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Книги издательства «Wordsworth»
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Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. |
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Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. Set in 1482, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is a compelling story of love and betrayal, brutal deeds and one of the most famous acts of revenge in world literature. Quasimodo, the hunchback of the title, is one of fiction's most extreme characters — beneath his monstrous disfigurement, his love for the beautiful Esmerelda reveals a heart full of intense emotion. The novel is set in the great cathedral of Notre-Dame and had a profound influence on the Romantic Movement. |
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Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer. Although subtitled 'A Novel without a Hero', Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world. |
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Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. This novel is based on the author's personal experience as a teacher in Brussels. It is a moving tale of repressed feelings and subjection to cruel circumstance and position, borne with heroic fortitude. It is also the story of a woman's right to love and be loved. |
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During his life, Geoffrey Chaucer (born c.1340) was courtier, diplomat, revenue collector, administrator, negotiator, overseer of building projects, landowner and knight of the shire. He was servant, retainer, husband, friend and father, but is now mainly known as a poet and 'the father of English literature', a postion to which he was raised by other writers in the generation after his death. It was Boccaccio's Decameron which inspired Chaucer, in the 1390s, to begin work on The Canterbury Tales, which was still unfinished at his death in October 1400. It tells the story of a group of 30 pilgrims who meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames opposite the city of London, and travel together to visit the then famous shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury cathedral. The tavern host, who accompanies them, suggests that they amuse one another along the way by telling stories, with the best storyteller awarded a meal in the tavern (paid for by all the others) on their return. The stories told by the pilgrims range from bawdy comedies through saints' lives and moral tracts to courtly romances, always delivered with a generous helping of Chaucer's own sly wit and ironic humour. Although basing his characters on the stereotypes of 'estates satire', Chaucer succeeds in his aim of producing an overview of his times and their culture, for posterity, in the manner of Italian, proto-Renaissance, writers. This transcription and edition is taken from British Library MS Harley 7334, produced within ten years of Chaucer's death. The on-page notes and glosses aim to enable readers with little or no previous experience of medieva |
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Parade's End is the great British war novel and Ford Madox Ford's major achievement as a novelist. Originally published as four linked novels between 1924 and 1928, it follows the story of Christopher Tietjens, as his life is shattered by his wife's infidelities and overturned by the mud, blood and destruction of the First World War. Tietjens, with his old-fashioned Tory values, is already out of step with the corrupt political culture of Edwardian England: his experiences at the Front and his developing relationship with the suffragette Valentine Wannop force him into a radical reconfiguring of his values as he participates in the post-war period of national re-construction. Parade's End is both a subtly perceptive psychological novel and a richly descriptive chronicle of 'the public events of a decade'. Through Tietjens, his beautiful (and unforgettably cruel) wife, Sylvia, and the principled Valentine, Ford draws us into the world of the English upper class as it goes through a period of crisis and transformation. |
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The beautiful Scheherazade's royal husband threatens to kill her, so each night she diverts him by weaving wonderful tales of fantastic adventure, leaving each story unfinished so that he spares her life to hear the ending the next night. This is the background to the Arabian Nights. In this selection made by that master of folklore and fairy-tale Andrew Lang, the reader meets Aladdin with his wonderful lamp, the Enchanted Horse, the Princess Badoura, Sinbad the Sailor, and the great Caliph of Bagdad, Haroun-al-Raschid. |
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Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. |
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Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. Hamlet is not only one of Shakespeare's greatest plays but also the most fascinatingly problematic tragedy in world literature. First performed around 1600, this is a gripping and exuberant drama of revenge, rich in contrasts and conflicts. Its violence alternates with introspection, its melancholy with humor, and its subtlety with spectacle. The Prince, Hamlet himself, is depicted as a complex, divided, introspective character. His reflections on death, morality and the very status of human beings make him 'the first modern man'. |
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«Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that «reaped» his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each. Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education: in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his 'mighty theme' — not only the whale but all things sublime — Melville breathes in the world's great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.» |
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Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. What does persuasion mean — a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances. A woman of no importance, she manoeuvres in her restricted circumstances as her long-time love Captain Wentworth did in the wars. Even though she is nearly thirty, well past the sell-by bloom of youth, Austen makes her win out for herself and for others like herself, in a regenerated society. |
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«Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. Love, sex and death are the components of Shakespeare's classic story of the love of two young people which reaches across the barriers of family and convention. It encompasses great love, high drama, low comedy and a tragic ending. «Romeo and Juliet» is a pure tragedy of youth told in verse that is both youthful and intense. The loveliness and the music of the poetry make believable the otherwise commonplace afflictions of blighted love. The beautiful personification of some of the main characters has caused Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio and the Nurse to become part of the world's literary mythology.» |
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«Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. Tom Sawyer, a shrewd and adventurous boy, is as much at home in the respectable world of his Aunt Polly as in the self-reliant and parentless world of his friend Huck Finn. The two enjoy a series of adventures, accidentally witnessing a murder, establishing the innocence of the man wrongly accused, as well as being hunted by Injun Joe, the true murderer, eventually escaping and finding the treasure that Joe had buried. «Huckleberry Finn» recounts the further adventures of Huck, who runs away from a drunken and brutal father, and meets up with the escaped slave Jim. They float down the Mississippi on a raft, participating in the lives of the characters they meet, witnessing corruption, moral decay and intellectual impoverishment. Sharing so much in background and character, these two stories, the best of Twain, indisputably belong together in one volume. Though originally written as adventure stories for young people, the vivid writing provides a profound commentary on provincial American life in the mid-nineteenth century and the institution of slavery.» |
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The Pickwick Papers is Dickens first novel and widely regarded as one of the major classics of comic writing in English. Originally serialised in monthly instalments, it quickly became a huge popular success with sales reaching 40,000 by the final number. In the century and a half since its first appearance, the characters of Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller and the whole of the Pickwickian crew have entered the consciousness of all who love English literature in general, and the works of Dickens in particular. Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения. |
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Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) began his diary on 1 Jan 1660, immediately prior to the Restoration of Charles II to the throne and the subsequent loosening of the rigid and social code enforced during the Puritan Commonwealth. As variously, Clerk to the Council, a Member of Parliament, a prisoner in the Tower of London, twice Secretary to the Admiralty and President of the Royal Society, Pepys was in a unique position to observe and record the details of a ten-year period of English history which included not only the Restoration, but the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of London of the following year. However, it was not only for affairs of state which took up the great diarist's interest, for he was a regular attendant at the King's Theatre, was a hearty eater and drinker and delighted in recording his fondness of women, especially his own and his friends' young servant girls. |
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In 1795 Mungo Park, a twenty-four year old Scottish surgeon, set out from the Gambia to trace the course of the Niger, a river of which Europeans had no first-hand knowledge. Travels in the interior districts of Africa is his Journal of that extraordinary journey. He travelled on the sufferance of African rulers and soon came to depend for his survival on the charity of African villagers. Before he reached the Niger, he endured months of captivity in the camp of a Moorish chief. His subsequent misadventures included being robbed and stripped naked by Fulani bandits. Yet, throughout his travels, Park maintained a remarkable empathy for African societies and beliefs. He recorded what he saw as accurately as he could, and without presuming European superiority. He prefaced his Journal with the disclaimer that it ‘has nothing to recommend it but truth. It is a plain unvarnished tale, without any pretensions of any kind…’ Park's truthfulness and lack of pretension will endear him to modern readers. |
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The hand was writhing in agonized contortions, squirming and wriggling upon the nail like a worm upon a hook. 'We'll keep it there until it dies', he said. 'May I burn in hell, if I ever open the door of that safe again'. The brilliant and scary The Beast with Five Fingers, is the first entry in this mammoth collection of strange and chilling short stories by W. F. Harvey, an unjustly neglected author of supernatural tales. This unique volume demonstrates clearly that Harvey is one of the masters of the genre. Along with such classics as August Heat, which concerns two strangers whose individual fates become inextricably entwined in a nightmare scenario and the gruesome school yarn, The Dabblers, you will find such minor masterpieces of the uncanny as The Man Who Hated Aspidistras, Sarah Bennet's Possession, The Habeas Corpus Club and many more stories which refreshingly avoid the cliche while at the same time creating that wonderfully eerie sense of fear. |
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This title includes an Introduction by Hilary Long. Marjorie Bowen (1885-1952) spent the early part of her working life providing for a demanding and ungrateful family. We are lucky that she did so, since among the results were these short stories of rare quality. In their use of dreams, ancient anecdote, and ruined or dilapidated buildings (Florence Flannery, The Fair Hair of Ambrosine) they are at times in the finest tradition of The Castle of Otranto and the Gothic revival which had chilled the blood of the British public a hundred and fifty years earlier. But her stories are more subtle in their construction, and often use simple materials (The Crown Derby Plate, Elsie's Lonely Afternoon), interweaving their terror and mystery with the commonplace of everyday life. Their mastery of detail, sureness of expression and acute reading of human nature give them a sinister force, which is realistic and unnerving, yet at the same time tinged with pity and compassion. |
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Few writers have had a more demonstrable impact on the development of the modern world than has Karl Marx (1818-1883). Born in Trier into a middle-class Jewish family in 1818, by the time of his death in London in 1883, Marx claimed a growing international reputation. Of central importance then and later was his book Das Kapital, or, as it is known to English readers, simply Capital. Volume One of Capital was published in Paris in 1867. This was the only volume published during Marx's lifetime and the only to have come directly from his pen. Volume Two, published in 1884, was based on notes Marx left, but written by his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Readers from the nineteenth century to the present have been captivated by the unmistakable power and urgency of this classic of world literature. Marx's critique of the capitalist system is rife with big themes: his theory of 'surplus value', his discussion of the exploitation of the working class, and his forecast of class conflict on a grand scale. Marx wrote with purpose. As he famously put it, 'Philosophers have previously tried to explain the world, our task is to change it'. |
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