Product Details
Barchester Towers (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Barchester Towers (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
By Anthony Trollope

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Product Description

Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

 

The second and most popular of Trollope’s six Barsetshire novels, Barchester Towers chronicles the struggles for power and position in an imaginary county in Victorian England. Passions start seething when an "outsider," Dr. Proudie, is appointed bishop of Barchester. Soon, his ambitious, domineering wife and the smarmy, scheming curate, Mr. Slope, are hatching plots and counter-plots as they try to control the choice of a new warden for Hiram’s Hospital and a new husband for Eleanor, a lovely young widow and the daughter of the former warden, Mr. Harding.

 

The novel combines the realism of later fiction (including Trollope’s own) with such Victorian devices as Dickensian character names and a comically interruptive narrator. The narrator’s sharply satiric comments enhance the story’s richness, while his playful, reassuring, and mocking asides subvert the reader’s expectations, giving the book an unexpectedly post-modernist flavor. Ultimately, we see that Trollope’s characters’ petty jealousies, selfishness, and meanness are not metaphors for larger issues, they are the issues—the same human failings that, in other contexts, can lead to serious social strife and civil unrest.

 

Edward Mendelson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is W. H. Auden’s literary executor and has written widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1899219 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-11-01
  • Original language: English
  • Dimensions: 1.40" h x 5.34" w x 8.03" l, 1.01 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 560 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Amazon.com
This 1857 sequel to The Warden wryly chronicles the struggle for control of the English diocese of Barchester. The evangelical but not particularly competent new bishop is Dr. Proudie, who with his awful wife and oily curate, Slope, maneuver for power. The Warden and Barchester Towers are part of Trollope's Barsetshire series, in which some of the same characters recur.

From AudioFile
This nineteenth-century novel about clerical politics read by Flo Gibson in her nineteenth-century voice is a joy. Keeping the deans, archbishops and prebendaries straight while reading, may encourage dozing off, but no difficulty occurs during this expert telling. Whether the cleric you dislike the most gets his comeuppance or the right cleric gets his just rewards, you can't wait to hear the resolution. This is a fine piece of work. C.P. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
`What has kept Trollope in the forefront of this country's great writers is his powers of ironical observation and nowhere is that more in evidence than in Barchester Towers.' Herts Advertiser, May '97

`What has kept Trollope in the forefront of this country's great writers is his powers of ironical observation and nowhere is that more in evidence than in Barchester Towers.' Noel Cantillon, Hitchin Gazette