Böcker i Oxford World's Classics-serien

A unique edition of three early modern utopian texts, using a contemporary translation of More's Utopia and examining the Renaissance world view as shown by these writers. The edition includes the illustrative material that accompanied early editions of Utopia, full chronologies of the authors, notes, and glossary.

J M Synge was one of the key dramatists in the flourishing world of Irish literature at the turn of the century. This volume offers all of Synge's plays, which range from racy comedy to stark tragedy, all sharing a memorable lyricism. The introduction sets Synge's work in the context of the Irish literary movement, with special attention to his role as one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre and his work alongside W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. Includes: Riders to the Sea; The Shadow of the Glen; The Tinker's Wedding; The Well of the Saints; The Play of the Western World; Deirdre of the Sorrows

This selection of the Byron's poetical works includes such masterpieces as Childe Harold, The Corsair, Manfred, Bebbo, and Don Juan. There are many other less familiar works and shorter lyrics, and Jerome J. McGann's introduction and notes give fascinating insight into Byron's world.

These five works - George Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F. J; John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit; Robert Greene's Pandosto. The Triumph of Time; Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller and Thomas Deloney's Jack of Newbury - represent Elizabethan fiction at its best. The Adventures of Master F. J. is a comedy of manners with a sting in its tail. In Euphues John Lyly invented a new, elaboraterhetorical style which delighted its Elizabethan audience and has been praised or parodied ever since. Pandosto was Shakespeare's source for The Winter's Tale, but Greene's is a darker story designed to shock the reader accustomed to romantic conventions. The Unfortunate Traveller marks the peak of Nashe's gift for literary pastiche, mixing picaresque narrativewith mock-historical fantasy. Jack of Newbury dedicated to 'All famous cloth Workers in England', sums up important social contradictions in sharply observed comic scenes and brisk, witty dialogue.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's romance concerns a group of American expatriates in mid-nineteenth century Italy, and their tragic encounter with the faun-like Italian count, Donatello. It is both a murder story and a parable of the Fall of Man, dominated by the fragility and durability of human life and art.

This is the only edition of these four plays, which are otherwise unavailable, and introduces readers to some of the earliest published women dramatists, to compare and contrast with their better-known male counterparts.

William Wycherley's comedies are admired for their satirical wit, farcical humour, and social criticism. This volume offers his complete dramatic works in a modern-spelling edition, with detailed annotation and a scholarly introduction. Includes: Love in a Wood; The Gentleman Dancing-Master; The Country Wife; The Plain Dealer

Philip Sidney and his sister Mary translated the biblical psalms into some of the greatest lyric poems of the English Renaissance. This is the first complete edition for over forty years, providing the Psalms in an authoritative modernized text, with glosses and notes and an introduction setting the Psalms in their literary and cultural context.

The Man of Feeling (1771) is the foremost novel of sentiment in which the hero, Harley demonstrates his sensiblity in a series of episodes as he is tested against an uncaring world. This edition reprints Brian Vickers's authoritative text with a new introduction and notes discussing the work in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment and European sentimentalism.

Male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the masquerade' of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fid le is the confidence man'? The central motif of Melville's last and most modern' novel can be seen as a symbol of American cultural history.

This authoritative edition brings together all of Hopkins's poetry and a generous selection of his prose writings to explore the essence of his work and thinking. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) was one of the most innovative of nineteenth-century poets. During his tragically short life he strove to reconcile his religious and artistic vocations, and this edition demonstrates the range of his interests. It includes all his poetry, from best-known works such as "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and "The Windhover" to translations, foreign language poems, plays, and verse fragments, and the recently discovered poem "Consule Jones." In addition there are excerpts from Hopkins's journals, letters, and spiritual writings. The poems are printed in chronological order to show Hopkins's changing preoccupations, and all the texts have been established from original manuscripts.

A major new edition, freshly edited in many cases from manuscripts, of Shelley's poetry and prose. It contains the longer poems from Queen Mab to The Triumph of Life, including generous selections from Laon and Cythna, a wide range of his shorter poems, and much of his major prose, including A Defence of Poetry.

Livy's great history of Rome contains, in Books 21 to 30, the definitive ancient account of Hannibal's invasion of Italy in 218 BC, and the war he fought with the Romans over the following sixteen years. This new translation captures the brilliance of Livy's style, and is accompanied by a fascinating introduction and notes.

With its rich and ebullient language, ironic twists and startling juxtapositions, Dead Souls (1842) stands as one of the most dazzling and poetic masterpieces of the nineteenth century. This brilliant new translation by Christopher English is complemented by a superb introductory essay by the pre-eminent Gogol scholar, Robert Maguire.

The first for forty years, this brillaint translation of a medieval classic offers a vivid and unique insight into the life of a great monastery in late twelfth-century England. At the centre of this community is Abbot Samson, a charismatic figure of enormous power, whose exploits include preventing an illegal tournament, excommunicating forty drunken knights who had escaped his enforced sanctuary, countless property disputes, and the opening of the tomb of StEdmund.

This is a verse translation of Lucretius' only known work, "On the Nature of the Universe", a didactic poem in six books of hexameters. Melville's particularly literal translation of the use of metaphor should be helpful to those looking at the text from a scientific or philosophical point of view.

Foxe's Book of Martyrs is a collection of unforgettable accounts of religious persecution. This modernized selection brings together some of the most stirring tales of the interrogation and execution of heretics burnt at the stake in the reign of Mary, with some of the original woodcut illustrations and an illuminating introduction.

This is the fourth volume of Euripides plays in new translation. The four plays it contains, Ion, Orestes, The Phoenician Women and The Suppliant Women, explore ethical and political themes, contrasting the claims of patriotism with family loyalty, pragmatism with justice, the idea that 'might is right' with the ideal of clemency.

Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) was Mark Twain's last serious work of fiction, and perhaps the only real novel that he ever produced. Written in a more sombre vein than his other Mississippi writings, the novel reveals the sinister forces that Mark Twain felt to be threatening the American dream. In spite of a plot which includes child swapping, palmistry, and a pair of Italian twins, this astringent work also raises the serious issue of racial differences.This volume also includes two other late works `Those Extraordinary Twins' and `The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'.

This volume brings together extracts of the major political writings of Mary Wollstonecraft in the order in which they appeared in the revolutionary 1790s. It traces her passionate and indignant response to the excitement of the early days of the French Revolution and then her uneasiness at its later bloody phase. It reveals her developing understanding of women's involvement in the political and social life of the nation and her growing awareness of therelationship between politics and economics and between political institutions and the individual. In personal terms, the works show her struggling with a belief in the perfectibility of human nature through rational education, a doctrine that became weaker under the onslaught of her own miserable experience and the revolutionary massacres. Janet Todd's introduction illuminates the progress or Wollstonecraft's thought, showing that a reading of all three works allows her to emerge as a more substantial political writer than a study of The Rights of Woman alone can reveal.

Written by an emigrant French aristocrat turned farmer, the Letters from an American Farmer (1782) posed the famous question `What, then, is the American, this new man?', as the new nation took shape before the eyes of the world. The Letters addresses some of American literature's most pressing concerns: the issue of American identity, personal determination, and freedom from institutional oppression. Celebrating the largeness and fertility of the land, Cr¿coeur's narrative also introduces darker and more symbolic elements, including slavery, and casts a long shadow of influence on subsequent writing about the moral, spiritual, and material topography of the new nation.

Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) was a goldsmith and sculptor whose autobiography is one of the most vivid and interesting ever written. In it he describes artistic techniques such as bronze casting as well as a fascinating account of life and intrigue in 16th century Italy. This new translation is based on the latest critical edition of the text.

In addition to its interest as one of Plato's dramatic masterpieces, the "Protagoras" presents a vivid picture of the crisis of 5th-century Greek thought. This revised edition contains revisions in the translation and commentary, and features a new preface and an updated bibliography.

Rasselas and his companions leave the 'happy valley' in search of 'the choice of life'. Johnson's philosophical tale considers such things as the nature of poetry, the stability of reason, the immortality of the soul, and the pursuit of happiness. This new edition relates the novel to Johnson's life and the political and social context.

This selection brings together thirty of Woolf's best essays across a wide range of subjects including writing and reading, the role and reputation of women writers, the art of biography, and the London scene. They are enchanting in their own right, and indispensable to an understanding of this great writer.