Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

Eight of the twelve tales in this book are from the master hand of Charles Perrault (1628-1703). Although Perrault enjoyed much distinction in the French literary circle of the late seventeenth century, his fame today rests upon his authorship of the traditional Tales of Mother Goose, or Stories of Olden Times. And it is true to say that as long as there are children to listen spellbound to the adventures of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, and that arch rogue Puss in Boots, his memory will endure.T...

The magical Peter Pan comes to the night nursery of the Darling children, Wendy, John and Michael. He teaches them to fly, then takes them through the sky to Never-Never Land, where they find Red Indians, wolves, Mermaids and... Pirates. The leader of the pirates is the sinister Captain Hook. His hand was bitten off by a crocodile, who, as Captain Hook explains 'liked me arm so much that he has followed me ever since, licking his lips for the rest of me'. After lots of adventures, the story reac...

The Phoenix and the Carpet is E. Nesbit's second fantasy novel and is the sequel to Five Children and It.From Robert, Anthea, Jane and Cyril's new nursery carpet there falls a mysterious egg which is hatched in the fire to reveal a benevolent, resourceful and ingenious Phoenix who explains that the carpet is possessed of magic qualities.And so begins a series of fantastic and bizarre adventures as the carpet transports the children and the Phoenix to places as diverse as a chilling French castle...

With an Introduction and Notes by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury. With Illustrations by R.Seymour, R.W. Buss and Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).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 part.In the century and a half since its first appearance, the characters of Mr Pickwick, Sam Welle...

The story of the walking and talking puppet Pinocchio is one of the best-loved children's tales of all time.Carved by old Gepetto, Pinocchio has an enormous nose which grows even longer whenever he tells a lie. Pinocchio is such a scamp that he gets into all sorts of mischief. He runs away to join a puppet show, he teams up with a rascally fox and wily cat, and plays truant from school which has dreadful consequences. Eventually the conscience of a talking cricket and Pinocchio's guardian fairy ...

Oscar Wilde took London by storm with his first comedy, Lady Windermere's Fan. The combination of dazzling wit, subtle social criticism, sumptuous settings and the theme of a guilty secret proved a winner, both here and in his next three plays, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and his undisputed masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest.This volume includes all Wilde's plays from his early tragedy Vera to the controversial Salome and the little known fragments, La Sainte Courtisane...

Introduced by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.In this notorious late novel, Lawrence's pagan imaginings burgeon. Kate Leslie, an Irish widow touring Mexico, becomes gradually involved with a charismatic leader, and she enters a sexual relationship with his dark henchman.As the two men conspire to revive the old Aztec religion and seize power, Kate is increasingly implicated in their `blood consciousness', phallic propaganda and right-wing violence.The Plumed Ser...

Transplanted to Europe from her native America, Isabel Archer has candour, beauty, intelligence, an independent spirit and a marked enthusiasm for life. An unexpected inheritance apparently gives her freedom, but despite all her natural advantages she makes one disastrous error of judgement and the result is genuinely tragic. Her tale, told with James' inimitable poise, is of the widest relevance.The phase when his (Henry James') genius functioned with the freest and fullest vitality is represen...

James Hogg's most ambitious prose work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, is now widely acclaimed as his masterpiece.In the early years of the 18th century, Scotland is torn by religious and political strife. Hogg's sinner, justified by his Calvinist conviction that his own salvation is pre-ordained, is suspected of involvement in a series of bizarre and hideous crimes. A century later his memoirs reveal the extraordinary, macabre truth.The tale is chilling for its astut...

The Professor is Charlotte Brontes first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in Villette he leaves the certainties of England to forge a life in Brussels. But as a man, William has freedom of action, and as a writer Bronte is correspondingly liberated, exploring the relationship between power and sexual desire.William's first person narration reveals his attraction to the dominating di...

When Dan and Una stage a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a fairy ring, they are astonished by the appearance of Puck in person. He explains that he is the last of the People of the Hills, who started as gods before descending into this world. Puck leads the two children in a series of extraordinary historical adventures in which they meet, Romans and Crusaders, Saxons and Vikings.Kipling's charming songs and verses, including the famous Smuggler's Song are placed between each thrilli...

In 1915, Lawrence's frank representation of sexuality in The Rainbow caused a furore and the novel was seized by the police and banned almost as soon as it was published. Today it is recognised as one of the classic English novels of the twentieth century.The Rainbow is about three generations of the Brangwen family of Nottinghamshire from the 1840s to the early years of the twentieth century. Within this framework Lawrence's essential concern is with the passional lives of his characters as he ...

Also included are two short stories:The Veteran - The Open BookThe Red Badge of Courage is one of the greatest war novels of all time. It reports on the American Civil War through the eyes of Henry Fleming, an ordinary farm boy turned soldier. It evokes the chaos and the dull clatter of war: the acrid smoke, the incessant rumours of coming battles, the filth and cold, the numbing monotony, the unworldly wailing of the dying. Like an impressionist painter, Crane also captures the strange beauty o...

This powerful novel, Tolstoy's third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury service, is astonished to see in the dock, charged with murder, a young woman whom he once seduced, propelling her into prostitution. She is found guilty on a technicality, and he determines to overturn the verdict. This pitches him into a hellis...

After Sherlock Holmes' apparently fatal encounter with the sinister Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, the great detective reappears, to the delight of the faithful Dr Watson in The Adventures of the Empty House.The stories are illustrated by Sidney Paget, the finest of illustrators, from which our images of Sherlock Holmes and his world derive.This is the second of three volumes of The Complete Sherlock Holmes newly typeset from the original copies of The Strand Magazine The three boo...

The Return of the Native is widely recognised as the most representative of Hardy's Wessex novels. He evokes the dismal presence and menacing beauty of Egdon Heath - reaching out to touch the lives and fate of all who dwell on it. The central figure is Clym Yeobright, the returning `native' and the story tells of his love for the beautiful but capricious Eustacia Vye.As the narrative unfolds and character after character is driven to self-destruction the presence of the Heath becomes all-embraci...

Rewards and Fairies is a collection of stories and a sequel to Puck of Pook's Hill and, as Kipling wrote, 'The tales had to be read by children, before people realised they were meant for grown-ups'. Through the agency of Puck, two children - Dan and Una - meet a glittering array of historical characters from flint and iron age tribes to 'Good Queen Bess' and Sir Francis Drake. Other tales include stories of England following the Norman Conquest and the Europe of Napoleon and Talleyrand. Rewards...

Richard II is one of Shakespeare's finest works: lucid, eloquent, and boldly structured. It can be seen as a tragedy, or a historical play, or a political drama, or as one part of a vast dramatic cycle which helped to generate England's national identity. Today, to some of us, Richard II may appear conservative; but, in Shakespeare's day, it could appear subversive: `I am Richard II', declared an indignant Queen Elizabeth.Numerous recent revivals in the theatre and on screen have demonstrated th...

Richard III is one of the finest of Shakespeare's historical dramas. Although it has a huge cast, Richard himself, gleefully wicked, charismatically Machiavellian, always dominates the play: a role to gratify such leading actors as David Garrick, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Sher, Ian McKellen and Al Pacino. Since, in real life, political Machiavellianism is never out of date, Richard III remains perennially topical. Numerous revivals on stage and screen have demonstrated the enduring cogency of th...

Rip van Winkle is an amiable man whose home and farm suffer from his lazy neglect; a familiar figure about the village, he is loved by all except his wife. One autumn day he escapes her nagging to wander up into the mountains, and there after drinking some liquor offered to him by a band of very strange folk, he settles down under a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes up twenty years later and returns to his village to find that not only is his wife dead but war and revolution have changed man...