Discover essays, criticism, and reflective writing that examine literature, culture, public questions, and ideas. This collection currently contains 33 titles in Literra’s catalogue.
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William Cullen Bryant's discourse on Gulian Crommelin Verplanck is a commemorative portrait of a prominent nineteenth-century American intellectual, public figure, and patron of literature. Delivered before the New-York Historical Society after Verplanck's death, the address combines biography
An English Garner is a wide-ranging anthology assembled by Edward Arber to preserve pieces of English literature, history, journalism, sermons, letters, travel writing, political argument, and miscellaneous prose that might otherwise disappear from ordinary reading. The collection's value lies
John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding begins with a radical question: where does human knowledge come from? Locke rejects the idea that the mind arrives in the world already filled with innate ideas and instead argues that the mind begins without built-in contents, gaining ideas
The second volume of Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding turns from the origins of ideas toward language, knowledge, probability, judgment, and the limits of human certainty. Books III and IV confront two problems that become unavoidable once ideas are understood as products of
Thomas Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species was one of the important early texts of British abolitionism. Clarkson presents slavery and the Atlantic slave trade not as distant economic institutions but as systems built on coercion, violence, family separation, and
Daniel Defoe’s An Essay Upon Projects is a collection of practical proposals for improving society through institutions, education, employment, finance, public administration, and social reform. Defoe approaches problems with the mentality of an organizer
Volume 13 of John Lord’s Beacon Lights of History turns from military and political rulers toward major writers and intellectual figures, continuing the series’ habit of presenting history through influential personalities. Lord’s approach is biographical and moral: each life becomes a way to
This volume of Discourses brings together essays concerned with biological and geological questions, reflecting the nineteenth-century culture of natural science in which observations about living organisms and the earth were increasingly being connected into broader theories of development and
Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius uses the early history of Rome as a laboratory for political thought. Instead of treating Livy’s stories as ancient curiosities, Machiavelli asks what they reveal about republics, military power, institutions, class conflict
This selection of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays reveals the writer behind the adventure novels. Stevenson writes about books, travel, youth, writing, art, memory, character, and the habits that make up an ordinary life
Essays on Paul Bourget brings Mark Twain’s sharp satirical intelligence to the work of French novelist and critic Paul Bourget. Twain was fascinated by the way European writers approached society, morality, culture, and psychological complexity, and his essays often combine literary criticism
Benjamin Rumford’s essays bring together practical scientific investigation with reflections on economics, government, labor, poverty, and the organization of society. Rumford was fascinated by efficiency: how much heat is produced, how resources are wasted, how workers can be fed, how military
Mark Twain’s Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences is a famous piece of comic literary criticism in which Twain attacks what he considers the flaws in James Fenimore Cooper’s prose and storytelling. Twain turns technical criticism into entertainment by presenting a catalogue of alleged mistakes
Alfred Russel Wallace’s Is Mars Habitable? is a scientific argument against the idea that Mars could support life in the lush, Earth-like form imagined by some nineteenth-century astronomers
Thomas De Quincey’s Miscellaneous Essays is exactly the kind of collection that rewards readers who enjoy following an intelligent mind wherever it decides to go. Rather than building one continuous argument, De Quincey moves through literary criticism, history, philosophy, memory, language
Spinoza’s On the Improvement of the Understanding is an unfinished philosophical project built around one deceptively difficult question: how can a human being learn to think well enough to live well? Spinoza begins from dissatisfaction with the ordinary sources of happiness—wealth, status
Philippine Folklore Stories collects legends and traditional tales preserved in the islands of the Philippines, offering a glimpse into a culture in which history, nature, morality, and the supernatural often overlap. The stories include explanations of customs, fantastic creatures, heroes
Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study is a practical rhetoric book designed to help people become more effective with language. Grenville Kleiser gathers useful phrases, model sentences, short passages, and examples that can be studied for their structure, vocabulary, rhythm
Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance examines the language writers and critics used to think about literature during a period when poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, education, and classical learning were deeply intertwined. Renaissance writers inherited a sophisticated vocabulary from Greek and
Scientific Essays and Lectures brings together Charles Kingsley’s attempts to connect scientific observation with broader questions about education, nature, religion, and human understanding. Kingsley was a clergyman and writer, but he also took a serious interest in natural history, and his
Lajos Kossuth’s Select Speeches brings together the public voice of one of the most important figures in the Hungarian struggle for constitutional reform and national independence. Kossuth’s oratory is political, but it is also theatrical
The Best Letters of Charles Lamb reveals one of the great pleasures of literary correspondence: a writer can be more spontaneous, mischievous, vulnerable, and personal in a letter than in a carefully constructed essay. Lamb’s letters are filled with friends, books, theater, gossip, food
The Epic is an essay about one of literature’s oldest forms: the long poem that turns a hero, war, journey, or founding event into a story of collective significance. Epic poetry is not merely large in length
Counsels and Maxims collects Schopenhauer’s practical reflections on how people might navigate a world in which happiness is uncertain and disappointment is normal. His advice is often severe
On Human Nature brings together Schopenhauer’s reflections on the recurring patterns of human behavior: desire, egoism, sympathy, sexuality, conflict, self-deception, and the social games people play in order to protect their interests. He is deeply skeptical of the idea that human beings are
Studies in Pessimism is Schopenhauer’s collection of essays on suffering, mortality, the limitations of human happiness, and the ways people create unnecessary pain through desire and expectation. The title sounds bleak because Schopenhauer is deliberately unwilling to make existence prettier
The Art of Controversy is Schopenhauer’s mischievous study of argument, debate, and the many ways people try to win disputes without actually proving that they are right. He distinguishes between genuinely establishing a proposition and defeating an opponent rhetorically
The Art of Literature is Schopenhauer’s blunt guide to reading, writing, style, and intellectual independence. He distinguishes between writers who genuinely have something to say and writers who produce pages mainly because writing is their profession
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge gathers lectures, notes, observations, fragments, literary criticism, philosophy, religion, and reflections from one of the most restless minds of the Romantic period. Coleridge’s notebooks and marginalia are valuable partly because they preserve
The Literature of Arabia is a broad introduction to Arabic literary traditions, presenting major forms, historical periods, poets, writers, and works for readers approaching the subject from outside the Arabic-speaking world. The book’s scope includes poetry, storytelling, religion, philosophy
This volume brings together poetry by three eighteenth-century English writers—Joseph Addison, John Gay, and William Somervile—along with memoirs and critical essays by George Gilfillan. The result is less a single book than a compact history of changing poetic tastes
The Elia essays are Charles Lamb’s intimate portraits of London life, memory, books, friendship, family, food, theatre, offices, and the odd little experiences that most writers would dismiss as insignificant. Lamb turns those small subjects into literature by giving them personality
Volume 6 of the collected works of Samuel Johnson brings together writing that displays the extraordinary range of one of eighteenth-century England’s most influential literary minds. The volume includes reviews, political pieces, and biographical lives, making it possible to see Johnson moving
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