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Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction 18: Crime and Punishment is unavailable, but you can change that!

When Charles William Eliot assembled The Harvard Classics, more commonly known as “The Five-Foot Shelf,” and later the “Shelf of Fiction”, he gathered this epic collection of key works which he thought would best represent “the progress of man… from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century.” In his introduction to The Harvard Classics, Eliot likens the collection to a...

as a consequence of his long association with criminals, he had an intense interest in abnormal and perverted types, the psychology of which he analysed with an uncanny subtlety. His books form a striking contrast to those of Turgenev in point of art, for they are diffuse, often poorly constructed and incoherent, and without charm of style. But in spite of these limitations, his power of rousing emotion, the grim intensity of his conceptions, and his command of the sources of fear and pity make him
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