In William Godwin's dark psychological novel of paranoia and persecution, the eponymous hero is a guileless young servant who enters the employment of Ferdinando Falkland, a cosmopolitan and benevolen
Perhaps no individual in modern history has received more intensive study than Adolf Hitler. His many biographers have provided countless conflicting interpretations of his dark life, but virtually a
Elizabeth Gaskell has long been one of the most popular of Victorian novelists, yet in her lifetime her shorter fictions were equally well loved, and they are among the most accomplished examples of t
How to Write is an introductory guide to writing, aimed at people who think they can't write, or for whom writing is an ordeal. Broken down into short topic-based chapters on everything from beginning
In The Liberation of Jerusalem (1581), Torquato Tasso set out to write an epic to rival the Iliad and the Aeneid. Unlike his predecessors, he took his subject not from myth but from history: the Chris
Richard III is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays on the stage and has been adapted successfully for film. This new and innovative edition recognizes the play's pre-eminence as a performance
The introduction reviews the few known facts about this early Shakespeare play and discusses the puzzling problems of its date and authorship. The text has been freshly edited with the aim of pres
The most famous of Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, Julius Caesar was written and first performed in 1599, and was apparently one the plays his contemporaries enjoyed most. Recounting the death of Caes
One of the most profound and disturbing works of nineteenth-century literature, Notes from the Underground is a probing and speculative work, often regarded as a forerunner to the Existentialist move
Arranged in the order of their original publication and written during Kipling's time as a journalist in India, these seventeen short stories explore the themes of isolation and abandonment and the e
A mystery of unrelenting suspense and penetrating characterization, The Dead Secret explores the relationship between a fallen woman, her illegitimate daughter, and buried secrets in a superb blend o
Edited by the eminent A.R. Braunmuller, this thorough edition of King John--the first scholarly edition in almost fifteen years--makes a significant contribution to the study of Shakespeare's works.
Timon of Athens is a bitterly intriguing study of a fabulously rich man who wastes his wealth on his friends, and, when he is finally impoverished, learns to despise humanity with a hatred that drive
First published in 1844, this is Thackeray's earliest substantial work of fiction and perhaps his most original. The text is that of Saintbury's 1908 Oxford edition which incorporates Thackeray's rev
Tressell's novel is about survival on the underside of the Edwardian Twilight, about exploitative employment when the only safety nets are charity, workhouse, and grave. Following the fortunes of a g
By the end of the eighteenth century, British travelers had fanned out to every corner of the world, driven by widely varying motives: scientific curiosity, commerce, colonization, diplomacy, explora
Cousin Henry, first published in 1879, is perhaps the most unusual and intriguing of Trollope's shorter novels. Trollope's masterly handling of the novel's unlikely hero, a tiresome and timid coward,
This modern fairy-tale is also the gripping adventure story about Dickson McCunn, a respectable, newly retired grocer who finds himself in the thick of a plot involving the kidnapping of a Russian pr
In The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), the best-known of his thrillers (made into a popular movie by Alfred Hitchcock), John Buchan introduces his most enduring hero, Richard Hannay, who, despite claiming
