Society & Class

Examinations of class, power, and the structures we live within.

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The interlocking lives of the inhabitants of a provincial English town in the 1830s, focusing on the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate. Virginia Woolf called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."

United Kingdom 1871

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

A group of British schoolboys stranded on a desert island after a wartime evacuation attempt to govern themselves — and descend into savagery. A disturbing allegory of the inherent darkness in human nature.

United Kingdom 1954

Charles Dickens

The orphan Oliver, born in a workhouse, runs away to London and falls in with a gang of thieves led by Fagin. Dickens's second novel was a biting attack on the Poor Law of 1834 and the treatment of children in Victorian England.

United Kingdom 1837

The confident, clever Emma Woodhouse appoints herself matchmaker for the people around her, with disastrously misguided results. Austen described her protagonist as "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like."

United Kingdom 1815

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Countries: 9

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