Masterpieces of World Literature (Hardcover)

by Frank N. Magill (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Philosophy and fantasy, plays and poems, essays and epics -- 270 literary classics that range from The Divine Comedy and Death Comes for the Archbishop to The Aeneid and The Grapes of Wrath are summarized and analyzed in this essential reference.

About the Author
Dr. Frank N. Magill has been a writer and editor of distinguished reference works for the past forty years. John K. Roth is Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. In 1988, he was named Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 992 pages
• Publisher: Collins Reference (August 19, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062700502
• ISBN-13: 978-0062700506
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.9 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #174,631 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

88 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the price!, May 1, 1999

By A Customer

"Literature" here means fiction and non-fiction -- great works of philosophy and political theory are included alongside famous novels, plays, and poems.

This book covers 275 of the "great books" of the western canon. (Make no mistake: this is unabashedly the Western Civ definition of Great Books. It also lacks racial diversity -- but see "Masterpieces of African-American Literature in the same series.)

For each work covered, the book gives a well-written, concise plot summary; descriptions of major characters; all the important facts of date and authorship; and a critical evaluation.

The list of authors is too long to give here. But since $35 is nothing to sneeze at -- and you need to know if the book covers works you're interested in -- here's a sampling: Shakespeare, Proust, Henry James, Tolstoy, Yeats, Trollope, Nietzsche, Coleridge, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Edith Wharton, Voltaire, Chaucer, Kafka, Kant, St, Augustine, Dickens, Plato, Ibsen, Henry Adams, Jane Austen, Emerson, Thoreau, Goethe, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Freud, Jung, Marx, Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Sartre, Camus, Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, etc., etc.

Whether you feel you have an incomplete education or you've just forgotten the basics of the books you read (or were supposed to read!) in high school and college -- this is the book for you. As it says on the flap copy" Invaluable for syudents and fascinating to every dedicated reader.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful reference but...., May 18, 2003

By A Customer

Of the available references of its kind, this one is the best. However, the latest compilation pales beside its 1952 counterpart which has 510 entries, compared to the 270 entries in this volume. This "new" edition has larger type and revised entries. Some of the articles/summaries are actually better than earlier versions.

However, none of the works of (for example) Thomas Wolfe, among others, are included in this new edition. I suppose the editors wished to keep the new volume as lean and basic as possible. They managed to do so in mostly an excellent way, but at the expense of omitting some essential literary masterpieces.

I do recommend this book, but definitely don't throw out your early editions of the title!

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Information about Literature- not the Literature itself, June 6, 2005

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This work provides summaries of the stories of two- hundred and seventy ' classic works' of Western Literature. It provides information about the characters of the work, the settings of the work. It can be truly helpful in ' straightening out' some of the confusion we often have after reading a book- no matter how much we have loved and concentrated in it.
It seems to me that this book is especially geared to helping students who are taking courses on these particular books. But it can also I think help in another way, help the reader get certain things ' straight' before doing the real reading on their own.
And this is the other, perhaps obvious point. No summary of a work is the work itself. And no information given about the work can substitute for the experience of reading the work.
Many clever students will of course substitute these summaries for the reading, write their papers and take their tests succcessfully. But they will have missed the crucial thing, the real act of reading.
So this is a tool, my sense is an excellent tool, but no substitute for the real thing.