The name Edgar Wallace too often suggests the sensational thriller, with dark deeds on darker nights, which is easily parodied or dismissed. What is overlooked is the fact that this prodigious writer was one of the most popular writers of this century....

ABSTRACT Both Poe and Stevens perceived imagination as the ultimate faculty of the human mind. The paper attempts a detailed comparison of Poe's "The Raven" and Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" as an a example of two different approaches...

A CURSORY examination of the lists of bestselling fiction around the world (published regularly in The Economist's monthly Review section) invariably throws up some cross-border curiosities. For example, the way that "Sophie's World", a re-telling of the history of western philosophy (with interesting-though...

In the following essay, McQuilland discusses Wallace's writing process and gives an overall assessment of his books.

Watson was an English journalist and novelist who was known for his detective novels. In the following essay, he speculates that the wide popularity of Wallace's novels was due to predictable plots and characters, as well as the author's refusal to question middle-class tastes and morality.

MacCarthy was one of the foremost English literary and drama critics of the twentieth century. He served for many years on the staff of the New Statesman and edited Life and Letters. A member of the Bloomsbury group, which also included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey among its number, MacCarthy was guided by their primary tenet that "one' sprime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience, and the pursuit o...