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Oxford University Press
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Alexandre Dumas's novels are notable for their suspense and excitement, their foul deeds, hairsbreadth escapes, and glorious victories. In The Black Tulip, the shortest of Dumas's most famous tales, the real hero is no Musketeer, but a flower. The novel — a deceptively simple story — is set in Holland in 1672, and weaves the historical events surrounding the brutal murder of John de Witte and his brother Cornelius into a tale of romantic love. The novel is also a timeless political allegory in which Dumas, drawing on the violence and crimes of history, makes his case against tyranny and puts all his energies into creating a symbol of justice and tolerance: the fateful tulipa negra. This edition reprints the first, classic English translation. David Coward sets the novel in the context of its author's life, the turbulent history of the Dutch Republic, and the amazing tulipmania of the 17th century which brought wealth to some and ruin to many. |
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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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Mrs. Gareth, widowed chatelaine of Poynton, is fighting to keep her house with its priceless objets d'art from her son Owen and his lovely, utterly philistine fiancee. When she discovers that her young friend and sympathized Fleda Vetch is secretly in love with Owen, she thrusts her into the battle-line. The power struggle that ensues between the three women leaves Owen vacillating. What is at stake is not the mere possession of tables and chairs; it is, for Fleda, a conflict between aesthetic ideals, ethical imperatives, and her innermost feelings, in which she risks betraying, and being betrayed by, all that she holds most dear. |
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When Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot's first novel, was published anonymously in 1857, it was immediately recognized, in the words of Saturday Review, as the production of a peculiar and remarkable writer. The three stories that make up the Scenes, The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, Mr Gilfil's Love Story, and Janet's Repentance, intriguingly foreshadow George Eliot's later work. The first readers, including Dickens and Thackeray, were struck by the humorous irony, the truthfulness of the presentation of the lives of ordinary people, and the compassionate acceptance of human weakness which characterize Eliot's writing. |
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Felix Holt, austere, idealistic, and passionate, is pitted against the self-satisfied local landlord Harold Transome in this story set in a Midland borough at the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Every class of society is included in Eliot's vivid picture of political ferment. |
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The greatest classic of angling literature and a unique celebration of the English countryside, Izaak Walton's IThe Compleat AnglerR was originally published in 1653 and first appeared with Charles Cotton's continuation in 1676. No book, apart from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, has been more often reprinted. As a treatise on the art of fishing it has never wholly been superseded. For its advice on the catching and cooking of fish, the rules for baits, and the making of artificial flies, it remains a valuable and engrossing guide. As a graceful and affectionate portrait of rural England its charm is irresistible and in Walton and Cotton we could not wish for more congenial companions. This illustrated edition, with an Introduction by the novelist John Buchan, has been expanded and revised by John Buxton. |
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Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the human beast? La Bete humaine (1890), is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his 'most finely worked' novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains, always, the beast within. This new translation captures Zola's fast-paced yet deliberately dispassionate style, while the introduction and detailed notes place the novel in its social, historical, and literary context. |
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The seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877) is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. It was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature. At the centre of the novel stands Gervaise, who starts her own laundry and for a time makes a success of it. But her husband Coupeau squanders her earnings in the Assommoir, the local drinking shop, and gradually the pair sink into poverty and squalor. L'Assommoir is the most finely crafted of Zola's novels, and this new translation captures not only the brutality but also the pathos of its characters' lives. This book is a pwerful indictment of nineteenth-century social conditions, and the introduction examines its relation to politics and art as well as its explosive effect on the literary scene. |
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An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Conrad`s second novel, is a tale of intrigue in an eastern setting. Love and death are the major players in this parable of human frailty — the story of a man unable to understand others and fated never to possess his own soul. |
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Jean Racine (1639-99) remains to this day the greatest of French poetic dramatists. Britannicus (1669), the first play in this volume, takes its themes from Roman history: the setting is bloody and treacherous court of the Emperor Nero. Phaedra (1677) dramatizes the Greek myth of Phaedra's doomed love for her stepson Hippolytus. Athaliah (1691), Racine's last and perhaps finest play, draws on the Old Testament story of Athaliah, Queen of Judah and worshipper of Baal, who is threatened and finally forced to concede victory to Joash, a son of the house of David and survivor of Athaliah's massacres. Racine's tragedies portray characters wrestling with ambition, treachery, religion, and love. In this translation, specially commissioned for The World's Classics series, C.H. Sisson has captured admirably the lucidity of Racine's language, both analytic and passionate, and the rhythm of his four-part Alexandrine, a combination that previous translators have consistently failed to achieve. |
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The last man! I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me. Mary Shelley, Journal (May 1824). Best remembered as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man eight years later, on returning to England from Italy after her husband's death. It is the twenty-first century, and England is a republic governed by a ruling elite, one of whom, Adrian, Earl of Windsor, has introduced a Cumbrian boy to the circle. This outsider, Lionel Verney, narrates the story, a tale of complicated, tragic love, and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague. The Last Man also functions as an intriguing roman a clef, for the saintly Adrian is a monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friend Lord Raymond is a portrait of Byron. The novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, as Shelley demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem her doomed characters. |
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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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