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Книги издательства «Oxford University Press»
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Trollope relates his life from the influence of his childhood and mother, to the time he spent in the Post Office and the motivation behind his literary career. |
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This story deals with the imperfect workings of the legal system in the trial and acquittal of Lady Mason. Trollope wrote in his Autobiography that his friends considered this the best I have written. |
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Boethius composed the De Consolatione Philosophiae in the 6th century AD whilst awaiting death under torture, condemned on a charge of treason which he protested was manifestly unjust. Though a convinced Christian, in detailing the true end of life which is the soul's knowledge of God, he consoled himself not with Christian precepts but with the tenets of Greek philosophy. This work dominated the intellectual world of the Middle Ages; writers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, Jean de Meun, and Dante were inspired by it. In England it was rendered in to Old English by Alfred the Great, into Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer, and later Queen Elizabeth I made her own translation. The circumstances of composition, the heroic demeanour of the author, and the Menippean texture of part prose, part verse have combined to exercise a fascination over students of philosophy and literature ever since. |
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The men of culture are the true apostles of equality. Matthew Arnold's famous series of essays, which were first published in book form under the title Culture and Anarchy in 1869, debate important questions about the nature of culture and society that are as relevant now as they have ever been. Arnold seeks to find out 'what culture really is, what good it can do, what is our own special need of it' in an age of rapid social change and increasing mechanization. He contrasts culture, the study of perfection, with anarchy, the mood of unrest and uncertainty that pervaded mid-Victorian England. How can individuals be educated, not indoctrinated, and what is the role of the state in disseminating sweetness and light? This edition reproduces the original book version and enables readers to appreciate its immediate historical context as well as the reasons for its continued importance today, in the face of the challenges of multi-culturalism and post-modernism. |
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Coward! Sneak! May good men shun him, from henceforth! may his Queen refuse to receive him! You, an earl's daughter! Oh, Isabel! How utterly you have lost yourself! When the aristocratic Lady Isabel abandons her husband and children for her wicked seducer, more is at stake than moral retribution. Ellen Wood played upon the anxieties of the Victorian middle classes who feared a breakdown of the social order as divorce became more readily available and promiscuity threatened the sanctity of the family. In her novel the simple act of hiring a governess raises the spectres of murder, disguise, and adultery. Her sensation novel was devoured by readers from the Prince of Wales to Joseph Conrad and continued to fascinate theatre-goers and cinema audiences well into the next century. This edition returns for the first time to the racy, slang-ridden narrative of the first edition, rather than the subsequent stylistically 'improved' versions hitherto reproduced by modern editors. |
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Our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise. Deceptively brief and insidiously easy to read, La Rochefoucauld's shrewd, unflattering analyses of human behaviour have influenced writers, thinkers, and public figures as various as Voltaire, Proust, de Gaulle, Nietzsche, and Conan Doyle. The author gave himself the following advice: The reader's best policy is to assume that none of these maxims is directed at him, and that he is the sole exception... After that, I guarantee that he will be the first to subscribe to them. This is the fullest collection of La Rochefoucauld's writings ever published in English, and includes the first complete translation of the Reflexions diverses (Miscellaneous Reflections). A table of alternative maxim numbers and an index of topics help the reader to locate any maxim quickly and to appreciate the full range of La Rochefoucauld's thought on any of his favourite themes, such as self-love, vice and virtue, love and jealousy, friendship and self-interest, passion and pride. |
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The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color-line. Originally published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk is a classic study of race, culture, and education at the turn of the twentieth century. With its singular combination of essays, memoir, and fiction, this book vaulted W. E. B. Du Bois to the forefront of American political commentary and civil rights activism. The Souls of Black Folk is an impassioned, at times searing account of the situation of African Americans in the United States. Du Bois makes a forceful case for the access of African Americans to higher education, memorably extols the achievements of black culture (above all the spirituals or 'sorrow songs'), and advances the provocative and influential argument that due to the inequalities and pressures of the race problem, African American identity is characterized by double consciousness. This edition includes a valuable appendix of other writing by Du Bois, which sheds light on his attitudes and intentions. |
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I wish to remain single, for I have made a vow of virginity. This is the remarkable story of the twelfth-century recluse Christina, who became prioress of Markyate, near St Albans in Hertfordshire. Determined to devote her life to God and to remain a virgin, Christina repulses the sexual advances of the bishop of Durham. In revenge he arranges her betrothal to a young nobleman but Christina steadfastly refuses to consummate the marriage and defies her parents' cruel coercion. Sustained by visions, she finds refuge with the hermit Roger, and lives concealed at Markyate for four years, enduring terrible physical and emotional torment. Although Christina is supported by the abbot of St Albans, she never achieves the recognition that he intended for her. Written with striking candour by Christina's anonymous biographer, the vividness and compelling detail of this account make it a social document as much as a religious one. Christina's trials of the flesh and spirit exist against a backdrop of scheming and corruption and all-too-human greed. |
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She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before. Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century american writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. When her most famous story, The Awakening, was first published in 1899, it stunned readers with its frank portrayal of the inner word of Edna Pontellier, and its daring criticisms of the limits of marriage and motherhood. The subtle beauty of her writing was contrasted with her unwomanly and sordid subject-matter: Edna's rejection of her domestic role, and her passionate quest for spiritual, sexual, and artistic freedom. From her first stories, Chopin was interested in independent characters who challenged convention. This selection, freshly edited form the first printing of each text, enables readers to follow her unfolding career as she experimented with a broad range of writing, from tales for children to decadent fin-de siecle sketches. The Awakening is set alongside thirty-two short stories, illustrating the spectrum of the fiction from her first published stories to her 1898 secret masterpiece, The Storm. |
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Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, the exuberant, satirical form of festival drama which flourished during the heyday of classical Athenian culture in the fifth century BC. His plays are characterized by extraordinary combinations of fantasy and satire, sophistication and vulgarity, formality and freedom. Birds is an escapist fantasy in which two dissatisfied Athenians, in defiance of men and gods, bring about a city of birds, the eponymous Cloudcuckooland. In Lysistrata the heroine of the play organizes a sex-strike and the wives of Athens occupy the Akropolis in an attempt to restore peace to the city. The main source of comedy in the Assembly-Women is a similar usurpation of male power as the women attempt to reform Athenian society along utopian-communist lines. Finally, Wealth is Aristophanes' last surviving comedy, in which Ploutos, the god of wealth is cured of his blindness and the remarkable social consequences of his new discrimination are exemplified. This is the first complete verse translation of Aristophanes' comedies to appear for more than twenty-five years and makes freshly available one of the most remarkable comic playwrights in the entire Western tradition, complete with an illuminating introduction including play by play analysis and detailed notes. |
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This edition brings together four eighteenth-century comedies that illustrate the full variety of the century's drama. Fielding's The Modern Husband, written before the 1737 Licensing Act that restricted political and social comment, depicts wife-pandering and widespread social corruption. In Garrick and Colman's The Clandestine Marriage two lovers marry in defiance of parental wishes and rue the consequences. She Stoops to Conquer explores the comic and not-so-comic consequences of mistaken identity, and in Wild Oats, the 'strolling player' Rover is a beacon of hope at a time of unrest. Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling texts, critical introduction, wide-ranging annotation and an informative bibliography. |
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Look at her, she is the image of our beautiful Italy. Corinne, or Italy (1807) is both the story of a love affair between Oswald, Lord Nelvil and a beautiful poetess, and an homage to the landscape, literature and art of Italy. On arriving in Italy, Oswald immediately falls under Corinne's magical spell as she is crowned a national genius at the Captitol. Yet, on returning to England, he succumbs to convention and honours his late father's wish by marrying the dutiful English girl, Lucile, despite having learned that Corinne is Lucile's Italian half-sister. Corinne dies of a broken heart and Lord Nelvil is left with a seared conscience. Stael weaves discreet French Revolutionary political allusion and allegory into her romance, and its publication saw her order of exile renewed by Napoleon. Indeed, the novel stands as the birth of modern nationalism, and introduces to French usage the word nationalitie. It is also one of the first works to put a woman's creativity centre stage. Sylvia Raphael's new translation preserves the natural character of the French original and the edition is complemented by notes and introduction which serve to set an extraordinary work of European Romanticism in its historical and political contexts. |
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This volume contains the four plays by Thomas Middleton which have most impressed the modern world: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is the most complex amd effective of the city comedies; Women Beware Women and The Changeling (with William Rowley) are two of the most powerful Jacobean tragedies outside of Shakespeare — studies in lust, power, violence, and self-delusive psychology; and A Game at Chess was the single most popular play of the whole Shakespearean era, a satirical expose of Jesuit plotting and Anglo-Spanish politics which played to pacifist houses at the Globe until King James and his ministers banned it. All the play texts are newly edited with informative annotation. |
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The second of Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, this is the one which has consistently captured the imagination of generations since it was first published in 1826. Its success lies partly in the historical role Cooper gives to his Indian characters, against the grain of accumulated racial hostility, and partly in his evocation of the wild beautiful landscapes of North America which the French and the British fought to control throughout the 18th century. At the centre of the novel is the celebrated massacre of British troops and their families by Indian allies of the French at Fort William Henry in 1757. Around this historical event, Cooper built a romantic fiction of captivity, sexuality and heroism, in which the destiny of the Mohicans Chingachgook and his son Uncas is inseparable from the lives of Alice and Cora Munro and of Hawkeye, the frontier scout. The controlled, elaborate writing gives natural pace to the violence of the novel's action: like the nature whose plundering Cooper laments, the book's placid surface conceals inexplicable and deathly forces. |
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In Adam Bede (1859) George Eliot took the well-worn tale of a lovely dairy-maid seduced by a careless squire, and out of it created a wonderfully innovative and sympathetic portrait of the lives of ordinary Midlands working people — their labours and loves, their beliefs, their talk. Hugely popular in its own time, Adam Bede is one of the greatest examples of humane and liberal Victorian social concern, a pioneering classic of radical social realism. It is also important for the way it meditates on the need for such fiction and the methods of writing it. As the Introduction declares: The distinction of Adam Bede is to tell a story, and also to tell about telling a story. This is a novel about obscure lives, and also about how to be a novel about obscure lives. This edition reprints the original broadsheet reports of the murder case that was a starting point for the book, and the notes illuminate Eliot's many literary and religious references. |
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A classic of Victorian literature, and one of the earliest books written specifically for boys, Tom Brown's Schooldays has long had an influence well beyond the middle-class, public school world that it describes. An active social reformer, Hughes wrote with a freshness, a lack of cant, and a kind, relaxed tolerance which keeps this novel refreshingly distinct from other schoolboy adventures. This edition is the only one available, and comes with the outstanding 1869 illustrations by Arthur Hughes. |
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This is a reissue of the previous World's Classics edition in the new, larger format and with the series name changed to Oxford World's Classics. |
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Walter Pater is increasingly being referred to by modern critics as an important precursor of modernist aesthetic theory. His study, The Renaissance, was also very influential in its own day, particularly on the work of Oscar Wilde who described it as my golden book... the very flower of decadence. |
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An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot... it will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer. Thomas Paine was the first international revolutionary. His Common Sense (1776) was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution; his Rights of Man (1791-2) was the most famous defence of the French Revolution and sent out a clarion call for revolution throughout the world. He paid the price for his principles: he was outlawed in Britain, narrowly escaped execution in France, and was villified as an atheist and a Jacobin on his return to America. Paine loathed the unnatural inequalities fostered by the hereditary and monarchical systems. He believed that government must be by and for the people and must limit itself to the protection of their natural rights. But he was not a libertarian: from a commitment to natural rights he generated one of the first blueprints for a welfare state, combining a liberal order of civil rights with egalitarian constraints. This collection brings together Paine's most powerful political writings from the American and French revolutions in the first fully annotated edition of these works. |
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In this, his first collection of short stories, Hardy sought to record the legends, superstitions, local customs, and lore of a Wessex that was rapidly passing out of memory. But these tales also portray the social and economic stresses of 1880s Dorset, and reveal Hardy's growing scepticism about the possibility of achieving personal and sexual satisfaction in the modern world. By turns humorous, ironic, macabre, and elegiac, these seven stories show the range of Hardy's story-telling genius. The critically established text, the first to be based on detailed study of all revised texts, presents manuscript readings which have never before appeared in print. The stories include: The Three Strangers; A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four; The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion; The Withered Arm; Fellow-Townsmen; Interlopers at the Knap; The Distracted Preacher. |
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