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Oxford University Press
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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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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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The fourth of Trollope's Palliser novels, this text tells the story of Phineas Redux, who returns to politics only to find that a series of quarrels hamper his progress. The beautiful and enigmatic Madame Max Goesler, familiar from earlier political novels, plays her part in this tale. |
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During the 1790s, with Ireland in political crisis, Maria Edgeworth made a surprisingly rebellious choice: in Castle Rackrent, her first novel, she adopted an Irish Catholic voice to narrate the decline of a family from her own Anglo-Irish class. Castle Rackrent's narrator, Thady Quirk, gives us four generations of Rackrent heirs — Sir Patrick, the dissipated spendthrift; Sir Murtagh, the litigating fiend; Sir Kit, the brutal husband and gambling absentee; and Sir Condy, the lovable and improvident dupe of Thady's own son, Jason. With this satire on Anglo-Irish landlords Edgeworth pioneered the regional novel and inspired Sir Walter Scott's Waverly (1814). She also changed the focus of conflict in Ireland from religion to class and boldly predicted the rise of the Irish Catholic Bourgeoisie. |
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My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings. For half a century from its publication in 1901 Up from Slavery was the best known book written by an African American. The life of ex-slave Booker T Washington embodied the legendary rise of the American self-made man, and his autobiography gave prominence for the first time to the voice of a group which had to pull itself up from extreme adversity. Washington attributes his success to his belief in many of the virtues celebrated by Benjamin Franklin: selflessness, industry, pragmatism, and optimism. But from behind the mask of the humble, plainspoken schoolmaster come hints that reveal Washington the ambitious and tough-minded analyst of power who had to balance the demands of blacks with the constraints imposed on him by whites. To read Up from Slavery is to explore the means by which Washington rose to become the most influential and powerful black American of his time. How far he compromised African American rights in order to achieve his aims remains a matter of controversy. |
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Menander was the founding father of European comedy. From Ralph Roister Doister to What the Butler Saw, from Henry Fielding to P. G. Wodehouse, the stock motifs and characters can be traced back to him. The greatest writer of Greek New Comedy, Menander (c.341-290 BC) wrote over one hundred plays but until the twentieth century he was known to us only by short quotations in ancient authors. Since 1907 papyri found in the sand of Egypt have brought to light more and more fragments, many substantial, and in 1958 the papyrus text of a complete play was published, The Bad-Tempered Man (Dyskolos). His romantic comedies deal with the lives of ordinary Athenian families, and they are the direct ancestors not only of Roman comedy but also of English comedy from the Renaissance to the present day. This new verse translation is accurate and highly readable, providing a consecutive text with supplements based on the dramatic situation and surviving words in the damaged papyri. |
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Eucritus and I and pretty Amyntas turned aside To the farm of Phrasidamus, where we sank down With pleasure on deep-piled couches of sweet rushes, And vine leaves freshly stripped from the bush. The Greek poet Theocritus of Syracuse (first half of the third century BC) was the inventor of 'bucolic' poetry. These vignettes of country life, centred on competitions in song and love, are the foundational poems of the western pastoral tradition. They were the principal model for Virgil in the Eclogues and their influence can be seen in the work of Petrarch and Milton. Although it is the pastoral poems for which he is chiefly famous, Theocritus also wrote hymns to the gods, brilliant mime depictions of everyday life, short narrative epics, epigrams, and encomia of the powerful. The great variety of his poems illustrates the rich and flourishing poetic culture of what was a golden age for Greek poetry. |
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...there is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped. Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small Ohio town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the centre is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's 'grotesques' — solitary figures unable to communicate with others. George is their conduit for expression and solace from loneliness, but he has his own longings which eventually draw him away from home to seek a career in the city. He carries with him the dreams and unuttered words of remarkable characters such as Wing Biddlebaum, the disgraced former teacher, and the story-telling Doctor Parcival. The book has influenced many American writers, including ernest hemingway, William Faulkner, John Updike, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates. It reshaped the development of the modern short story, turning the genre away from an emphasis upon plot towards a capability for illuminating the emotional lives of ordinary people. This new edition corrects errors in earlier editions and takes into account major criticism and textual scholarship of the last several decades. |
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An ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered. Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) is the best account of the history and working of the British political system ever written. As arguments raged in mid-Victorian Britain about giving the working man the vote, and democracies overseas were pitched into despotism and civil war, Bagehot took a long, cool look at the 'dignified' and 'efficient' elements which made the English system the envy of the world. His analysis of the monarchy, the role of the prime minister and cabinet, and comparisons with the American presidential system are astute and timeless, and pertinent to current discussions surrounding devolution and electoral reform. Combining the wit and panache of a journalist with the wisdom of a man of letters steeped in evolutionary ideas and historical knowledge, Bagehot produced a book which is always thoughtful, often funny, and seldom dull. This edition reproduces Bagehot's original 1867 work in full, and introduces the reader to the dramatic political events that surrounded its publication. |
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The fragility of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-19th century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the Marble Faun, Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn. |
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Philip Sidney was in his early twenties when he wrote his 'Old' Arcadia for the amusement of his younger sister, the Countess of Pembroke. The book, which he called a trifle, and that triflingly handled, reflects their youthful vitality. The Old Arcadia tells a romantic story in a manner comparable to that of Shakespeare's early comedies. It is divided into five Acts, and abounds in lively speeches, dialogues, and quasi-dramatic tableaux. Two young princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, disguise themselves as an Amazon and a shepherd to gain access to the Arcadian Princesses, who have been taken into semi-imprisonment by their father to avoid the dangers foretold by an oracle. As a vehicle for Sidney's prophetic ideas about English versification, the 'Old' Arcadia also includes over seventy poems in a wide variety of metres and genres. In clarity, symmetry, and coherence the 'Old' version is greatly superior both to the ambitious but unfinished 'New' Arcadia and the amalgamated, 'composite' version, a hybrid monster which Sidney himself never envisaged. |
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This new translation in free verse conveys the full force of Lucan's writing and his grimly realistic view of the subject. The Introduction sets the scene for the reader unfamiliar with Lucan and explores his relationship with earlier writers of Latin epic, and his interest in the sensational. |
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