Oxford World Classic

Described variously as the greatest poem of the European Middle Ages and, because of the author's evangelical purpose, the `fifth Gospel', the Divine Comedy is central to the culture of the west. The poem is a spiritual autobiography in the form of ajourney - the poet travels from the dark circles of the Inferno, up the mountain of Purgatory, where Virgil, his guide leaves him to encounter Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise. Dante conceived the poem as the new epic of Christendom, and he creates aworld in which reason and faith have transformed moral and social chaos into order.Charles Sisson's blank verse translation is remarkable for its lucidity and vigour, and the Introduction, diagrams, maps, and notes by David Higgins provide the reader with invaluable guidance.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth ofother valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.Readership: General readers, poets, students at 6th-form, undergraduate and postgraduate level studying Italian, comparative literature, comparative religion, theology, medieval European literature, medieval European history, English literature, historyof art, creative writing.

The Oxford ShakespeareGeneral Editor Stanley WellsThe Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers.*a new, modern-spelling text, based on the 1623 First Folio*detailed introduction considers composition, sources, historical events, performances and changing critical attitudes to the play*and much else*appendices include extracts from the chronicle sources and new research on the use of boy actors in Elizabethan performance*illustrated with production photographs and related art*full index to introduction and commentary*durable sewn binding for lasting use'not simply a better text but a new conception of Shakespeare. This is a major achievement of twentieth-century scholarship.' Times Literary SupplementABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth ofother valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.Readership: students, readers and performers of Shakespeare

Whitman is today regarded as America's Homer or Dante, and his work the touchstone for literary originality in the New World. In Leaves of Grass, he abandoned the rules of traditional poetry - breaking the standard metred line, discarding the obligatoryrhyming scheme, and using the vernacular. Emily Dickinson condemned his sexual and physiological allusions as `disgraceful', but Emerson saw the book as the `most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed'. A century later itis his judgement of this autobiographical vision of the vigour of the American nation that has proved the more enduring. This is the most up-to-date edition for student use, with full critical apparatus.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth ofother valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.Readership: General

*A generous one-volume edition of Tennyson's poetry, including all the best-loved poems and several substantial works in their entirety (The Princess, In Memoriam, Maud, Enoch Arden), as well as several of the Idylls of the King.*The only one-volume selection to include letters and journal entries, as well as extracts from Hallam Tennyson's Memoir of his father.*Up-to-date bibliography.*Includes introduction, chronology, and invaluable notes.This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Tennyson's poetry and prose - juvenilia as well as his best-known poems,and letters and journal entries - to give the essence of his work and thinking.Tennyson was acclaimed in his own day as the chief poetic voice of his age, and he remains one of the most highly regarded masters of the music and mood of poetry. This edition selects extensively from Tennyson's entire career, beginning with hisstriking juvenilia, through his career as Poet Laureate and the powerful poetry he wrote in his ninth decade. It contains such classics as 'The Lady of Shalott', 'Morte d'Arthur', Break, Break, Break', 'Locksley Hall', 'Ulysses', 'The Charge of the LightBrigade', and 'Tears, Idle Tears'. It also includes in its entirety Tennyson's quasi-feminist epic The Princess, as well as the whole of In Memoriam, Maud, Enoch Arden, and several of the Idylls of the King. The poems are augmented with a broad selectionfrom Tennyson's letters, as well as relevant passages from his son Hallam Tennyson's Memoir of his father, where Tennyson talks widely about his own poetry and the writing of others.

This was Kipling's first published volume of fiction. The stories with their brevity and concentration of effect are a landmark in the history of the short story.

A Selection of Eight LivesTranslated by Robin WaterfieldEdited by Philip A. Stadter*Superb new translation*The most comprehensive selection availableMarcus CatoSullaAemilius PaullusPompeyThe GracchiMariusJulius CaesarAnthony'I treat the narrative of the Lives as a kind of mirror...The experience is like nothing so much as spending time in their company and living with them: I receive and welcome each of them in turn as my guest.'In the eight lives of this collection Plutarch introduces the reader to the major figures and periods of classical Rome. He portrays virtues to be emulated and vices to be avoided, but his purpose is also implicitly to educate and warn those in his ownday who wielded power. In prose that is rich, elegant and sprinkled with learned references, he explores with an extraordinary degree of insight the interplay of character and political action. While drawing chiefly on historical sources, he brings tobiography a natural story-teller's ear for a good anecdote. Throughout the ages Plutarch's Lives have been valued for their historical value and their charm. This new translation will introduce new generations to his urbane erudition. The mostcomprehensive selection available, it is accompanied by a lucid introduction, explanatory notes, bibliographies, maps and indexes.

'he thought it expedient and necessary that he should commence knight-errant, and wander through the world, with his horse and arms, in quest of adventures'Don Quixote, first published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is one of the world's greatest comic novels. Inspired by tales of chivalry, Don Quixote of La Mancha embarks on a series of adventures with his faithful servant Sancho Panza by his side. Thenovel has acquired mythic status and its influence on modern fiction is profound.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth ofother valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.Readership: Students following courses in the novel

*Originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series in 1993, this remains the best, most comprehensive single-volume anthology of Pope's work.*Includes The Dunciad, The Rape of the Lock, and Peri Bathous in full as well as all the other major poems, a selection of Pope's translations and prose including satires, pamphlets, criticism and letters.*The only edition to print the texts in chronological sequence, restoring the Moral Essays and Imitations of Horace to their original position in Pope's career.*Updated Further Reading list and introduction by distinguished Pope scholar Pat Rogers.*The edition includes an invaluable biographical index as well as indexes of titles, first lines, and correspondents.This authoritative edition was first published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Pope's poetry and prose - the major poems in their entirety, together withtranslations, criticism, letters and other prose - to give the essence of his work and thinking.Pope has often been termed the first truly professional poet in English, whose dealings with the book trade helped to produce the literary market-place of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this representative selection of Pope's most importantwork, the texts are presented in chronological sequence so that the Moral Essays and Imitations of Horace are restored to their original position in his career. The Dunciad, The Rape of the Lock, and Peri Bathous are presented in full, together with acharacteristic sample of Pope's prose, including satires, pamphlets, and periodical writing. The influential preface to his edition of Shakespeare is here, as well as passages from his conversations with Joseph Spence and examples of his wide-rangingcorrespondence. This fine edition features a comprehensive biographical index, as well as an introduction and invaluable notes.

*Jeri Johnson's edition of Ulysses is acknowledged by reviewers, Anthony Burgess among them, as the best available*The intro is the most wide-ranging, comprehensive, and accessible intro to the novel of any edition, demystifying its 'difficulties'*The notes are the fullest of any edition and provide a background to Irish history, the intricacies of Catholic ritual, Irish slang, literary allusions and much else*Inc. full composition and publishing history and list of selected variants.'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo 'So begins one of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century, and one of the most innovative. Its originality shocked contemporary readers on its publication in 1916 who found its treating of the minutiae of daily life indecorous, andits central character unappealing. Was it art or was it filth?The novel charts the intellectual, moral, and sexual development of Stephen Dedalus, from his childhood listening to his father's stories through his schooldays and adolescence to the brink of adulthood and independence, and his awakening as an artist.Growing up in a Catholic family in Dublin in the final years of the nineteenth century, Stephen's consciousness is forged by Irish history and politics, by Catholicism and culture, language and art. Stephen's story mirrors that of Joyce himself, and thenovel is both startlingly realistic and brilliantly crafted.For this edition Jeri Johnson, editor of the acclaimed Ulysses 1922 text, has written an introduction and notes which together provide a comprehensive and illuminating appreciation of Joyce's artistry.

*Pericles survives only in a corrupt text, which cannot be performed exactly as it stands. This is the first single-volume, fully-annotated text to attempt to help performers and readers by offering a reconstruction of the original play. It alsoreproduces the text of 1609 exactly as first printed, enabling users of the edition to see how the reconstruction was made, and why it was necessary. It is therefore the most comprehensive edition currently available.*The text draws upon Jacobean dramatist George Wilkins's The Painful Adventures of Pericles to emend some of the Quarto's errors and to supply some missing material.*The introduction argues the case for authorial collaboration between Shakespeare and Wilkins and also draws upon Warren's extensive experience of the play in rehearsal and performance to suggest why it is regaining its original popularity in the moderntheatre.*Reprints the entire Quarto text in an appendix, together with passages from Wilkins's narrative, so readers can see how the reconstruction has been made.*The only edition to be based on the Oxford Complete Works (1986), modified in the light of subsequent productions.The Oxford ShakespeareGeneral Editor: Stanley WellsThe Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers*The only single-volume, modern-spelling edition both to offer a reconstruction of the original play and to reproduce the corrupt Quarto text of 1609 exactly as first printed*On-page commentary and notes explains meaning, staging, language, and allusions*Detailed introduction explains the complex textual situation and Shakespeare's probable collaboration with George Wilkins*Illustrated with production photographs and related art*Full index to introduction and commentary*Durable sewn binding for lasting use'not simply a better text but a new conception of Shakespeare. This is a major achievement of twentieth-century scholarship'

*A unique collection of Chekhov's most lyrical stories in a new translation of great skill and originality, published to coincide with the centenary of Chekhov's death.*This translation captures Chekhov's musicality and modernism by paying special attention to his tone and prose rhythm - closer to the Russian while shaping the prose idiomatically.*The stories are arranged chronologically to show the evolution of Chekhov's art and include familiar as well as less well-known works.*Growing interest in Chekhov as a prose writer, evidenced by the attention given to recent publications of Chekhov's previously unpublished work, and the influence he had had on modern writers such as Katherine Mansfield, John Cheever, and RaymondCarver.'the greatest short story writer who has ever lived'Raymond Carver's unequivocal verdict on Chekhov's genius has been echoed many times by writers as diverse as Katherine Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, John Cheever and Tobias Wolf. While his popularity as a playwright has sometimes overshadowed hisachievements in prose, the importance of Chekhov's stories is now recognized by readers as well as by fellow authors. Their themes - alienation, the absurdity and tragedy of human existence - have as much relevance today as when they were written, andthese superb new translations capture their modernist spirit. Elusive and subtle, spare and unadorned, the stories in this selection are among Chekhov's most poignant and lyrical. They include well-known pieces such as 'The Lady with the Little Dog', aswell as less familiar work like 'Gusev', inspired by Chekhov's travels in the Far East, and 'Rothschild's Violin', a haunting and darkly humorous tale about death and loss.

Highly regarded today as one of the greatest novels in English literature, Little Dorrit presents both a scathing indictment of mid-Victorian England and a devastating insight into the human condition.Examining the many social and mental prisons which incarcerate men and women, the novel also considers the nature of true spiritual freedom. Against a background of administrative and financial scandal, Dickens tells the moving story of the oldMarshalsea prisoner who inherits a fortune and his devoted daughter's love for a man who believes he has done with love. He draws widely on the events of his own life and times, yet focuses a powerful imaginative vision which is as universal as it isspecific, immediate, and intense. In Little Dorrit Dickens displays his characteristic mastery of irony and pathos, of satire and comedy, and the novel exemplifies his most mature, ambitious, and effective writing.This edition, which has the definitive Clarendon text, also includes Dickens's working notes and eight of the original illustrations from the first edition by 'Phiz'.

`she tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.'North and South is a novel about rebellion. Moving from the industrial riots of discontented millworkers through to the unsought passions of a middle-class woman, and from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny, it poses fundamentalquestions about the nature of social authority and obedience.Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the conflict between Margaret's ready sympathy with the workers and her growingattraction to the charismatic mill ownder, John Thornton. This new revised and expanded edition sets the novel in the context of Victorian social and medical debate.

Beowulf is the longest and finest literary work to have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon times, and one of the world's greatest epic poems. Set in the half-legendary, half historical Scandinavian past, it tells the story of the hero Beowulf, who comes tothe aid of the Danish king Hrothgar by killing first the terrifying, demonic monster Grendel, and then Grendel's infuriated and vengeful mother. A lifetime later, Beowulf's own kingdom, Geatland, is threatened by a fiery dragon

Louise de la Vallicre is the middle section of The Vicomte de Bragelonne, or, Ten Years After. Against a tender love story, Dumas continues the suspense which began with The Vicomte de Bragelonne and will end with The Man in the Iron Mask. Set during thereign of Louis XIV and filled with behind-the-scenes intrigue, the novel brings the aging Musketeers and d'Artagnan out of retirement to face an impending crisis within the royal court of France. This new edition of the classic English translation isrichly annotated and places Dumas's invigorating tale in its historical and cultural context.

The plot of this novel revolves around the feminist movement in Boston in the 1870s. F.R. Leavis called it one of the two most brilliant novels in the language. The novel's many allusions to the historical and social background of Boston society areexplained in the editorial material.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth ofother valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Set in the second half of the eighteenth century, Barry Lyndon is the fictional autobiography of an adventurer and rogue whom the reader is led to distrust from the very beginning. Born into the petty Irish gentry, and outmanoeuvred in his firstlove-affair, a ruined Barry joins the British army. After service in Germany he deserts and, after a brief spell as a spy, pursues the career of a gambler in the dissolute clubs and courts of Europe. In a determined effort to enter fashionable society hemarries a titled heiress but finds he has met his match.First published in 1844, Barry Lyndon is Thackeray's earliest substantial novel and in some ways his most original, reflecting his views of the true art of fiction: to represent a subject, however unpleasant, with accuracy and wit, and not to moralize.The text is that of George Sainsbury's 1908 Oxford edition which restores passages cut when the novel was revised in 1856.

*Phineas Finn's perilous political career takes a sensational turn when he is accused of murder, in the fourth of Trollope's Palliser series

The classic American text - with informative appendices and generous annotation`So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!'These words, said to have been uttered by Abraham Lincoln, signal the celebrity of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first American novel to become an international best-seller, Stowe's novel charts the progress from slavery to freedom of fugitives who escape thechains of American chattel slavery, and of a martyr who transcends all earthly ties. At the middle of the nineteenth-century, the names of its characters - Little Eva, Topsy, Uncle Tom - were renowned. A hundred years later, `Uncle Tom' still hadmeaning, but, to Blacks everywhere it had become a curse.This edition firmly locates Uncle Tom's Cabin within the context of African-American writing, the issues of race and the role of women. Its appendices include the most important contemporary African-American literary responses to the glorification ofUncle Tom's Christian resignation as well as excerpts from popular slave narratives, quoted by Stowe in her justification of the dramatization of slavery, Key to Uncles Tom's Cabin.

* A superb new translation of one of the greatest comic works of Russian literature'Rus! Russ!...Everything within you is open, desolate, and flat

Edited and translated by David GallopThese new translations present Plato's remarkable dramatization of the momentous events surrounding the trial of Socrates in 399 BC, on charges of irreligion and corrupting the young. The Euthyphro, Defence of Socrates, and Crito form a dramatic andthematic sequence, raising fundamental questions about the basis of moral, religious, legal, and political obligation. Plato explores these issues with a freshness and directness that have never been surpassed.In the Defence of Socrates, Plato seeks not only to clear his master's name, but also to defend the whole Socratic way of life, and therefore philosophy itself. The result is an oratorical masterpiece. The Euthyphro, an inquiry into the nature of piety,probes the relationship between religion and morality. The Crito discusses the citizen's obligation to the state, in the context of a life-or-death issue confronting Socrates himself - whether or not to escape from prison.David Gallop's Introduction provides a stimulating philosophical and historical analysis of these texts, complemented by useful explanatory notes and an index of names, to make this edition invaluable to readers new to these timeless classics.

- This splendid edition of FitzGerald's famous version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám celebrates the poem as a work of Victorian literary art, which rose from obscurity to become the poem that contains some of the most quoted lines in English poetry.- Reproduces the first 1859 edition of this much-revised poem and documents the changes made in subsequent editions as well as providing a table of corresponding stanzas.- Daniel Karlin's wide-ranging introduction discusses FitzGerald's treatment of his Persian sources and theory of translation, his life and the circumstances of the poem's composition and revisions, its relation to the Orientalist tradition, Victorianliterature and the Victorian context.- Explanatory notes include selective details of the relation between the English version and its Persian original, as well as information about literary and historical sources and allusions, and relevant biographical episodes.- A selection of contemporary reviews offers an insight into the poem's early reception, including the first attack on its status as a 'translation'

*The only critically established text of the novel, based on a comprehensive study of the manuscript and Hardy's extensive revisions.*Pamela Dalziel's new introduction incorporates the latest critical thinking on the novel and offers an original analysis of Hardy's representation of the modern and his characterization of Elizabeth-Jane in the*Updated bibliography.*New chronology.*Map.*Glossary of dialect words.New to this edition*New introduction by Pamela Dalziel, in addition to providing a basic introduction to the novel, analyses Hardy's representation of the modern and makes an original contribution to discusion of the character of Elizabeth-Jane as proto-feminist.*Updated bibliography.*New chronology.'The woman is no good to me. Who'll have her?'Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife Susan and baby daughter. Eighteen years later Susan and her daughter seek him out, only to discover that he has become the most prominent man inCasterbridge. Henchard attempts to make amends for his youthful misdeeds but his unchanged impulsiveness clouds his relationships in love as well as his fortunes in business. Although Henchard is fated to be a modern-day tragic hero, unable to survive inthe new commercial world, his story is also a journey towards love.This edition is the only critically established text of the novel, based on a comprehensive study of the manuscript and Hardy's extensive revisions.

`the fates ordained the founding of this great city and the beginning of the world's mightiest empire, second only to the power of the gods'Romulus and Remus, the rape of Lucretia, Horatius at the bridge, the saga of Coriolanus, Cincinnatus called from his farm to save the state - these and many more are stories which, immortalised by Livy in his history of early Rome, have become part ofour cultural heritage.The historian's huge work, written between 20 BC and AD 17, ran to 12 books, beginning with Rome's founding in 753 BC and coming down to Livy's own lifetime (9 BC). Books 1-5 cover the period from Rome's beginnings to her first great foreign conquest,the capture of the Etruscan city of Veii and, a few years later, to her first major defeat, the sack of the city by the Gauls in 390 BC.The complete Livy in English, available in five volumes from Oxford World's Classics.

When Claudio breaks the new laws against vice in Vienna by getting his financee, Julietta, pregnant, a series of ethical issues is brought under scrutiny. His sister's virtue is held to ransom by the deputy rule of the city until justice is done, mercyshown, and order restored.This is among Shakespeare's most vivid dramatic projections of moral duplicity. The introduction discusses the origins of his treatment of the well-known story and examines his sources. The editor also sets the play in its historical context and offersthe most comprehensive available account of the text's theatrical life from Restoration adaptations to present-day productions.

'It was early in a fine summer's day, near the end of the eighteenth century, when a young man, of genteel appearance, having occasion to go towards the north-east of Scotland, provided himself with a ticket in one of those public carriages which travelbetween Edinburgh and the Queensferry...'So begins Scott's personal favourite among his novels, in characteristically wry and urbane style, as a mysterious young man calling himself 'Lovel' travels idly but fatefully toward the Scottish seaside town of Fairport. Here he is befriended by theantiquary Jonathan Oldbuck, who has taken refuge from his own personal disappointments in the obsessive study of miscellaneous history. Their slow unravelling of Lovel's true identity will unearth and redeem the secrets and lies which have devastated theguilt-haunted Earl of Glenallan, and will reinstate the tottering fortunes of Sir Arthur Wardour and his daughter Isabella.First published in 1816 in the aftermath of Waterloo, The Antiquary deals with the problem of how to understand the past so as to enable the future. Set in the tense times of the wars with revolutionary France, it displays Scott's matchless skill atpainting the social panorama and in creating vivid characters, from the earthy beggar Edie Ochiltree to the loqacious and shrewdly humorous Antiquary himself.The text is based on Scott's own final, authorized version, the 'Magnum Opus' edition of 1829.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth ofother valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.Readership: readers and students of classic fiction, the nineteenth-century novel, the historical novel, Scottish literature, courses on Romanticism

he Voyage Out (1915) is the story of a rite of passage. When Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship she is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage.Virginia Woolf knew all too well the forms that she was supposed to follow when writing of a young lady's entrance into the world, and she struggled to subvert the conventions, wittily and assiduously, rewriting and revising the novel many times. Thefinished work is not, on the face of it, a `portrait of the artist'. However, through The Voyage Out readers will discover Woolf as an emerging and original artist: not identified with the heroine, but present everywhere in the social satire and thelyricism and patterning of consciousness.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth ofother valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'In ancient tales many marvels are told us ... now you may hear such marvels told!' The greatest of the heroic epics to emerge from medieval Germany, the Nibelungenlied is a revenge saga of sweeping dimensions. It tells of the dragon-slayer Sivrit, andthe mysterious kingdom of the