeared in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, 'John of silence', the same day as Repetition. Its subject is Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering.
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is not a polished monograph but a technical memorandum whose influence exceeds its form. Written in 1945 for the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer project, it describes a general-purpose electronic digital computer in which numerical data and operating instructions occupy the same high-speed memory.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
In Patagonia is an account of Chatwin's journey through the southern tip of South America in the mid-1970s, told in 97 short, numbered chapters that mix travel, history, legend and portraits of people met along the way. The book begins in childhood: in his grandmother's cabinet in England lay a piece of skin with coarse reddish hair, which he was told came from a 'brontosaurus' and had been sent by his grandmother's cousin, Charley Milward, a sailor who settled in Patagonia.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Leibniz's logical writings on binary arithmetic and universal character are scattered across essays, letters, drafts, and memoranda rather than gathered in a single finished book. Their unity lies in a dream: reasoning might be made clearer, more reliable, and more inventive by a symbolic language whose elements combine according to rules.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
This Douglass entry pairs the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with the 1852 speech commonly known as What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? The Narrative tells Douglass's movement from enslaved childhood in Maryland through violence, literacy, skilled labor, resistance, escape, and public abolitionist identity.
Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland, the unremarkable seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, whom the narrator teasingly insists no one would have supposed born to be a heroine. Catherine is a devoted reader of Gothic novels, especially Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
This paired entry brings together Alan Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem and his 1950 essay Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The first paper attacks a precise mathematical problem: what does it mean for a number or function to be computable?
On Fairy-Stories is Tolkien's defense of fairy-story as a serious form of imaginative art. He begins by rejecting narrow definitions that identify fairy tales with children, small supernatural beings, dreams, or mere folklore collection.
On Formally Undecidable Propositions is one of the decisive works in the history of logic. Godel addresses the dream that mathematics might be placed on a complete and consistent formal foundation, a dream associated with Hilbert's program.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems, published after his death in 1918, bring together a Jesuit priest's experiments in sound, perception, praise, and spiritual desolation. Hopkins's key ideas of inscape and instress name the particular form of a created thing and the energy by which that form is apprehended.
Whitefield's Selected Sermons preserve the voice of the eighteenth century's most famous evangelical itinerant. His preaching emphasized new birth, heartfelt conversion, human sin, Christ's mercy, and the immediate demand that hearers respond.
Spurgeon's Selected Sermons show Victorian evangelical preaching at industrial scale. Week by week, his sermons moved from pulpit to print, reaching readers far beyond the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
Moody's Selected Sermons represent revival preaching after the Civil War, in the age of railroads, urbanization, mass meetings, gospel hymnody, and organized evangelistic campaigns. Moody's style is famously plain.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the central monuments of medieval monastic spirituality. They do not offer a continuous modern commentary on every verse.
This paired entry sets Jonathan Edwards's most famous terror sermon beside his narrative of revival in Northampton and neighboring towns. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is often remembered for its imagery of danger, wrath, and suspended judgment, but its structure is theological before it is theatrical.
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces.
Patrick's own writings are the narrow bridge between the global St. Patrick's Day figure and a real late Roman Christian voice.
St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania joins two histories that later language often confuses: the hagiographic cult of a youthful martyr and the medical naming of involuntary or epidemic movement.
Studies on Hysteria is the classic collaborative text from which psychoanalysis narrates much of its beginning. , followed by theoretical and therapeutic reflections.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
The History of the Church tells the story of Christianity from the apostles to Eusebius’ own fourth-century world, where persecution gives way to imperial favor. Eusebius organizes the past through succession: bishops, teachers, heresies, writings, persecutions and martyrs.
The History of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ unfinished account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 411 BCE. Unlike Herodotus’ broad storytelling, Thucydides narrows his gaze to power, fear, interest, decision and the deterioration of civic language under pressure.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
Jung's Psychology of Dementia Praecox attempts to make psychotic speech and behavior psychologically intelligible. Working from the Burgholzli clinic, word-association studies, Bleuler's dementia praecox, and Freud's ideas about complexes, Jung argues that seemingly senseless symptoms may express emotionally charged complexes.
The Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
The Symposium is a framed dialogue about eros, memory and ascent. Apollodorus repeats what Aristodemus told him about a banquet at Agathon’s house after the poet’s tragic victory.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
The Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Twelfth Night begins with shipwreck, loss, and disguise. Viola believes her brother Sebastian drowned, enters Illyria as Cesario, and serves Duke Orsino, who sends her to woo Olivia.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life.