Classic Literature
George Eliot's first full-length novel, Adam Bede paints a powerful portrait of rural life, seduction, faith, and redemption. First published in 1859, this innovative novel carried its readers back sixty years to a time of impending change for England and the wider world. Eliot's penetrating
portrayal of the interaction of ordinary people brought a new social realism to the novel, in which humor and tragedy co-exist, and fellow-feeling is the mainstay of human relationships. This is the first edition based on Eliot's final revision of the novel in 1861, using the definitive Clarendon
text. It includes Eliot's journal entry on the real-life origins of the story and broadsheet accounts of Mary Voce, whose execution provided the germ of the novel. Carol Martin's superb Introduction sheds light on the novel's historical context and some of the main issues it explores: the role of
work, class, and relations between the sexes, and Eliot's belief that the artist's duty is the faithful representing of commonplace things. The book includes comprehensive notes that identify literary and historical allusions. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert
introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
portrayal of the interaction of ordinary people brought a new social realism to the novel, in which humor and tragedy co-exist, and fellow-feeling is the mainstay of human relationships. This is the first edition based on Eliot's final revision of the novel in 1861, using the definitive Clarendon
text. It includes Eliot's journal entry on the real-life origins of the story and broadsheet accounts of Mary Voce, whose execution provided the germ of the novel. Carol Martin's superb Introduction sheds light on the novel's historical context and some of the main issues it explores: the role of
work, class, and relations between the sexes, and Eliot's belief that the artist's duty is the faithful representing of commonplace things. The book includes comprehensive notes that identify literary and historical allusions. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert
introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
The magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning work that brought the wrenching experience of slavery into the literature of our time, enlarging our comprehension of America's original sin. Upon the original publication of Beloved in 1987, John Leonard wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "I can't imagine American literature without it." Nearly two decades later, The New York Times chose Beloved as the best American novel of the previous fifty years. Set in post-Civil War Ohio, it is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has withstood savagery and not gone mad. Sethe, who now lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing apparition who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in her memory; in Denver's fear of the world outside the house; in the sadness that consumes Baby Suggs; in the arrival of Paul D, a fellow former slave; and, most powerfully, in Beloved, whose childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining possession of the present--and to throw off the long-dark legacy of the past--is at the center of this spellbinding novel. But it also moves beyond its particulars, combining imagination and the vision of legend with the unassailable truths of history.
A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author's grandson.
When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that "if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy." Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for "obscenity" and "instigating hatred between the races."
Wright's once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him--whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and Blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he headed north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo." Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate. "To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness," John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. "Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear."
One of the great American memoirs, Wright's account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance--a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time.
Charles Dickens's most important novel is now available in an edition that provides extensive historical appendices.
Miss Harriet Brandt, daughter of a mad scientist and a voodoo priestess, comes of age and leaves her home in Jamaica for the first time, travelling to Europe. Beautiful and talented, Harriet will gain the affections of many of the men and women she meets and a bright future seems assured for her.
But there is something strange about Harriet. Everyone she gets close to seems to sicken or die. Doctor Phillips has a theory: the blood of the vampire flows through Harriet's veins, and she is draining the life out of those she loves. Are the misfortunes that seem to follow Harriet merely coincidence? Or is she really afflicted with the curse of the vampire?
One of the strangest novels by the prolific Florence Marryat (1837-1899), The Blood of the Vampire was the "other vampire novel" of 1897, appearing the same year as Dracula. Marryat's novel is fascinating not only for its sensational plot and bizarre characters, but also because of its engagement with many of the issues that haunted the late Victorian imagination, such as race, heredity, women's roles, Spiritualism, and the occult. This edition includes the unabridged text of the exceedingly rare 1897 first edition and a new introduction by Brenda Hammack.
This Norton Critical Edition includes:
- The medieval masterpiece's most popular tales, including--new to the Third Edition--The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale and The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale.
- Extensive marginal glosses, explanatory footnotes, a preface, and a guide to Chaucer's language by V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson.
- Sources and analogues arranged by tale.
- Twelve critical essays, seven of them new to the Third Edition.
- A Chronology, a Short Glossary, and a Selected Bibliography.
About the Series
Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format--annotated text, contexts, and criticism--helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.
- The medieval masterpiece's most popular tales, including--new to the Third Edition--The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale and The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale.
- Extensive marginal glosses, explanatory footnotes, a preface, and a guide to Chaucer's language by V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson.
- Sources and analogues arranged by tale.
- Twelve critical essays, seven of them new to the Third Edition.
- A Chronology, a Short Glossary, and a Selected Bibliography.
About the Series
Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format--annotated text, contexts, and criticism--helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.
A rich selection of background and source materials is provided in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and Dracula's Guest, the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. Dramatic and Film Variations focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.
Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijsktra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.
A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.
This Norton Critical Edition presents fully annotated the text of the 1897 First Edition.
A rich selection of background and source materials is provided in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and "Dracula's Guest," the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. "Dramatic and Film Variations" focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.
Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijsktra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.
A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.
From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom in which to be reborn. They display Camus at the height of his powers. Now, on the 50th anniversary of the book's publication, Carol Cosman's new translation recovers a literary treasure for our time. Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series, now in a dazzling new series design Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books 50 Covers competition Gold Medal Winner of the 3x3 Illustration Annual No. 14 This edition of Hamlet is edited with an introduction by series editor A. R. Braunmuller and was recently repackaged with cover art by Manuja Waldia. Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series. The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare's time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Thoreau's political writing is intensely personal and direct. Both his life and work focus uncompromisingly on the question how should I live?. This edition of Thoreau's political essays includes Civil Disobedience, selections from Walden, and the anti-slavery addresses.
Here, in one volume for the first time, are the most important works of Henry David Thoreau, America's greatest nature writer and a political thinker of worldwide influence. A landmark in American literature, Walden is at once a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, a manual of self-reliance, and a masterpiece of style. The Maine Woods combines close observation of the unexplored Maine wilderness with a far-sighted plea for conservation. Including "Civil Disobedience," "Walking," and "Life Without Principle," the 27 essays gathered here reflect Thoreau's speculative and probing cast of mind. In his poems, presented here in versions from his journals and manuscripts, Thoreau gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain style of New England speech.