Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

Martin Chuzzlewit is Charles Dickens' comic masterpiece about which his biographer, Forster, noted that it marked a crucial phase in the author's development as he began to delve deeper into the 'springs of character'.Old Martin Chuzzlewit, tormented by the greed and selfishness of his family, effectively drives his grandson, young Martin, to undertake a voyage to America. It is a voyage which will have crucial consequences not only for young Martin, but also for his grandfather and his grandfat...

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel depicts nothing less than the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-nineteenth century. But these clashes are dramatized through personal struggles. John Barton has to reconcile his personal conscience with his socialist duty, risking his life and liberty in the process. His daughter Mary is caught between two lovers, from opposing classes - worker and manufacturer. And at the heart of t...

Mathilda is Mary Shelley's haunting story of an incestuous and fatal love. The narrative traces the teenaged Mathilda's reunion with her unnamed father, and the development of their obsessive bond that culminates in suicide. Shelley's own father, William Godwin, was so disturbed after reading the manuscript that he refused to return it to her and it remained unpublished for over one hundred years. This near-forgotten and harrowing work encompasses the Romantic themes of the individual's growth, ...

None of the great Victorian novels is more vivid and readable than The Mayor of Casterbridge. Set in the heart of Hardy's Wessex, the 'partly real, partly dream country' he founded on his native Dorset, it charts the rise and self-induced downfall of a single 'man of character'. The fast-moving and ingeniously contrived narrative is Shakespearian in its tragic force, and features some of the author's most striking episodes and brilliant passages of description. An aparitie: 1998Format: 17,4 X1...

In the hope of saving her brother's life, should a woman submit to rape? Should the law be respected when its administrator is corrupt? How powerful in the state should religion become? Although Measure for Measure ends like a comedy, with reconciliations, forgiveness and marriages, it has often been regarded as one of Shakespeare's problem plays. The drama shows the difficulty of effecting an appropriate balance between judicial severity and mercy, between sexual repression and decadence, and b...

Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.Henry James described Middlemarch as a `treasurehouse of detail' while Virgin...

The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, with Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and The Merchant of Venice as its inaugural volumes, 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.Its lyricism, comedy (both broad and subtle) and magical transformations have long made A Midsummer Night's Dream one of the most popular of Shakespeare's works. The supernatural and the mundane, the il...

This novel, based on George Eliot's own experiences of provincial life, is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age. As the headstrong Maggie Tulliver grows into womanhood, the deep love which she has for her brother Tom turns into conflict, because she cannot reconcile his bourgeois standards with her own lively intelligence. Maggie is unable to adapt to her community or break free from it, and the result, on more than one level, is tra...

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 ...

The novel follows the life of its eponymous heroine, Moll Flanders, through its many vicissitudes, which include her early seduction, careers in crime and prostitution, conviction for theft and transportation to the plantations of Virginia, and her ultimate redemption and prosperity in the New World.Moll Flanders was one of the first social novels to be published in English and draws heavily on Defoe's experience of the topography and social conditions prevailing in the London of the late 17th c...

When fifteen-year-old orphan John Trenchard is banished by his Aunt Jane, he goes to live at the local inn with the mysterious Elzevir Block, whose son has been killed by Customs Officers. Unofficially adopted by Block, John comes to learn the reasons for the noises in the graveyard at night, of 'Blackbeard' Mohune's lost treasure and Elzevir Block's secret. This dashing tale of eighteenth-century Dorset smugglers will be enjoyed by all who love stories of derring-do written in the tradition of ...

The Moonstone, a priceless Indian diamond which had been brought to England as spoils of war, is given to Rachel Verrinder on her eighteenth birthday. That very night, the stone is stolen. Suspicion then falls on a hunchbacked housemaid, on Rachel's cousin Franklin Blake, on a troupe of mysterious Indian jugglers, and on Rachel herself. The phlegmatic Sergeant Cuff is called in, and with the help of Betteredge, the Robinson Crusoe-reading loquacious steward, the mystery of the missing stone is i...

Traditional rhymes and stories have been collected under the wing of Mother Goose for centuries and this collection of favourite nursery rhymes has been put together by the famous illustrator Arthur Rackham. It is a wonderful collection of old favourites from Jack and Jill, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep and Who Killed Cock Robin? to comic alphabets and the fearful fate of Anthony Rowley. It is illustrated with Rackham's beautiful pen and ink drawings, and is one of his finest books. An aparitie: 1998Fo...

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's finest plays, and presents a man's conscience and the effect of guilt on his mind. A dark and bloody play, Macbeth explores reality and illusion; witchcraft and the supernatural; ambition and kingship; the natural order; light and life, darkness and death; blood and dead babies. Written just after the Gunpowder Plot, and at a time when people were often tried for treason, Macbeth makes much of the beliefs of an extremely superstitious age. King James 1 believed in...

The drama of Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous of all tragedies. It tells the story of two 'star-crossed' lovers whose young lives are cruelly cut short because of a bitter feud between their families. Since it was published in 1597, Romeo and Juliet has been performed all round the world, made into box office recordbreaking films, ballets and adapted by Leonard Bernstein for his world-famous musical, West Side Story. Shakespeare was young when he wrote the play, and the exquisite langu...

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.Much Ado About Nothing has long been celebrated as one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies. The central relationship, between Benedick and Beatrice, is wittily combative until love prevails. Broader comedy is provided by Dogberry, Verges and the watchmen. The drama ranges between the...

Jules Verne (1828-1905) is internationally famous as the author of a distinctive series of adventure stories describing new travel technologies which opened up the world and provided means to escape from it. The collective enthusiasm of generations of readers of his 'extraordinary voyages' was a key factor in the rise of modern science fiction.In The Mysterious Island a group of men escape imprisonment during the American Civil War by stealing a balloon. Blown across the world, they are air-wrec...

Dickens's final novel, left unfinished at his death, is a tale of mystery whose fast-paced action takes place in an ancient cathedral city and in some of the darkest places in nineteenth-century London. Drugs, sexual obsession, colonial adventuring and puzzles about identity are among the novel's themes. At the centre of the plot lie the baffling disappearance of Edwin Drood and the many explanations of his whereabouts. A sombre and menacing atmosphere, a fascinating range of characters and Dick...

Following the success of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby was hailed as a comic triumph and firmly established Dickens as a 'literary gentleman'. It has a full supporting cast of delectable characters that range from the iniquitous Wackford Squeers and his family, to the delightful Mrs Nickleby, taking in the eccentric Crummles and his travelling players, the Mantalinis, the Kenwigs and many more.Combining these with typically Dickensian elements of burlesque and farce, the no...