Fiction
Welcome to a collection on early 19th-century Russian readership, culture & the press. It consists of: a) TEXTS drawn from fiction, journals, memoirs & travel accounts; and b) SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS—bibliographies of primary and secondary sources, a database of 11,898 subscriptions to Russian imprints (1825-1846), images, and various reference materials.
Muriel Spark was identified as a promising and creative writer when her name was still Muriel Camberg and she was still at school. Some of her poems had already been published by the time she won her first poetry prize, at the age of 12.
Dame Muriel – poet, writer of fiction and literary criticism, and biographer – went on to win most of the literary awards going, was never out of print, and was at the top of her profession, internationally, for more than half a century.
Best-known as the author of 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie', Muriel decided in the 1940s to keep a record of her professional and personal activities, beginning a personal archive that is now one of the largest and most comprehensive held by the National Library of Scotland.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh’s New Town in 1850. He died 44 years later on a small Samoan island in the Pacific.
During his short life he travelled the world, defied convention, and made himself one of the most famous writers of the 19th century.
Here we tell Stevenson's story, illustrated with material held in the National Library of Scotland's collections.
You can also see the entire first English edition of Kidnapped – one of his most famous tales – published in 1886.
Introduction This virtual exhibit presents a small selection of items taken from the Osborne Collection’s sixtieth anniversary exhibit, When Cinderella Went to the Ball: Five Hundred Years of Fairy Tales , held from September 12 to December 12, 2009. Celebrating one of children’s literature’s most enduringly popular genres, the exhibit progresses from a fifteenth-century Venetian wonder tale ( Historia di Lionbruno , 1476), through “classic” stories and collections by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and others, to today’s spin-offs, spoofs and “post-modern” interpretations.
Street & Smith Dime Novel Covers Brief History of Street & Smith In 1855, when Francis Scott Street and Francis Shubael Smith bought The New York Weekly Dispatch , Street & Smith embarked on a publishing mission that remained remarkably prolific and profitable for over one hundred years. Street & Smith rapidly became a "fiction factory," producing a wide variety of popular literature, including dime novels, pulp magazines, books in series for juveniles, fashion and homemaking magazines, comics, and adventure stories. The company viewed fiction as a commodity, with Street & Smith editors dictating plots, character types, and other conventions to the firm's stable of writers.