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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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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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Few American novelists of the twentieth century have stayed as modern as F. Scott Fitzgerald. He gave a name to his age, 'the Jazz Age', but his reputation has outlived it. Gathered here are the five novels he wrote in his relatively short career, together with a number of the many short stories he wrote between 1922 and his death in 1940. This Side of Paradise catapulted him to fame, its expose of the manners and morals of a post-war generation becoming a cause celebre. The Beautiful and Damned, a semi autobiographical moral parable of a doomed marriage, affirmed Fitzgerald's status as the spokesman for the generation of the 1920s. His third novel, The Great Gatsby, remains for many readers the definitive American novel of the twentieth century, its eponymous hero a complex fictional portrayal of a romantic imagination at the mercy of a corrupt reality. Tender is the Night is an American Vanity Fair set on the French Riviera in the 1920s. Fitzgerald was working on The Last Tycoon at his death in 1940, and many critics rank his account of Hollywood at the height of the studio system, even in its unfinished state, as comparable to the achievement of The Great Gatsby. |
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E.F.Benson (1867-1940) was a prolific English novelist. He wrote some very highly rated Supernatural fiction, but his most famous creations were the protagonists in the six novels known under the collective title of Mapp and Lucia, the comic exploits of two upper-middle-class ladies living in a seaside town, very like Rye in East Sussex, in the 1920 and 1930s. These stories, of enduring popularity, were made into a TV series in the 1980s. Volume One contains: Queen Lucia (1920); Miss Mapp (1922); and, Lucia in London (1927). |
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E.F.Benson (1867-1940) was a prolific English novelist. He wrote some very highly rated Supernatural fiction, but his most famous creations were the protagonists in the six novels known under the collective title of Mapp and Lucia, the comic exploits of two upper-middle-class ladies living in a seaside town, very like Rye in East Sussex, in the 1920 and 1930s. These stories, of enduring popularity, were made into a TV series in the 1980s. Volume Two contains: Mapp and Lucia (1931); Lucia's Progress (1935); and, Trouble for Lucia (1939). |
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This book is introduced by Mark Valentine. Dr Nikola — Victorian master criminal. Elegant, ruthless, hypnotic: enter Dr Nikola and his black cat Apollyon. He was the world's first master villain, a Victorian forerunner of Dr Fu Manchu and the mad cat-stroking evil genius Blofeld in the James Bond books and films. Now Dr Nikola is back, wielding his sinister powers across the globe. In England, Egypt, Australia, Tibet, he pursues a priceless holy relic that will help him achieve his ultimate goal: immortality. Whether giving orders to his henchmen, suave in an evening suit in a private London restaurant, or languidly interrogating his prisoners in his secret torture chamber, Dr Nikola is always at his ease. And even when, by some mischance, his plans are temporarily thwarted, Dr Nikola manages to return, his implacable dark eyes drawing you to obey his will — Here you will find his two greatest adventures, the vintage Victorian thrillers A Bid for Fortune (1895) and Dr Nikola (1896) in one breathless, pacy, nightmarish volume. Created by Anglo-Australian novelist Guy Boothby, these books won praise from Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell. Dr Nikola is a character you will not be able to forget. 'Frank sensationalism carried to its furthest limits' — The Times, 1905. |
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In Henry IV, Part 1, the King is in a doubly ironic position. His rebellion against Richard II was successful, but now he himself is beset by rebels, led by the charismatic Harry Hotspur. The King's son, Prince Hal, seems to be more concerned with the pleasures of the tavern world and the company of the fat rogue, Falstaff, than with concerns of state. Eventually, however, Hal proves a courageous foe of the rebels. This history play is lively in its interplay of political intrigue and boisterous comedy, subtle in the connections between high statecraft and low craftiness, exuberant in its range of vivid characters, and memorable in its thematic concern with honour, loyalty and the quest for power. In Henry IV, Part 2, the King is ailing, Falstaff is ageing, and the kingdom itself, where rebellion is still rife, seems diseased or debilitated. The comedy has a melancholy undertone, and the politics verge on the Machiavellian. Eventually, the resourceful Hal, inheriting the crown as Henry V, must prove that he can uphold justice in the realm. Here Shakespeare demonstrates a mastery of thematic complexity and subtlety, and shows the price in human terms that may be exacted by political success. |
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This collection brings together Jane Austen's earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank, which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. These novels are here joined by shorter fictions that survive in Austen's manuscripts, including critically acclaimed works like Catharine, Love and Freindship, and The History of England. |
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