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The Romance of a Shop is an early New Woman novel about four sisters, who decide to establish their own photography business and their own home in central London after their father's death and their loss of financial security. In this novel, Amy Levy examines both the opportunities and dangers of urban experience for women in the late nineteenth century who pursue independent work rather than follow the established paths of domestic service. By outfitting her characters as photographers, Levy emphasizes the importance of the gendered gaze in this narrative of the modern city. This Broadview edition prints for the first time since the 1880s Levy's essay on Christina Rossetti and a short story set in North London, both published in Oscar Wilde's magazine The Woman's World. Other appendices include poetry by Levy, Michael Field, Dollie Radford, and A. Mary F. Robinson, and essays on Victorian photography, literary realism, the woman question at the end of the nineteenth century, and the plight of women working in London.
The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of American fiction. It tells of the mysterious Jay Gatsby's grand effort to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, the rich girl who embodies for him the promise of the American dream. Deeply romantic in its concern with self-making, ideal love, and the power of illusion, it draws on modernist techniques to capture the spirit of the materialistic, morally adrift, post-war era Fitzgerald dubbed the jazz age. Gatsby's aspirations remain inseparable from the rhythms and possibilities suggested by modern consumer culture, popular song, the movies; his obstacles inseparable from contemporary American anxieties about social mobility, racial mongrelization, and the fate of Western civilization. This Broadview edition sets the novel in context by providing readers with a critical introduction and crucial background material about the consumer culture in which Fitzgerald was immersed; about the spirit of the jazz age; and about racial discourse in the 1920s.
Written during the English Civil War and Interregnum when the public theatres were closed and Margaret Cavendish was living away from England in exile, Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions are scathing satires that speak to the role of women's agency amidst this cultural tumult. In Bell in Campo, a group of virtuous women follow their husbands to war and, refusing to remain docilely out of harm's way, form an army of their own. The Sociable Companions details the struggles of four women from impoverished Royalist families trying to survive in a rapacious marriage market at the war's end. This Broadview Edition presents these two complementary plays together, along with supplementary materials on Cavendish's life, the participation of women in the combat of the English Civil War, the conduct of the Royalist military forces, and seventeenth-century social and marriage conventions.
L.M. Findlay's elegant new translation is a work of textual and historical scholarship. Few books have had as much of an impact on modern history as The Communist Manifesto. Since it was first published in 1848, it has become the rallying cry for revolutionary movements around the world. This new Broadview edition draws on the 1888 Samuel Moore translation supervised by Engels-the standard English version in Marxist discourse-and on the original Helen Macfarlane translation into English of 1850. Throughout, Findlay draws on a variety of disciplines and maintains a broad-ranging perspective. Among the appendices are Engels' Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith, correspondence and journalism of Marx and Engels, ten illustrations, and eight additional influential political manifestos from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The plot of Charlotte Smith's autobiographical first novel Emmeline (1788) includes the usual thrills of the eighteenth-century courtship novel: abduction, duels, and a fairy tale princess. At the same time, the novel satirically reworks such literary conventions by focusing on the dangers of early engagement and marriage, and challenges a social and legal system in which woment are inherently illegitimate subjects. The Broadview edition includes primary source material relating to the novel's reception; women, marriage and work; and landscape in eighteenth-century fiction. Mary Hays's biographical writing on Smith is also included, as is selected correspondence.
Margaret Cavendish was one of the most subversive and entertaining writers of the seventeenth century. She invented new genres, challenged gender roles, and critiqued the new science as well as the mores of society. Paper Bodies was the wonderful phrase she used to described her manuscripts, which she hoped would continue to make a great Blazing Light after her death. There are connections here to Cavendish's most famous work, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), a unique tale of a woman travelling through the north pole to a strange new world. In addition to The Blazing World, this volume includes Cavendish's brief autobiography, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life (1667), her play The Convent of Pleasure, and selections from her Sociable Letters, her poetry, and her critical writings. A variety of background documents by other seventeenth-century writers helps to set her work in context for the modern reader.
H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the first story to speculate about the consequences of aliens (from Mars) with superior technology landing on earth, is one of the most influential science fiction books ever written. The novel is both a thrilling narrative and an elaboration of Wells's socio-political thought on the subjects of imperialism, humankind's treatment of other animals, and unquestioning faith in military technology and the continuation of the human species. This edition's appendices include other related writings by Wells; selected correspondence; contemporary reviews; excerpts from works that influenced the novel and from contemporary invasion narratives; and photographs of examples of Victorian military technology.
First published in 1865, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland began as a story told to Alice Liddell and her two sisters on a boating trip in July 1862. The novel follows Alice down a rabbit-hole and into a world of strange and wonderful characters who constantly turn everything upside down with their mind-boggling logic, word play, and fantastic parodies. Like the first, this second edition includes Carroll's earlier story Alice's Adventures Under Ground, which allows readers to trace the revisions and to compare Carroll's own illustrations in the original with the famous John Tenniel illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This edition also includes new appendix material: George MacDonald writing on the fantastic, the eighteenth-century children's story Goody Two-Shoes, a section on film and television adaptations of Alice, and new illustrations.
Emerging from Dickens's preoccupation in the early 1840s with issues of poverty, ignorance, and cruelty, this classic story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, visited by four ghosts on Christmas Eve, was first published in 1843 to strong reviews and popular success. The Broadview edition uses the first edition with original drawings by John Leech. This edition also includes Washington Irving's descriptions of English Christmas customs; essays by Dickens on Christmas, and his essay A Walk in a Workhouse ; a British government report on the lives of child labourers; a speech by Dickens on the importance of educating the poor; selected letters; contemporary reviews; and a listing of film, television, and radio adaptations of the book.
Published together for the first time, Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela and Henry Fielding's An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews are the two most important responses to Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela. Anti-Pamela comments on Richardson's representations of work, virtue, and gender, while also questioning the generic expectations of the novel that Pamela establishes, and it provides a vivid portrayal of the material realities of life for a woman in eighteenth-century London. Fielding's Shamela punctures both the figure Richardson established for himself as an author and Pamela's preoccupation with virtue. This Broadview edition also includes a rich selection of historical materials, including writings from the period on sexuality, women's work, Pamela and the print trade, and education and conduct.
Mary Barton first appeared in 1848, and has since become one of the best known novels on the 'condition of England,' part of a nineteenth-century British trend to understand the enormous cultural, economic and social changes wrought by industrialization. Gaskell's work had great importance to the labour and reform movements, and it influenced writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and Charlotte Bronte. The plot of Mary Barton concerns the poverty and desperation of England's industrial workers. Fundamentally, however, it revolves around Mary's personal conflicts. She is already divided between an affection for an industrialist's son, Henry Carson, and for a man of her own class, Jem Wilson. But Mary's conflict escalates when her father, a committed trade unionist, is asked to assassinate Henry, who is the son of his unjust employer.
With its combination of satire and sentiment, its focus on the seedy side of London life, and its unexpected shifts in tone, Amelia has intrigued and disturbed readers since its first publication. Eagerly awaited by Henry Fielding's eighteenth-century readers of Tom Jones, the novel perplexed many of them. Amelia counters the traditional courtship plot of eighteenth-century novels with its convincing portrayal of a marriage between an errant husband and his wife, and is ahead of its time in its depiction of the alienation of modern city life. Appendices include contemporary criticism and related works by Alexander Pope and Sarah Fielding.
The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph was hugely popular in circulating libraries in the years after its publication, and its emotional intensity was often remarked upon; Samuel Johnson wrote to Frances Sheridan, I know not, Madam! that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much. Sheridan traces Sidney Bidulph's development in a complex epistolary novel spanning much of the protagonist's life, and explores the tension between sexual desire and prescribed female conduct. In addition to an introduction that places the novel in the context of Sheridan's feminism and of the early novel, this edition provides material on discourses of female conduct, letters between Sheridan and Samuel Richardson, and contemporary reviews.
Benito Cereno, a story of atmospheric Gothic horror and striking political resonance, represents Herman Melville's most profound and unsettling engagement with the horrors of New World slavery. Narrating the story of a slave revolt using materials drawn from Amasa Delano's non-fictional account of the Tryal Rebellion from earlier in the nineteenth-century, Melville's story probes the moral complexities of the antebellum United States and its position within the Americas. Melville explores the psychology of slavery and racism and role of violence in both resistance to slavery and the perpetuation of slavery in the Americas. The appendices to this volume illustrate how Melville's satirical treatment of racism and his ambivalent response to violent resistance to slavery connect with antislavery literature (poetry, fiction, and non-fiction alike) in the middle of the nineteenth century, and they also consider how Benito Cereno functions as a central piece in Melville's contribution to the literature of the Americas.
Following the success of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe wrote a new fiction, the story of an English pirate whose success eclipsed every buccaneer the Atlantic world had seen. Featuring a haunted, unreliable narrator, a daring trek across the continent of Africa, and mercantile adventures in the China Seas, Captain Singleton is a tale of loneliness, brotherhood, and the lust for profit.Appendices to this Broadview Edition include materials on pirate writing, travel writing, and earlier pirate tales that may have provided models for Captain Singleton.
The Middle English romance of Richard Coeur de Lion transforms the historical Richard I of England-a Frenchman by upbringing, who spent only four months of his reign in England, and who once joked that he would sell London to finance his Crusade if he could only find a buyer-into an aggressively English king. This act of historical revision involves the invention of several fantastic elements that give Richard the superhuman force necessary to unite the English nation and elevate it above all others. Springing from a supernatural birth and endowed with exceptional strength and an insatiable and transgressive appetite, Richard embodies a vision of triumphant Englishness that humiliates and decimates England's foes, whether they be French, German, or Muslim.
John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in English and is perhaps the greatest example of the genre. From the outset it was mired in disrepute. Cleland penned the novel to liberate himself from debtors' prison, and the book's manifestly lewd content led to its legal suppression within a year of publication. Though versions of the novel, nearly always abridged in some form, continued to find a way into print, the Memoirs remained an underground text until the 1960s. Only as that decade ushered in a culture less socially deferential and more sexually permissive was the moment opportune for the obscenity ban to be successfully challenged. Cleland's novel is a triumph of literary style, resting on his invention of an entirely new, vividly metaphoric, terminology for describing sexual pleasure.
Edgar Huntly is a compelling tale of sleepwalking, murder, and frontier violence set in rural Pennsylvania in the 1780s. His memory and wits shaken by the scenes he has witnessed, ordinary republican citizen Edgar Huntly relates the unpredictable and catastrophic consequences of his chance encounter with Clithero Edny, a mysterious Irish immigrant whose unfortunate but violent history catches up with him in the New World. Huntly's growing obsession with Clithero plunges both men into physical and mental danger, unsettling the colonial territories of the Delaware basin and the cognitive territory of Huntly's own mind. Brown's artful sensationalism transplants the European form of the gothic romance to the new United States, yielding one of the most exciting, metaphysically sophisticated, and historically self-aware novels in early American literary culture.
The first publisher of Tender Buttons described the book's effect on readers as something like terror, there are no known precedents to cling to. Written in pencil in a small notebook and barely revised after its first composition, the text caused a sensation and was widely reviewed and discussed on its publication. This edition of Gertrude Stein's transformative work immerses the text in its cultural context. The most opaque of modernist texts, Tender Buttons also had modernism's most voluminous and varied response. This Broadview Edition uses the response to Tender Buttons as a way of understanding this spectacular moment in publishing history. Stein's text is published alongside its parodies, defenses, publicity brochure, and selections from the hundreds of responses to it in American daily newspapers, which placed it in the context of Cubism, fashion shows, and celebrity culture.
A Marriage Below Zero is the first novel in English to explicitly explore the subject of male homosexuality. Written by a British emigre to America, the New York theater critic Alfred J. Cohen, under the pseudonym of Alan Dale, this first-person narrative is told by a young Englishwoman, Elsie Bouverie, who gradually discovers that her new husband, Arthur Ravener, is romantically involved with another man. Denounced on publication ( a saturnalia in which the most monstrous forms of human vice exhibit themselves shamelessly wrote one reviewer), the novel was published during the public exposure of a London homosexual brothel frequented by upper-class men and telegraph boys. A Marriage Below Zero reflected late-nineteenth-century fears and anxieties about homosexuality, women's position in marriage, and the threat that seemingly new, illicit forms of desire posed to marriageable women and to the Victorian family. This Broadview edition includes excerpts from the era's pro-homosexual tracts, scientific and legal documents, contemporary feminist commentary on the new dandyism, and newspaper accounts of late-Victorian same-sex scandals. Highlights of the volume include excerpts from Charles Dickens's 1836 account of his visit to Newgate Prison, where he witnessed the last two men in Britain executed for sodomy, George Bernard Shaw's 1889 unpublished letter attacking the social purity movement's legislation against homosexual men, and a never-before reprinted 1898 article from Reynolds Magazine, Sex Mania, that warned of an increasing number of homosexual men choosing to enter marriages as a cover for an illicit life.
Essayist, lecturer, poet, and America's first public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is the central figure in nineteenth-century American letters and the leader (albeit reluctantly) of the Transcendental group. A literary mover and shaker, his unpopular early radicalism was directed toward social institutions (the church, education, literary conventions); by his death in 1882, however, his reputation was already solidifying as a national icon. Somewhere between the iconic sage and the speculative idealist lies an Emerson students don't often encounter, a flesh-and-blood figure whose writings testified to his continuing exploration of the individual's place in an increasingly conformist and crowded world. In its selections and its apparatus, this Broadview edition bridges the gap between Emerson and students by stressing his real-world engagements. The collection contains a range of prose and poetry representing some of Emerson's central concerns-nature and the self; poetry and the artist; religion and social reform. Historical appendices include materials on Transcendentalism, the contemporary debate, in which Emerson participated, about the validity of Biblical miracles, and other authors' responses to Emerson.
In April 1888, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the English novelist and journalist Margaret Harkness, expressing his appreciation for her first novel, A City Girl: A Realistic Story, and calling it a small work of art. A City Girl was one of many slum novels set in the East End of London in the 1880s. It tells the story of a young East Ender, Nelly Ambrose, who is seduced and abandoned by a middle-class politician. After the birth of her child and betrayal by her family, Nelly is rescued by two outside forces: the Salvation Army and a sympathetic local man, George, who marries her despite her fallen status. While Nelly's relative passivity and social ignorance distinguishes her from contemporary New Woman heroines, Harkness's sympathy for Nelly's position and refusal to judge her morally make A City Girl a fascinating and original novel. This Broadview Edition includes contemporary reviews of A City Girl along with historical documents on London's East End, fallen women in late-Victorian fiction, and reform organizations for East End women.
Mary Shelley's Mathilda, the story of one woman's existential struggle after learning of her father's desire for her, has been identified as Shelley's most important work after Frankenstein. The two texts share many characteristics, besides authorship and contemporaneity: both concern parental abandonment; both contribute to the Gothic form through themes of incest, insanity, suicidality, monstrosity, and isolation; and both are epistolary. However, Mathilda was not published until 1959, 140 years after Shelley wrote it - in part because Shelley's father, William Godwin, suppressed it. This new edition encourages a critical reconsideration of a novella that has been critically stereotyped as biographical, and explores the importance of the novella to the Romantic debate about suicide. Historical appendices trace the connections between Mathilda and other works by Shelley and by her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, while also providing biographical documents, contemporary works on the theme of incest, and documents on suicide in the Romantic era.
The sentimental antislavery novel Ida May appeared so like its predecessor in the genre, Uncle Tom's Cabin, that for the month of November 1854 reviewers looked for Harriet Beecher Stowe's hand in the narrative. Ida May explores the possibility of white slavery from the safety of an exciting, romantic narrative; Ida is kidnapped on her fifth birthday from her white middle-class family in Pennsylvania, stained brown, and sold into slavery in the South. Traumatic amnesia brought about by a severe beating keeps her from knowing whom she really is, until after five years in slavery, her identity is recovered in a dramatic flash of recognition. To the abolitionists of the period, fictional narratives of white enslaved children offered a crucial possibility: to unsettle the legitimacy of a race-based system of enslavement. The historical appendices to this Broadview Edition provide context for the novel's reception, Pike's racial politics, and the problem of white slavery in nineteenth-century abolitionist writing.
Immensely popular with contemporary readers, Smith's major poetic works are foundational poetic texts of the Romantic period. Smith's innovations in poetic form have also placed her at the forefront of twenty-first century scholarship on the period. This edition presents her three major poetic works - Elegiac Sonnets (1784-1800), The Emigrants (1793), and Beachy Head (1807). They also remain major texts for thinking through such questions as the relationship between public and private; the ethical treatment of refugees and other persecuted people; the position of women in a patriarchal society; and the usefulness of science as a way of making sense of a complex and ever-changing world. This Broadview edition includes a new critical introduction which takes into account the developments in scholarship on Smith's work and women's writing over the past three decades, and it provides readers with a wealth of contextual material for understanding the writer and the social and literary environment within which she wrote, including key works by her precursors and contemporaries, selections from her letters, and reviews of her poetry.
In Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger's most successful book, Alger codified the basic formula he would follow in nearly a hundred subsequent novels for boys: a young hero, inexperienced in the temptations of the city but morally armed to resist them, is unexpectedly forced to earn a livelihood. The hero's exemplary struggle - to retain his virtue, to clear his name of accusations, and to gain economic independence - was the basis of the Alger plot. Hugely popular at the turn of the twentieth century, Alger's works have at different times been framed as a model for the American dream and as dangerously exciting sensationalism for young readers; Gary Scharnhorst's new introduction separates the myth of Alger as success ideologue from the more complex messages conveyed in his work. Ragged Dick is paired in this edition with Risen from the Ranks, another coming-of-age story of a young man achieving respectability. Historical appendices include extensive contemporary reviews, material on the success myth associated with Alger, and parodies of Alger's work.
The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman is an eponymous novel purportedly written by a midshipman left behind in New Zealand's Queen Charlotte Sound after escaping the infamous Grass Cove massacre. The protagonist is a midshipman on HMS Adventure, the ship that accompanied Cook's Resolution on his second voyage around the world. The two ships become separated off New Zealand, leading to a group of seamen being sent from the Adventure to gather wild greens at Grass Cove, where they are killed by Maori. The fictional Hildebrand escapes because he has gone off hunting. The remainder of the novel traces his travels through six fictional islands in the South Pacific; echoing eighteenth-century stadial theory, these societies represent human culture gradually ascending from brutish insensibility to the primitive savagery to idealized pastoral economy. The novel is a unique hybrid of historical events and the cultural satire of such works as Gulliver's Travels. Historical appendices provide an exceptionally broad range of materials on the Grass Cove massacre, the eighteenth-century stadial theory of historical development, cannibalism, and contemporary depictions of the South Pacific and its indigenous peoples.
In 1848 and again in 1849, Henry David Thoreau delivered a lecture in Concord, Massachusetts on the relationship of the individual to the state. The essay now known as Civil Disobedience is a significant and widely admired contribution to abolitionist literature, as well as an anti-war tract, but Thoreau's focus is less on political organization and solidarity than it is on personal choice and individual responsibility. Cultivating personal integrity in the face of political injustice is the project Thoreau defends in Civil Disobedience; this focus has made the work highly influential to 20th- and 21st-century political movements. Robert Pepperman Taylor's new Introduction explains the work's specific political context, helping readers to understand the text as Thoreau wrote it. The edition also offers a number of historical documents on Thoreau's abolitionism; the United States' war with Mexico; and Thoreau's philosophical development in relation to other thinkers.
Dinah Mulock Craik's The Half-Caste concerns the coming-of-age of its title character, the mixed-race Zillah Le Poer, daughter of an English merchant and an Indian princess. Sent back to England as a young girl, Zillah has no knowledge that she is an heiress. She lives with her uncle Le Poer, his wife, and two daughters, and is treated as little more than a servant in the household. Zillah's situation is gradually improved when Cassandra Pryor is employed as a governess to the Le Poer daughters and takes an interest in the mysterious cousin. Craik explores issues of gender, race, and empire in the Victorian period in this compact and gripping novella. Along with a newly-annotated text, this Broadview edition includes a critical introduction that discusses Craik's involvement with contemporary racial and imperialist attitudes, her place within the broader genre of Anglo-Indian fiction, and the importance of Zillah Le Poer as a positive symbol of empire. The edition is also enriched with relevant contemporary contextual material, including Dinah Mulock Craik's writing on gender and female employment, British views on the biracial Eurasian community in India, and writings on the Victorian governess.
The Grand Babylon Hotel opens with New York millionaire Theodore Racksole's demand for an Angel Kiss - an American concoction the Grand Babylon does not serve. Racksole and his daughter Nella are on vacation, but quickly find themselves running the hotel, after Theodore's impulsive purchase of the establishment from founder and owner Felix Babylon. Soon the Racksoles are rushing to solve the mystery that threatens the reigning Prince of Posen - and Nella's future. The hotel itself opens possibilities for adventure, discovery, and wonder that the Racksoles had never anticipated. The novel, out of print for decades, raises serious questions about the possibilities for a truly cosmopolitan world, offering a dazzling picture of what this would look like. The historical appendices to this edition include extensive photographs and documents from the history of the Savoy Hotel (the model for the Grand Babylon) and material on the film version.
This group of fifteen brief narratives connected by a place and a time, the city of Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century, was written when James Joyce was a precocious young graduate of University College. With great subtlety and artistic restraint, Joyce suggests what lies beneath the pieties of Dublin society and its surface drive for respectability, suggesting the difficulties and despairs that were being endured on a daily basis in homes, pubs, streets, and offices of the city: underemployment, domestic violence, alcoholism, poverty, hunger, emotional and sexual repression. No writer ever took more seriously the details, history, and culture of a particular place than Joyce did with his home city, and these stories combine dark humor with compassion and a searching eye for the causes of suffering. This new edition's historical appendices include contemporary reviews (including one by Ezra Pound) and materials on religion, the struggle for Irish independence, and Dublin's musical and performance culture.
Kelroy, a nearly-forgotten 1812 novel by Rebecca Rush, combines the refinement of the novel of manners with the Gothic novel's hidden evil to tell the story of the star-crossed lovers Emily Hammond and the romantic Kelroy, whose romance is doomed by the machinations of Emily's mother. Set in the elite world of Philadelphia's Atlantic Rim society, Kelroy transcends the genre of sentimental romance to expose the financial pressures that motivate Mrs. Hammond's gambles. As she sacrifices her daughter to maintain the appearance of urbane wealth, Mrs. Hammond emerges as one of the most compellingly detestable figures in early American literature. Appendices include materials on gender, economics, and marriage; games and dancing; and gambling and the lottery in early urban America. A group of illustrations of early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia is also included.
The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us conjoined twins, babies exchanged in the cradle, acts of cross-dressing and racial masquerade, duels, a lynching, and a murder mystery. Pudd'nhead Wilson tells the story of babies, one of mixed race and the other white, exchanged in their cradles, while Those Extraordinary Twins is a farcical tale of conjoined twins. Although the stories were long viewed as flawed narratives, their very incongruities offer a fascinating portrait of key issues-race, disability, and immigration-facing the United States in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Hsuan Hsu's introduction traces the history of literary critics' response to these works, from the confusion of Twain's contemporaries to the keen interest of current scholars. Extensive historical appendices provide contemporary materials on race discourse, legal contexts, and the composition and initial reception of the texts.
As nearly all of its reviewers pointed out, Clotel was an audience-minded performance, an effort to capitalize on the post-Uncle Tom's Cabin mania for abolitionist fiction in Great Britain, where William Wells Brown lived between 1849 and 1854. The novel tells the story of Clotel and Althesa, the fictional daughters of Thomas Jefferson and his mixed-race slave. Like the popular and entertaining public lectures that Brown gave in England and America, Clotel is a series of startling, attention-grabbing narrative attractions . Brown creates in this novel a delivery system for these attractions, in an effort to draw as many readers as possible towards anti-slavery and anti-racist causes. Rough, studded with caricatures, and intimate with the racism it ironizes, Clotel is still capable of creating a potent mix of discomfort and delight. This edition aims to makes it possible to read Clotel in something like its original cultural context. Geoffrey Sanborn's Introduction discusses Brown's extensive plagiarism of other authors in composing Clotel, as well as his narrative strategies in the novel.
The Spanish Tragedy became one of the most successful plays on the Elizabethan English stage and laid the foundation of the revenge tragedy, a genre that playwrights returned to throughout the early modern era and that endures even today. The story surrounds the civil servant Hieronimo who joins Bel-imperia of the royal family to take revenge on her own brother for murdering Hieronimo's son, the object of her affection. The work goes far beyond a story of intrigue and brings up questions about aristocratic privilege, the moral hazards of revenge, the spectacle of violence, and the agency of women at court. This Broadview Edition includes a freshly edited text based on the 1592 edition, notes designed to help first-time readers understand and enjoy the work, an extensive introduction that situates the play in its literary and historical context, and extensive historical documents. The documents open up avenues of inquiry for students interested in the life and work of Thomas Kyd, the construction of women at court, the question of revenge, violence and entertainment in Elizabethan England, and Spain in the Elizabethan imagination.
Percy Bysshe Shelley's narrative poem Laon and Cythna is about a failed revolution-or is it? Laon and Cythna was quickly suppressed by Shelley's publisher, who feared he would be prosecuted for its revolutionary ideas and its depiction of incest between the two title characters, a brother and sister. The two lead a rebellion against the Sultan of a city called Islam, which is liberated briefly before being recaptured by the Sultan's armies. Laon and Cythna are burnt at the stake, or seem to be: just before they die, they are spirited away to a mysterious island, where the poet who recounts their story meets and talks to them. The poem asks what it means for a political movement to succeed, or to fail, and presents Shelley's revolutionary ideas in a suspenseful narrative. Historical appendices provide context for Shelley's political and philosophical works, the poem's feminist ideals, and the treatment of Asia and the Middle East in Romantic literature.
Socrates, the first of the great ancient Greek philosophers, left no written works. What survives of his philosophical thought are second-hand descriptions of his teachings and conversations-including, most famously, the accounts of his trial and execution composed by his friend, student, and philosophical successor, Plato. These dialogues, though fallible as historical record, contain some of the most fascinating and well-known arguments in Western philosophy, and offer a dramatic picture of Socrates as uncompromising in the face of death. In Euthyphro, Socrates examines the concept of piety, and displays his propensity for questioning Athenian authorities. Such audacity is not without consequence, and in the Apology we find Socrates defending himself in court against charges of impiety and corruption of the youth. Crito depicts Socrates choosing to accept the resulting death sentence, rather than escape Athens and avoid execution. All three dialogues are included here, as is the final scene of Phaedo, in which the sentence is carried out. Woods and Pack's new translation strikes a fine balance between literal exactness and readability, and thorough annotations make Plato's prose more accessible than ever before. A non-technical introduction sets the stage for new readers, detailing the historical context of Plato's writing, and offering useful background information.
Unjustly overlooked in its own time, Frank J. Webb's novel of pre-Civil War Philadelphia weaves together action, humor, and social commentary. The Garies and Their Friends tells the story of two families struggling for di| erent sorts of respectability: the Garies, a well-to-do interracial couple who relocate to Philadelphia from the plantation South in order to legalize their marriage, and their friends the Ellises, free black Philadelphians hoping to make the move from the working class into the bourgeoisie. Along the way the families confront racialized violence, melodramatic villainy, and sentimental reversals. Entertaining and fastmoving, the novel has a Dickensian mix of uncanny coincidence and interwoven personal experiences. The historical documents accompanying this Broadview Edition provide reviews of the novel along with extensive materials on slavery, the color line, and contemporary Philadelphia.
Geoffrey Chaucer's most significant literary accomplishment may well be Troilus and Criseyde, a single, profoundly philosophical narrative of a tragic love affair. Set in ancient Troy and telling the story of the rise and fall, in love and war, of the prince Troilus, Troilus and Criseyde is an archetypal medieval romance. The widowed Criseyde is a powerful woman, complex and intelligent, and the naive Troilus is ambushed by his overwhelming love for her; Pandarus, Troilus's friend and the enabler of the couple's love, provides comic relief. Chaucer used his familiarity with the works of Giovanni Boccaccio and Benoit de Sainte-Maure to build his own historical world, depicting pagan beliefs and myths with sympathy and imagination. This edition is based on the Corpus Christi College Cambridge manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde; as with Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor's Broadview Edition of The Canterbury Tales, the manuscript text is preserved as much as possible and the original Middle English text is used. Difficult words are conveniently glossed in the margins, and explanatory footnotes help with references and allusions.
First published in 1666>>>, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle's Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World is the first fictional portrayal of women and the new science. In Blazing World, Cavendish depicts her heroine, theEmpress, in multiple roles. The Empress is leader of a dreamlike utopian world reachable through the North Pole, filled with talking animals and intelligent hybrid creatures. She establishes a royal society of scientists, initiates learned conferences, interrogates existing knowledge, and spends her days speculating on natural philosophy. She also forms a lively intellectual collaboration with the Duchess of Newcastle, a female character summoned from Earth. A companion volume to Cavendish's important Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Blazing World is the first known science fiction novel to have been written and published by a woman, and represents a pioneering female scientific utopia. This Broadview Edition includes related historical materials on the new science and Cavendish's role in the intellectual world of her time.
In 1898, The Strand Magazine, one of the most influential publications of the Victorian fin de siecle, deemed best-selling author and editor L.T. Meade a literary celebrity and one of the most industrious writers of modern fiction. Beginning in 1893 and continuing into the first decade of the twentieth century, Meade's medical mysteries and thrilling tales of dangerous criminal women appeared in the Strand. There they competed successfully not only with Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but also with the works of some of the most popular writers of the day. The Sorceress of the Strand is one of Meade's most compelling mysteries, and the first to feature the seductive criminal genius Madame Sara. The Sorceress of the Strand is accompanied in this edition by three other popular stories featuring powerful female criminal protagonists, from gang leaders to spies and terrorists. The historical appendices expand on the stories' themes of criminality, gender, and political activism.
Daniel Defoe's fifth novel, Colonel Jack is the supposed autobiography of an English gentleman who begins life as a child of the London streets. He and his two brothers (both also named Jack) are brought up as pickpockets and highwaymen, but Colonel Jack seeks to improve himself. Kidnapped and taken to America, he becomes first a slave, then an overseer on plantations in Maryland and Virginia. Returning to England, he is drawn into the Jacobite rebellion and into a succession of marriages, all of which end badly for him. Escaping back to Virginia, Jack becomes a successful planter, ending his life as a gentleman despite his mistakes along the way. Historical appendices relate to eighteenth-century Virginia and Maryland and contemporary crime, punishment, and imprisonment.
E. Pauline Johnson, also known as Tekahionwake, is remarkable as one of a very few early North American Indigenous poets and fiction writers. Most Indigenous writers of her time were men educated for the ministry who published religious, anthropological, autobiographical, political, and historical works, rather than poetry and fiction. More extraordinary still, she became both a canonical poet and a literary celebrity, performing on stage for fifteen years across Canada, in the US, and in London. Johnson is now seen as a central figure in the intellectual history of Canada and the United States, and as an important historical example of Indigenous feminism. This edition collects a diverse range of Johnson's writings on what was then called the Indian question and on the question of her own complex Indigenous identity. Six thematic sections gather Johnson's poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and a rich selection of historical appendices provide context for her public life and her work as a feminist and activist for Indigenous people.
Published five years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's popular collection Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes shocked readers and drew scornful reviews. Poems was a revolutionary challenge to literary taste in revolution-weary times. The poems were perceived as inappropriately personal, puerile, and egotistical in the attention that the poet pays to moods of [his own] mind. The collection is now seen as containing some of the most enduring works of British Romantic poetry, and Wordsworth's achievement in opening up new worlds of subject matter, emotion, and poetic expression is widely recognized. Richard Matlak places the initial reaction to Poems in its historical context and explains the sea change in critical and popular opinion of these poems. The extensive historical documents place the poems in the context of Wordsworth's life, contemporary politics, and the literary world of the early nineteenth century.
First published in 1865, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland began as a story told to Alice Liddell and her two sisters on a boating trip in July 1862. The novel follows Alice down a rabbit-hole and into a world of strange and wonderful characters who constantly turn everything upside down with their mind-boggling logic, word play, and fantastic parodies. The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, was published in 1871, and was both a popular success and appreciated by critics for its wit and philosophical sophistication. Along with both novels and the original Tenniel illustrations, this edition includes Carroll's earlier story Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Appendices include Carroll's photographs of the Liddell sisters, materials on film and television adaptations, selections from other looking-glass books for children, and The Wasp in a Wig, an originally deleted section of Through the Looking-Glass.
Godwin's Mandeville, published in 1817, was described as his best novel by Shelley, who sent a copy to Byron, and it was recognized by its admirers as a work of unique psychological power. As Shelley wrote in a letter to Godwin, the novel's interest is of that irresistible and overwhelming kind. Written one year after the battle of Waterloo and set in an earlier revolutionary period between the execution of Charles I and the Restoration, Mandeville is a novel of psychological warfare. The narrative proceeds through Mandeville's early education by a fanatical Presbyterian minister to his persecution at Winchester school, his constant (and not unjustified) paranoia, and his confinement in an asylum. Mandeville's final, desperate attempt to prevent his sister's marriage to his enemy ends in tragedy. The historical appendices offer contemporary reviews, material elucidating the novel's complex historical background, and contemporary writings on war, madness, and trauma.
Continuously in print and translated into multiple languages since it was first published, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty is a classic work of children's literature and an important text in the fields of Victorian studies and animal studies. Writing to induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment , Sewell realistically documents the working conditions of Black Beauty, who moves down the social scale from a rural carriage horse to a delivery horse in London. Sewell makes visible and tangible the experience of animals who were often treated as if they were machines. Though she died shortly after it was published, Sewell's book contributed significantly to late nineteenth-century campaigns for humane treatment of horses and remains a seminal anti-cruelty text today. The Broadview Press edition reproduces the first edition of 1877, restoring material often abridged in other modern editions. Appendices include materials on contemporary animal rights movements, equine management, and Victorian understandings of animal emotions.
H.G. Wells's 1909 novel centres on the coming of age of the spirited Ann Veronica, who runs away from her sheltered suburban home to live in London. There she mingles with feminists, studies biology, learns jiu jitsu, and even participates in a suffragette raid on the House of Commons that lands her in jail. When originally published, the novel was deemed poisonous for its bold treatment of an adulterous romance that only lightly veiled Wells's extramarital affairs. While critics debate whether the shift to romance undermines the novel's feminist themes, readers continue to be engaged by its vividly realized heroine and its rich portrayal of the tumultuous social movements of Edwardian London. Historical documents expand on the novel's autobiographical dimension with letters between Wells and Amber Reeves, the model for Ann Veronica; also included are materials on the suffrage movement, attempts to censor the novel, and the New Woman.
Written circa 1894-95 but published posthumously in 1914, Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute presents an unflinching portrait of unconventional sexuality, moral dissolution, and physical degeneration. In the setting of turn-of-the-century San Francisco depicted in Vandover, disaster encompasses far more than the vivid accounts of shipwreck or earthquake that appear in the novel. The slow wasting away of characters who contract syphilis, the suicide of a young girl, and the murder of a man clinging to a lifeboat fascinate readers today as much as they did a century ago, when this scandalous novel was first published. The most complete wreck is Vandover himself, whose artistic talents and constitution collapse after orgies of drink and sexual abandon. Russ Castronovo's new edition gathers historical materials on literary naturalism, gender and criminality, and the visual culture of the late nineteenth century.
Kant's landmark essay, On Perpetual Peace, is as timely, relevant, and inspiring today as when it was first written over 200 years ago. In it, we find a forward-looking vision of a world respectful of human rights, dominated by liberal democracies, and united in a cosmopolitan federation of diverse peoples. This book features a fresh and vigorous translation of Kant's essay by Ian Johnston. And it includes an extended introduction by philosopher Brian Orend, author of the widely-used text, The Morality of War. This extensive, yet highly readable, introduction situates Kant's essay in its historical context, while also offering a substantial analysis, section-by-section, of the essay itself. In doing so, Orend not only discusses Kant's personal life and the history of the perpetual peace tradition, he also shows how Kant's provocative ideas have inspired and infused our own time, especially the concept of a global alliance of free societies committed to respecting human rights. The book also sports an enlightening set of appendices that cleverly and sharply debate the promise of perpetual peace. A few are from Kant's works, but most are from other acclaimed thinkers, including: Hegel, Leibniz, Bentham, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. A chronology of Kant's life and a recommended reading list round out this inquiry into one of the most hopeful, stirring, and imaginative political proposals: a cosmopolitan federation uniting us all and securing perpetual peace between nations.
Inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's own experience as a member of the famous Brook Farm Community, which the author describes in his preface as the most romantic episode in his life, The Blithedale Romance is one of the most engaging and complex of Hawthorne's novels. Recounting the hopeful formation and slow fragmentation of a reform-minded socialist community in antebellum Massachusetts, the novel has increasingly preoccupied commentators on American literature and culture over the last few decades. The editors' new introduction helps the reader to negotiate Blithedale's literary difficulties by offering a detailed reflection on the main problems confronted by past and present interpreters of the novel. Appendices expand upon the novel's key historical themes: women's emancipation, slavery, and religious reform.
This edition recovers Elizabeth Oakes Smith's successful 1842 novel The Western Captive; or, The Times of Tecumseh with many of Oakes Smith's other writings about Native Americans, including short stories, legends, autobiographical and biographical sketches. The Western Captive is a captivity narrative portraying the Shawnee leader as an American hero and as the white heroine's spiritual soulmate; in contrast to the later popular legend of Tecumseh's rejected marriage proposal to a white woman, Margaret, the captive of the title, returns Tecumseh's love and embraces life apart from white society. these texts are accompanied by selections from Oakes Smith's Woman and Her Needs and her unpublished autobiography, from contemporary captivity narratives and biographies of William Henry Harrison depicting the Shawnee, and from writings by her colleagues Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.
The second of Shaw's unpleasant plays, written in 1893, published in 1898, but not performed until 1905, The Philanderer is subtitled A Topical Comedy. The eclectic range of topical subjects addressed in the play includes the influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen on British middle-class social mores (the second act of The Philanderer is set in the fictional Ibsen Club), medical follies, the rise of the New Woman, and, in particular, the destructive impact of Victorian marriage and divorce laws. Just as Shaw's other unpleasant plays, Widowers' Houses and Mrs Warren's Profession, call, respectively, for reform of laws that allow corrupt property owners to exploit the poor and for radical change to economic structures that drive women into prostitution, so The Philanderer makes the case for more liberal legislation to allow easier divorce-particularly for women-when marriages become irretrievably broken. Shaw's attack on divorce laws becomes even clearer and stronger in the final act that he wrote for the play but discarded in favour of the version he published. The discarded version is published for the first time in this Broadview edition of the play.
Salome is Oscar Wilde's most experimental-and controversial-play. In its own time, the play, written in French, was described by a reviewer as an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology of situations the reverse of sacred. None, however, could deny the importance of Wilde's creation. Contemporary audiences and reviewers variously regarded Salome as the symbol of a thrilling modernity, a challenge to patriarchy, a confession of desire, a sign of moral decay, a new form of art, and a revolt against the restraints of Victorian society. Less well known than Wilde's beloved comedies, Salome is as enduringly modern and relevant. This edition uses the English translation by Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and overseen by Wilde himself. Appendices detail the play's sources and provide extensive materials on its contemporary reception and dramatic productions.
A contemporary critic described Ignatius Sancho as what is very uncommon for men of his complexion, A man of letters. A London shopkeeper, former butler, and descendant of slaves, Sancho was the first author of African descent to have his correspondence published. He was a critic of literature, music, and art; a composer; and an advocate for the abolition of slavery. Initially celebrated for his correspondence with Laurence Sterne, Sancho became well known as a writer, and his posthumously published letters were widely read. The letters reveal an avid reader and prolific author, and his epistolary style shows a sophisticated understanding of both private and public audiences. Even after the abolition of the slave trade, proponents of equal rights on both sides of the Atlantic continued to use Sancho as an exemplar of the intellectual and moral capacity of people of African descent. In addition to the annotated letters, this edition includes Laurence Sterne's letters to Sancho, the autograph versions of several of Sancho's letters, and a selection of the many eighteenth-century responses to Sancho and his letters.
First published in 1886 as a shilling shocker, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde takes the basic struggle between good and evil and adds to the mix bourgeois respectability, urban violence, and class conflict. The result is a tale that has taken on the force of myth in the popular imagination. This Broadview edition provides a fascinating selection of contextual material, including contemporary reviews of the novel, Stevenson's essay A Chapter on Dreams, and excerpts from the 1887 stage version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Also included are historical documents on criminality and degeneracy, the Jack the Ripper murders, and London in the 1880s. New to this third edition are an appendix on the figure of the Victorian gentleman and an expanded selection of letters related to the novel; the Introduction and bibliography have also been updated to reflect recent criticism.
One of the first animal viewpoint novels published in the United States, Margaret Marshall Saunders's Beautiful Joe (1894) tells the story of an abused dog and his rescue by a humane family. A catalogue of animal rights and wrongs, the novel fuelled humane sentiments worldwide. This annotated, illustrated edition draws on archival collections to trace the novel's impact on the nineteenth-century animal protection movement. The introduction also highlights some of the key social issues surrounding the substantive revisions and omissions in ensuing editions of the text. The historical appendices place the now-obscure novel in its rich milieu as an international bestseller that taught a generation of children to practice kindness towards animals.
The story of a young soldier, Henry Fleming, who flees a Civil War battle, The Red Badge of Courage has been celebrated for its depiction of both the physical action of battle and the protagonist's internal struggle. Despite the precise and vivid descriptions of the scenes of battle in his fiction, Stephen Crane was not born until six years after the war had ended and never saw military service. His novel altered the tradition of war literature in its naturalistic emphasis on a single, ordinary man facing the horrors of battle. This edition includes an important new introduction by James Nagel, author of the book Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism and former president of the Stephen Crane Society. Historically significant reviews and commentary from the publication of the novel in 1895 are included, along with the deleted Chapter 12 from the novel. The short story The Veteran, in which the protagonist appears as an elderly man, is also included.
Rosanna Mullins Leprohon's The Manor House of De Villerai: A Tale of Canada Under the French Dominion is a literary milestone-it is the first Canadian historical novel, in English or French, to rewrite the conquest of the French Canadians from the perspective of history's vanquished. Its revisionary account of the fall of New France is framed around a love triangle between the heroine, Blanche de Villerai, her childhood betrothed, Gustave de Montarville, and Blanche's servant, Rose Lauzon. Popular in its original serial publication and once widely reprinted in both French and English, but now out of print, The Manor House of De Villerai is a long-overlooked Canadian classic. In addition to the text originally serialized in the Family Herald magazine, this Broadview Edition includes extensive documents on the novel's reception, Leprohon's historical sources and literary precedents, and maps and art from the period.
When it first appeared in 1767, The Female American was called a sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders. Indeed, The Female American is an adventure novel about an English protagonist shipwrecked on a deserted isle, where survival requires both individual ingenuity and careful negotiations with visiting local Indians. But what most distinguishes Winkfield's novel is her protagonist, a woman who is of mixed race. Though the era's popular novels typically featured women in the confining contexts of the home and the bourgeois marriage market, Winkfield's novel portrays an autonomous and mobile heroine living alone in the wilds of the New World, independently interacting with both Native Americans and visiting Europeans. Moreover, The Female American is one of the earliest novelistic efforts to articulate an American identity, and more specifically to investigate what that identity might promise for women. This second edition has been updated throughout and includes a greatly expanded selection of historical materials on castaway narratives and the cultural context of colonial America.
In 1761, Frances Sheridan published her novel The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, which became a popular and widely praised example of the sentimental novel. The Conclusions, that novel's sequel, is set eight years later, after Sidney Bidulph's marriage and motherhood. Psychologically subtle and emotionally immediate, the novel is told almost entirely in the form of letters. Many of the letters are between the scheming Sophy and Edward Audley, who are trying to trick Sidney's daughter into marriage with Edward; these letters provide a startlingly realistic portrayal of villainy, anticipating such later works as Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The historical appendices include documents on the education of young adults in the eighteenth century and contemporary reviews of the novel.
Mrs. Dalloway takes place on one day in the middle of June 1923. Its plot is seemingly thin: a middle-aged society hostess is having a party; she hopes the Prime Minister will attend; she reconnects with old friends from her youth. From these slimmest of premises a whole world unfolds. Of all of Virginia Woolf's novels, it is Mrs. Dalloway that appears to speak most intimately to our own time. Selected contemporary reviews, both positive and negative, are included in the appendices of this edition, as are materials on the literary, political, medical, and educational contexts of the novel.
R.M. Liuzza's translation of Beowulf, first published by Broadview in 1999, has been widely praised for its accuracy and beauty. The translation is accompanied in this edition by genealogical charts, historical summaries, and a glossary of proper names. Historical appendices include related legends, stories, and religious writings from both Christian and Anglo-Saxon traditions. These texts help readers to see Beowulf as an exploration of the politics of kingship and the psychology of heroism, and as an early English meditation on the bridges and chasms between the pagan past and the Christian present. Appendices also include a generous sample of other modern translations of Beowulf, shedding light on the process of translating the poem. This new edition features an updated introduction and an expanded section of material on Christianity and paganism.
Over a series of elegantly written, engaging essays, the Enquiry examines the experiential and psychological sources of meaning and knowledge, the foundations of reasoning about matters that lie beyond the scope of our sensory experience and memory, the nature of belief, and the limitations of our knowledge. The positions Hume takes on these topics have been described as paradigmatically empiricist, sceptical, and naturalist and have been widely influential and even more widely decried. The introduction to this edition discusses the Enquiry's origin, evolution, and critical reception, while appendices provide examples of contemporary responses to Hume.
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is the greatest work of political philosophy in English and the first great work of philosophy in English. In addition, it presents the fundamentals of his beliefs about language, epistemology, and an extensive treatment of revealed religion and its relation to politics. Beginning with premises that were sometimes controversial, such as that every human action is caused by the agent's desire for his own good, Hobbes derived shocking conclusions, such as that the civil government enjoys absolute control over its citizens and that the sovereign has the right to determine which religion is to be practiced in a commonwealth. Hobbes's contemporaries recognized the power of the arguments in Leviathan and many of them wrote responses to it. Selections from books by John Bramhall, Robert Filmer, Edward Hyde, George Lawson, William Lucy, Samuel Pufendorf and Thomas Tenison are included in this edition. Leviathan is divided into four parts: In the first part, Of Man, Hobbes presents a view of human beings and of the natural world in general that is materialistic and mechanistic. In the second part, Of Commonwealth, he defends the theory of absolute sovereignty, the view that the government has all the political power and has the right to control any aspect of life. In the third part, Of a Christian Commonwealth, he critiques concepts like revelation, prophets, and miracles in such a way that it becomes doubtful whether they can be rationally justified. In the fourth part, Of the Kingdom of Darkness, he explains various ways in which priestly religion has corrupted religion and transgressed the rights of the sovereign. In this revised edition of Hobbes's classic work, A.P. Martinich improves Hobbes's punctuation for the sake of clarity. He has also added new notes for readers, extensive cross references, and substantial part of Hobbes's reply to Bramhall's The Catching of Leviathan.
For twenty-six years after his first mention of the character, J.M. Barrie worked on the story of Peter Pan as he appeared through different incarnations: the three-act play Peter Pan, or the Boy who Wouldn't Grow Up (1904), the illustrated novella Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), the Epilogue to the play An After Thought (1908), the full-length novel Peter and Wendy (1911), two short stories, and finally a longer version of the original play. This edition of Peter Pan includes not only the novel and revised play as they were first published, but also an earlier novella and the previously unpublished original play. Appendices include materials from Barrie's personal writings and contemporary reviews and illustrations.
Advocating equality, meritocracy, and social responsibility in plain language, Paine galvanized tens of thousands of readers and changed the framework of political discourse. He was tried and convicted for sedition by the British government for publishing the pamphlet, but his direct style and provocative ideas were hugely influential and continue to speak to modern readers. This edition situates Rights of Man within the discussion of the French Revolution in Britain and enables readers to understand the broader political debates of the 1790s. Appendices include responses to the French Revolution. Paine's response to the Proclamation that declared his writing seditious, contemporary political philosophy by Richard Price and Edmund Burke, and cartoon satirizing Paine.
Critically acclaimed as Kate Chopin's most influential work of fiction, The Awakening has assumed a place in the American literary canon. This new edition places the novel in the context of the cultural and regional influences that shape Chopin's narrative. With extensive contemporary readings that examine historical events, including the hurricanes that frequently disrupt life in Louisiana, this edition will contextualize The Awakening for a new generation of readers.
This revised Broadview Edition of Hobbes's classic work of political philosophy includes the full text of Part I (Of Man), Part II (Of Commonwealth), and the Review and Conclusion. The appendices, which set the work in its historical context, include a rich selection of contemporary responses to Leviathan. Also included are an introduction, explanatory notes, and a chronology of Hobbes's life.
This classic novel tells the story, in letters, of the beautiful and virtuous Clarissa Harlowe's pursuit by the brilliant, unscrupulous rake Robert Lovelace. The epistolary structure allows Richardson to create layered and fully realized characters, as well as an intriguing uncertainty about the reliability of the various narrators. Clarissa emerges as a heroine at once rational and passionate, self-sacrificing and defiant, and her story has gripped readers since the novel's first publication in 1747-1748. This new abridgment is designed to retain the novel's rich characterizations and relationships, and reproduces individual letters in their entirety whenever possible. This Broadview Edition provides a uniquely accessible entry point for readers, while retaining much of the powerful reading experience of the complete novel.
John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism is a philosophical defense of utilitarianism, a moral theory stating that right actions are those that tend to promote overall happiness. The essay first appeared as a series of articles published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861; the articles were collected and reprinted as a single book in 1863. Mill discusses utilitarianism in some of his other works, including On Liberty and The Subjection of Women, but Utilitarianism contains his only sustained defence of the theory. In this edition, Colin Heydt provides a substantial introduction that will enable readers to understand better the polemical context for Utilitarianism. Heydt shows, for example, how Mill's moral philosophy grew out of political engagement, rather than exclusively out of a speculative interest in determining the nature of morality. Appendices include precedents to Mill's work, reactions to Utilitarianism, and related writings by Mill.
Hamel, the Obeah Man is set against the backdrop of early nineteenth-century Jamaica, and tells the story of a slave rebellion planned in the ruins of a plantation. Though the novel is sympathetic to white slaveholders and hostile to anti-slavery missionaries, it presents a complex picture of the culture and resistance of the island's black majority. Hamel, the spiritual leader of the rebels, becomes more and more central to the story, and is a surprisingly powerful and ultimately ambiguous figure. This Broadview Edition includes a new foreword by acclaimed poet Kamau Brathwaite and a critical introduction by the editors. Extensive appendices include contemporary reviews of the novel, other authors' and travellers' descriptions of Jamaica, and historical documents related to slave insurrections and the debate over slavery.
The quintessential novel of sentiment, A Sentimental Journey masquerades as the fragmentary travel journal of Parson Yorick, a whimsical and amorous Englishman abroad. Accompanied through Paris and the provinces by his loyal French valet, Yorick enjoys a variety of sentimental and often comic encounters with a lively range of French characters. The novel is also punctuated by passages of self-conscious reflection on questions of personal and national identity, slavery and freedom, poverty and inequality. Appendices include material on sensibility in philosophy and literature and on eighteenth-century travel writing, as well as excerpts from Sterne's other writings and examples of the novel's critical reception, imitation, and illustration.
Edgar Allan Poe's only long fiction has provoked intense scholarly discussions about its meaning since its first publication. The novel relates the adventures of Pym after he stows away on a whaling ship, where he endures starvation, encounters with cannibals, a whirlpool, and finally a journey to an Antarctic sea. It draws on the conventions of travel writing and science fiction, and on Poe's own experiences at sea, but is ultimately in a category of its own. Appendices include virtually all of the contemporary sources of exploration and south polar navigation that Poe consulted and adapted to the narrative, together with reviews and notices of Pym and a sampling of responses to the novel from a wide array of authors, from Herman Melville to Jules Verne. Seven illustrations are also included.
Arthur Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel is both a detective story and an imperial romance. Ostensibly the story of Mary Morstan, a beautiful young woman enlisting the help of Holmes to find her vanished father and solve the mystery of her receipt of a perfect pearl on the same date each year, it gradually uncovers a tale of treachery and human greed. The action audaciously ranges from penal settlements on the Andaman Islands to the suburban comfort of South London, and from the opium-fuelled violence of Agra Fort during the Indian 'Mutiny' to the cocaine-induced contemplation of Holmes' own Baker Street.This Broadview Edition places Doyle's tale in the cultural, political, and social contexts of late nineteenth-century colonialism and imperialism. The appendices provide a wealth of relevant extracts from hard-to-find sources, including official reports, memoirs, newspaper editorials, and anthropological studies.
Depicting with shocking openness the sexual and political violence of its central characters' fates, Edward the Second broke new dramatic ground in English theatre. The play charts the tragic rise and fall of the medieval English monarch Edward the Second, his favourite Piers Gaveston, and their ambitious opponents Queen Isabella and Mortimer Jr., and is an important cultural, as well as dramatic, document of the early modern period. This modernized and fully annotated Broadview Edition is prefaced by a critical but student-oriented introduction and followed by ample appendix material, including extended selections from Marlowe's historical sources, texts bearing on the play's complex sexual and political dynamics, and excerpts from contemporary poet Michael Drayton's epic rendition of Edward the Second's reign.
In 1898, Henry James wrote a novella that would become one of the most famous and critically discussed ghost stories ever written, The Turn of the Screw. Three other examples of James's tales of the supernatural, The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, and The Jolly Corner, are included in this edition. These texts reveal on both the thematic and narrative levels James's deepest concerns as a writer. The texts in this edition are all drawn from the New York Edition of James's works. The introduction traces the extensive critical debate around The Turn of the Screw, and situates the texts in contemporary discussions of the supernatural. Appendices include material on the tales' reception, James's writings on the supernatural, and the study of the supernatural in the 19th century.
An important sensation novel, Cometh Up as a Flower made Rhoda Broughton's reputation and fortune while also attracting harsh criticism. Nell LeStrange, the heroine, is torn between duty to her family and her own passion. What angered critics of the time was the heroine's frank discussion of her sexual attraction to her lover, and her dispassionate evaluation of loveless marriage as a form of self-sale. Broughton's lively, colloquial narrative voice, witty observations of contemporary manners, and sympathetic portrayal of the lives and feelings of young women, though no longer shocking, are as engaging now as they were to her readers of 1867. This Broadview Edition includes an extensive selection of appendices on the novel's reception (including a parody of Broughton), Victorian discourses on health and medicine, and contemporary attitudes towards women, marriage, and sexuality.
Powerful and complex, this novel touches on issues of race, gender roles, and women's education in the late eighteenth century. Adeline Mowbray tells a story of desire, transgression, and remorse over the lives of a mother and daughter. As the subtitle suggests, this novel begins and ends with the relationship between Adeline and her intellectual, experimental mother, Editha, but encompasses almost every other human relationship in the long journey between their rift and their reconciliation. Pursued and exploited by the same two men, Editha and Adeline are estranged from each other by jealousy and deceit, but finally reunited. A critique of the treatment of women in eighteenth-century society, the novel was inspired in part by the partnership between the Romantic writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The appendices include contemporary reviews and material expanding on the novel's themes of colonialism, women's education, marriage, and the tension between feeling and reason. It is the only stand-alone edition available (see Competition). It is edited and comes with an excellent introduction by a well-known Romanticist.
In the late eighteenth century, Matthew Gregory Monk Lewis, a notorious author of lurid Gothic novels and plays, began to gather this collection of horror ballads. Including original and traditional works, translations and adaptations, and even burlesques of the Gothic, this hobgoblin repast, as Lewis called it, brings together a fascinating assortment of works. Contributors include Lewis, the young Walter Scott, William Taylor of Norwich, John Leyden, and Robert Southey. Appendices contain selections from Tales of Terror (1801), a text long intertwined with Lewis's collection; information on Scott's An Apology for Tales of Terror (1799); and parodies and reviews of Lewis's particular brand of Gothic poetry.
The Importance of Being Earnest marks a central moment in late-Victorian literature, not only for its wit but also for its role in the shift from a Victorian to a Modern consciousness. The play began its career as a biting satire directed at the very audience who received it so delightedly, but ended its initial run as a harbinger of Wilde's personal downfall when his lover's father, who would later bring about Wilde's arrest and imprisonment, attempted to disrupt the production. In addition to its focus on the textual history of the play, this Broadview Edition of Earnest provides a wide array of appendices. The edition locates Wilde's work among the artistic and cultural contexts of the late nineteenth century and will provide scholars, students, and general readers with an important sourcebook for the play and the social, creative, and critical contexts of mid-1890s English life.
Arguably the first work of science fiction in English, Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone was published in 1638, pseudonymously and posthumously. The novel, which tells the story of Domingo Gonsales, a Spaniard who flies to the moon by geese power and encounters an advanced lunar civilization, had an enormous impact on the European imagination for centuries after its initial publication. With its discussion of advanced ideas about astronomy and cosmology, the novel is an important example of both popular fiction and scientific speculation. This Broadview Edition includes a critical introduction that places the text in its scientific and historical contexts. The rich selection of appendices includes related writings by Godwin and his predecessors and contemporaries on magnetism, human flight, voyages to real and unreal lands, and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.
Anne Bronte's second and last novel was widely and contentiously reviewed upon its 1848 publication, in part because its subject matter domestic violence, alcoholism, women's rights, and universal salvation was so controversial. The tale unfolds through a series of letters between two friends as one man learns more about Helen Huntingdon and the past that brought this young painter and single mother to Wildfell Hall. Powerfully plotted and unconventionally structured, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is now considered to be a classic of Victorian literature. This Broadview Edition includes a critical introduction that situates the novel in significant Victorian debates, and provides appendices that make clear Bronte's intellectual inheritance from important eighteenth-century writers such as Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft. Material on temperance, education, childrearing, and nineteenth-century women artists is also included in the appendices.
Michael Field was the literary pseudonym of two women, Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913). The women were poets, playwrights, diarist, and lovers who lived and wrote together during the final decades of the nineteenth century up to World War I. Their arresting poetry has recently gained them a place in the canon, and their extensive engagement with other writers puts them at the centre of fin de siecle literary culture. This Broadview Edition offers selections from all published books of poetry by Michael Field, and a substantial section of transcriptions from largely unpublished manuscript letters and diaries that gives insight into the extraordinary life and work of the authors. A critical introduction, bibliography, and selection of contemporary reviews are also included.
A classic of science fiction and a dark meditation on Darwinian thought in the late Victorian period, The Island of Doctor Moreau explores the possibility of civilisation as a constraint imposed on savage human nature. The protagonist, Edward Prendick, finds himself stranded on an island with the notorious Doctor Moreau, whose experiments on the island's humans and animals result in unspeakable horrors. The critical introduction to this Broadview Edition gives particular emphasis to Wells's hostility towards religion as well as his thorough knowledge of the Darwinian thought of his time. Appendices provide passages from Darwin and Huxley related to Wells's early writing; in addition, excerpts from other writers illustrate late-nineteenth-century anxieties about social degeneration.
Long central to the canon of British Romantic literature, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads is a fascinating case study in the history of poetry, publishing, and authorship. This Broadview edition is the first to reprint both the 1798 and the 1800 editions of Lyrical Ballads in their entirety. In the appendices to this Broadview edition, reviews, correspondence, and a selection of contemporary verse and prose situate the work within the popular and experimental literature of its time, and allow readers to trace the work's transformations in response to the pressures of the literary marketplace.
Pompey the Little, the canine narrator of this story, is a uniquely observant and witty guide to eighteenth-century culture, both high and low. In the course of the novel Pompey is passed from owner to owner, offering a panoramic vision of English and European societies in the period. Written with sparkling irony, The History of Pompey is an important example of an it-narrative, or a narrative written from a non-human perspective; this genre allows the novelist to move between levels of society and to observe human behaviour from an outsider's perspective. The rich selection of historical documents in the appendices to this Broadview edition includes a similar narrative told by a cat, along with other writings on eighteenth-century attitudes towards animals.
The History of the Kings of Britain is arguably the most influential text written in England in the Middle Ages. The work narrates a linear history of pre-Saxon Britain, from its founding by Trojan exiles to the loss of native British (Celtic) sovereignty in the face of Germanic invaders. Along the way, Geoffrey introduces readers to such familiar figures as King Lear, Cymbeline, Vortigern, the prophet Merlin, and a host of others. Most importantly, he provides the first birth-to-death account of the life of King Arthur. His focus on that king's reign sparked the vogue for Arthurian romance throughout medieval Europe that has continued into the twenty-first century. This new translation is the first in over forty years and the first to be based on the Bern manuscript, now considered the authoritative Latin text. It is accompanied by an introduction that highlights the significance of Geoffrey's work in his own day and focuses in particular on the ambiguous status of the text between history and fiction. Appendices include historical sources, early responses to the History, and other medieval writings on King Arthur and Merlin.
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was the theatrical sensation of the London stage in 1893. It established Pinero as the leading English dramatist of serious social issues, and created a star out of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the title role. The play recounts the marriage of a woman with a past and how it fails because of the double standard of morality applied unequally and hypocritically by Victorian society to men and women. This Broadview edition includes a thoroughly revised text based on the author's manuscript, the prompt copy for the first production, and the published first edition; it also incorporates pertinent stage directions from the first production. The critical introduction examines all facets of the play and its production, and the appendices make accessible a wide variety of hard-to-find contemporary contextual materials related to the play.
Based on Leonora Sansay's eyewitness accounts of the final days of French rule in Saint Domingue (Haiti), Secret History is a vivid account of race warfare and domestic violence. Sansay's writing provocatively draws comparisons between Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution and the postrevolutionary United States, while fluidly combining qualities of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, colonial travel writing, and political analysis. Laura, Sansay's second novel, features as its protagonist a beautiful impoverished orphan who throws herself headlong into a secret marriage with a young medical student. When her husband dies in a duel in an effort to protect his wife's reputation, Laura finds herself once more alone in the world. The republication of these works will contribute to a significant revision of thinking about early American literary history. This Broadview edition offers a rich selection of contextual materials, including selections from periodical literature about Haiti, engravings, letters written by Sansay to her friend Aaron Burr, historical material related to the Burr trial for treason, and excerpts from literature referenced in the novels.
This classic novel, first published in 1860, tells the story of Maggie Tulliver. Intelligent and headstrong but trapped by the conventions of family tradition and rural life, Maggie is one of the great heroines of Victorian literature. Along with Maggie's story, the novel also tells a companion tale of the social pressures that restrict the vision of her beloved brother Tom. George Eliot's most autobiographical novel, The Mill on the Floss remains one of her most popular and influential works. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and extensive contextualizing notes as well as a broad range of appendices drawn from contemporary documents dealing with issues such as 19th-century views of disability, education, and the Woman Question.
The prize-winning entry in a national competition for distinctively Canadian fiction, Winona was serialised in a Montreal story paper in 1873. The novel focuses on the lives of two foster-sisters raised in the northern Ontario wilderness: Androsia Howard, daughter of a retired military officer, and Winona, the daughter of a Huron chief. As the story begins, both have come under the sway of the mysterious and powerful Andrew Farmer, who has proposed to Androsia while secretly pursuing Winona. With the arrival of Archie Frazer, the son of an old military friend, there is a violent crisis, and the scene shifts southward as Archie takes the foster-sisters via Toronto to his family's estate in the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River. Farmer follows, and the narrative moves towards a sensational climax. The critical introduction and appendices to this edition place Winona in the contexts of Crawford's career, the contemporary market for serialized fiction, the sensation novel of the 1860s, nineteenth-century representations of women and North American indigenous peoples, and the emergence of Canadian literary nationalism in the era following Confederation.
Vernon Lee writes in the Preface to Hauntings, My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts... of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own. First published in 1890, Lee's most famous volume of supernatural tales occupies a special place in the literature of the fantastic for its treatment of the femme fatale and the allure of the past, along with the themes of thwarted artistic creativity and psychological obsession. This collection, which includes the four stories originally published in Hauntings and three others, enables readers to consider Lee's work anew for its subtle redefinitions of gender and sexuality during the Victorian fin-de-siecle. The appendices, which include extensive excerpts from writings by Lee's predecessors and peers, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Lee's brother Eugene Lee-Hamilton, allow the reader to see how Lee takes on the themes and preoccupations of the late-Victorian period but adapts them to her own purposes.
As the inscription on his tombstone reveals, Wilkie Collins wanted to be remembered as the author of The Woman in White, for it was this novel that secured his reputation during his lifetime. The novel begins with a drawing teacher's eerie late-night encounter with a mysterious woman in white, and then follows his love for Laura Fairlie, a young woman who is falsely incarcerated in an asylum by her husband, Sir Percival Glyde, and his sinister accomplice, Count Fosco. This edition returns to the original text that galvanized England when it was published in serial form in All the Year Round magazine in 1860. Three different prefaces Collins wrote for the novel, as well as two of his essays on the book's composition, are reprinted, along with nine illustrations. The appendices include contemporary reviews, along with essays on lunacy, asylums, mesmerism, and the rights of women.
Oscar Wilde wrote of this novel, Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic. Reuben Sachs, the story of an extended Anglo-Jewish family in London, focuses on the relationship between two cousins, Reuben Sachs and Judith Quixano, and the tensions between their Jewish identities and English society. The novel's complex and sometimes satirical portrait of Anglo-Jewish life, which was in part a reaction to George Eliot's romanticized view of Victorian Jews in Daniel Deronda, caused controversy on its first publication. This Broadview edition prints for the first time since its initial publication in The Jewish Chronicle Levy's essay The Jew in Fiction. Other appendices include George Eliot's essay on anti-Jewish sentiment in Victorian England and a chapter from Israel Zangwill's novel The Children of the Ghetto. Also included is a map of Levy's London with landmarks from her biography and from the Jewish geography of Reuben Sachs.
Published just after the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Eikon Basilike is a defence of the king's motivations and actions prior to and during the British civil wars. Nine chapters of Eikonoklastes, John Milton's response to Eikon Basilike, are also included in this edition. Here Milton, writing from a republican perspective, attacks the substance and style of the King's Book. These fascinating texts are now available in an edition that also includes a rich selection of historical documents. This Broadview edition's critical introduction discusses the publication history and both seventeenth-century and current debates regarding the work and its authorship, while the appendices provide a generous selection of contemporary responses to Eikon Basilike and accounts of the king's trial and scaffold speech.
One of Bernard Shaw's early plays of social protest, Mrs Warren's Profession places the protagonist's decision to become a prostitute in the context of the appalling conditions for working class women in Victorian England. Faced with ill health, poverty, and marital servitude on the one hand, and opportunities for financial independence, dignity, and self-worth on the other, Kitty Warren follows her sister into a successful career in prostitution. Shaw's fierce social criticism in this play is driven not by conventional morality, but by anger at the hypocrisy that allows society to condemn prostitution while condoning the discrimination against women that makes prostitution inevitable. This Broadview edition includes a comprehensive historical and critical introduction; extracts from Shaw's prefaces to the play; Shaw's expurgations of the text; early reviews of the play in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain; and contemporary contextual documents on prostitution, incest, censorship, women's education, and the New Woman.
Three-Fingered Jack, the protagonist of this 1800 novel, is based on the escaped slave and Jamaican folk hero Jack Mansong, who was believed to have gained his strength from the Afro-Caribbean religion of obeah, or obi. His story, told in an inventive mix of styles, is a rousing and sympathetic account of an individual's attempt to combat slavery while defending family honour. Historically significant for its portrayal of a slave rebellion and of the practice of obeah, Obi is also a fast-paced and lively novel, blending religion, politics, and romance. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a selection of contemporary documents, including historical and literary treatments of obeah and accounts of an eighteenth-century slave rebellion.
Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, first published in 1785, is still one of the most widely read and influential works of moral philosophy. This Broadview edition combines a newly revised version of T.K. Abbott's respected translation with material crucial for placing the Groundwork in the context of Kant's broader moral thought. A varied selection of other ethical writings by Kant on subjects including our moral duties, fundamental principles of justice, the concept of happiness, and the relation of morality to religion are included, along with important criticisms of Kant's ethics by Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, and Sidgwick.
Nature and Art commands a central place in the history of the English Jacobin novel. Published in 1796, the story explores the opposition between the upbringing and actions of Henry Norwynne, an unspoiled child of nature who has been reared without books on an African island, and the corrupt conduct of his aristocratic older cousin, William. Inchbald was one of the best-known writers of her time, and Nature and Art represents her most concerted attempt to analyze the effects of education, power, and privilege on human behaviour. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction, contemporary reviews of the novel, and primary source material relating to the novel's composition and its philosophical influences (including documents by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin). Documents on education, political and religious corruption, and African colonization provide further historical context.
L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables is one of the best-known and most enduringly popular novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1908, it has never been out of print, and it continues, nearly a century after its first appearance, to appeal to new readers in many locations around the world. Anne of Green Gables is the story of how a little girl, adopted from an orphan asylum by a brother and sister seeking a boy to help them on their Prince Edward Island farm, grows to responsible young adulthood and, as she grows, brings light and life to her adoptive home. Although it is, as Montgomery described it in her journal, a simple little tale, it has nonetheless generated not only an international readership but, more recently, an increasing critical interest that focuses on the text's engagement with social and political issues, its relation to Montgomery's life and her other writing, and its circulation as a popular cultural commodity in Canada and elsewhere. This Broadview Edition is based on the first edition of Anne of Green Gables. It includes a critical introduction and a fascinating selection of contemporary documents, including contemporary reviews of the novel, other writings by L.M. Montgomery (stories, writings on gender and on writing), and excerpts from the Pansy books by Isabella Macdonald Alden.
Published in 1749, the story of Mrs. Teachum and the nine pupils who make up her little female academy is widely recognized as the first full-length novel for children, and the first to be aimed specifically at girls. The daily experiences of Mrs. Teachum's charges are interwoven with fables and fairy tales illustrating the book's underlying principles, which draw on contemporary theories of education and virtue. As central to the history of the novel as it is to the development of children's literature, The Governess is a pioneering work by one of the eighteenth century's most respected women writers. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction that places The Governess in its cultural and literary context; appendices include examples of eighteenth-century educational literature and selections from Fielding's correspondence.
The seemingly peaceful country village of Hayslope is the setting for this ambitious first novel by one of the nineteenth century's great novelists. With sympathy, wit, and unflinching realism, Adam Bede tells a story that would have been familiar to Eliot's first readers: the seduction of a pretty farm girl by the young squire of the district. Eliot uses this story, with its tragic implications, to explore the dangers of reliance on religious and social norms to govern destructive desires. As this edition demonstrates, Adam Bede addresses profound questions of morality, religion, and the role of women in society, while at the same time seeking to establish a new aesthetic for fiction. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a rich selection of appendices, including selections from Eliot's letters and journals, contemporary reviews of the novel, and accounts of the murder trial of Mary Voce, the woman whose story formed part of the inspiration for the novel.
Hawthorne's story of the disgraced Hester Prynne (who must wear a scarlet A as the mark of her adultery), of her illegitimate child, Pearl, and of the righteous minister Arthur Dimmesdale continues to resonate with modern readers. Set in mid-seventeenth-century Boston, this powerful tale of passion, Puritanism, and revenge is one of the foremost classics of American literature. This Broadview edition contains a selection of historical documents that include Hawthorne's writings on Puritanism, the historical sources of the story, and contemporary reviews of the novel. New to the second edition are an updated critical introduction and bibliography and, in the appendices, additional writings by Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry James, and William Dean Howells.
George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72) is one of the classic novels of English literature and was admired by Virginia Woolf as one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. The complex main plot and many subplots revolve around Dorothea Brooke, an ardent young woman, and her relationship to three men: Casaubon, a clergyman and scholar twice her age; Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor who shares Dorothea's enthusiasm for reform but whose flaws compromise his ambitions; and Will Ladislaw, a young man of mysterious origins, romantic temperament, and artistic inclinations. A female Bildungsroman and a study of character and society in the realistic mode pioneered by Balzac, Middlemarch is also an historical novel that offers a panorama of English society in an era of social reform and political agitation. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a rich selection of contextual materials, including contemporary reviews of the novel, other writings by George Eliot (essays, reviews, and criticism), and historical documents pertaining to medical reform, religious freedom, and the advent of the railroads.
The writings of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, are remarkable for their vivid depiction of the mores and mentality of seventeenth-century England. This edition includes all of Cavendish's Sociable Letters (1664), a collection of writings that comments on a wide range of aspects of seventeenth-century society, such as war and peace, science and medicine, English and Classical literatures, and social issues such as choosing a spouse, married life, infidelity, divorce, and the option of women not to marry. This Broadview edition includes: A critical introduction and a valuable selection of primary documents that situate Margaret Cavendish and Sociable Letters within the context of English letter writing and other early women writers. The appendices contain the letters Cavendish wrote during her courtship with William Cavendish; letters by two family members, Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and Christiana Cavendish; letters written by Aphra Behn, Dorothy Osborne, and Angel Day; and an essay by Francis Bacon.
Jane Austen's Emma (1816) tells the story of the coming of age of Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, who had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. Typical for the novel's time, Emma's transition to womanhood is accomplished through courtship-both of those around her and, ultimately, her own. As in other Austen works, education and courtship go hand in hand, and Emma's process of learning to relinquish the power of having her own way is also a process of falling in love. However, in Emma this classic plot is both complicated by and reflective of a collection of contemporary issues, assumptions, and anxieties that highlight just how political even the most conventional of courtship plots can be. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and an extensive collection of historical documents relating to the composition and reception of the novel, the social implications of England's shift from a rural agrarian to an urban industrial economy, the role of women in provincial society, and the contemporary preoccupation with health and the treatment of illness.
First published in 1799, George Walker's The Vagabond was an immediate popular success. Offering a vitriolic critique of post-Bastille Jacobinism and sansculotte-style mob rule, its true-to-life satirical portraits of many of the radical men and women who fought in the forefront of the British Revolution are nonetheless full of playful banter and farce. With swipes at Hume, Rousseau, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Paine; the French Revolution; and the ideas of the noble savage, natural virtue, liberty, equality, and romantic primitivism, The Vagabond offers a unique cross-section of 1790s radicalism. This Broadview edition contains a critical introduction and a wide selection of primary source materials that situate the novel in the context of the revolutionary debate of the 1790s. Appendices include contemporary reviews of the novel and excerpts from the writings of a variety of radicals and reactionaries engaged in the debate, such as Hume, Rousseau, Paine, Thelwall, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Burke, Playfair, Malthus, and Cobbett, among many others.
The Beetle (1897) tells the story of a fantastical creature, born of neither god nor man, with supernatural and hypnotic powers, who stalks British politician Paul Lessingham through fin de siecle London in search of vengeance for the defilement of a sacred tomb in Egypt. In imitation of various popular fiction genres of the late nineteenth century, Marsh unfolds a tale of terror, late imperial fears, and the return of the repressed, through which the crisis of late imperial Englishness is revealed. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a rich selection of historical documents that situate the novel within the contexts of fin de siecle London, England's interest and involvement in Egypt, the emergence of the New Woman, and contemporary theories of mesmerism and animal magnetism.
This collection of early works by Eliza Haywood includes the well-known novella Fantomina (1725) along with three other short, highly engaging Haywood works: The Tea-Table (1725), Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), and Love-Letters on All Occasions (1730). In these writings, Haywood arouses the vicarious experience of erotic love while exploring the ethical and social issues evoked by sexual passion. This Broadview edition includes an introduction that focuses on Haywood's life and career and on the status of prose fiction in the early eighteenth century. Also included are appendices of contextual materials from the period comprising writings by Haywood on female conduct, eighteenth-century pornography (from Venus in the Cloister), and a source text (Nahum Tate's A Present for the Ladies).
Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman originally appeared in serial form in the women's weekly The Lady's Pictorial. Like Hepworth Dixon herself, the novel's heroine Mary Erle is a woman writer struggling to make her living as a journalist in the 1880s. Forced by her father's sudden death to support herself, Mary Erle turns to writing three-penny-a-line fiction, works that (as her editor insists) must have a ball in the first volume, a picnic and a parting in the second, and an opportune death in the third. This Broadview edition's rich selection of historical documents helps contextualize The Story of a Modern Woman in relation to contemporary debates about the New Woman.
The Monk is the most sensational of Gothic novels. The main plot concerns Ambrosio, an abbot of irreproachable holiness, who is seduced by a woman (or perhaps a demon) disguised as a novice, and who goes on to sell his soul to the Devil. An extravagant blend of sex, death, politics, Satanism, and poetry, the work greatly appealed to the Marquis de Sade. The Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and appendices of historical materials that address the novel's literary sources (in English, German, and Greek literature), historical contexts (the French Revolution, slavery and abolition debates, sexuality), critical reception, and influence.
Lady Audley's Secret (1862) was one of the most widely read novels in the Victorian period. The novel exemplifies sensation fiction in featuring a beautiful criminal heroine, an amateur detective, blackmail, arson, violence, and plenty of suspenseful action. To its contemporary readers, it also offered the thrill of uncovering blackmail and criminal violence within the homes of the upper class. The novel makes trenchant critiques of Victorian gender roles and social stereotypes, and it creates significant sympathy for the heroine, despite her criminal acts, as she suffers from the injustices of the marriage market and rebels against them. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a broad selection of primary source material, including reproductions of the twenty-two woodcut illustrations from the London Journal serialization of the novel, extracts from two Victorian dramatizations of the work, satirical commentaries, and contemporary reviews.
Charles Darwin's On The Origin of Species, in which he writes of his theories of evolution by natural selection, is one of the most important works of scientific study ever published. This unabridged edition also includes a rich selection of primary source material: substantial selections from Darwin's other works (Autobiography, notebooks, letters, Voyage of the Beagle, and The Descent of Man) and selections from Darwin's sources and contemporaries (excerpts from Genesis, Paley, Lamarck, Spencer, Lyell, Malthus, Huxley, and Wallace).
Walsingham is both a lively story and a commentary by Mary Robinson on her society's constraints upon women. The novel follows the lives of two main characters, Walsingham Ainsforth and his cousin, Sir Sidney Aubrey, a girl who is passed off as a son by her mother so that she will become the family heir. Sidney, educated in France, returns to England as an adult and persistently sabotages Walsingham's love interests (having secretly fallen in love with him herself). Eventually, Sidney reveals her identity, and she and Walsingham declare their mutual love, wed, and share the family's estate. This Broadview edition includes a rich selection of primary sources material including contemporary reviews; historical and literary accounts of eighteenth-century female cross-dressers; and selections from contemporary works that focus on the figure of the fallen woman.
First accepted by a publisher in 1803, Northanger Abbey was eventually published posthumously in 1818. In it Austen weaves a romance full of suspense and comedy around the heroine Catherine Morland's first foray into society. The style of the novel is a unique hybrid; along the way Austen parodies the eighteenth-century novel of manners, the Gothic novel, and even the educational treatises of the time. The second Broadview edition includes a revised introduction, notes, bibliography, and expanded appendices of background contextual materials.
Robert Bage's Hermsprong satirizes English society of the 1790s targeting, in particular, corrupt clergymen, grasping lawyers and wicked aristocrats. The protagonist, a European raised among Native Americans, visits Europe and is dismayed by what he encounters. While such satire might seem conventional enough, Hermsprong is distinguished from other political novels of the period by its comedy, and it is a measure of Bage's success that he won the admiration of writers as different in political outlook as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sir Walter Scott. Indeed, Hermsprong is built around debate, and celebrates the pleasures of the lively exchange of ideas. This Broadview edition contains extensive primary source appendices including material by William Godwin, Benjamin Franklin, Pierre de Charlevoix, and Voltaire.
Set in seventeenth-century India, The Missionary focuses on the relationship between Hilarion, a Portuguese missionary to India, and Luxima, an Indian prophetess. Both are aristocratic, devoted to their religions, bound by vows of chastity, and begin the novel biased against other cultures. This Broadview Literary Texts edition also includes extensive primary source appendices that situate the novel in relation to Irish, Portuguese and Indian history, as well as to the literature of sensibility and travel writing.
Elizabeth Bennet is Austen's most liberated and unambiguously appealing heroine, and Pride and Prejudice has remained over most of the past two centuries Austen's most popular novel. The story turns on the marriage prospects of the five daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet: Elizabeth forms a prejudice against the proud and distant Mr. Darcy; Darcy's charming friend Charles Bingley falls in love with her sister Jane; and the handsome officer George Wickham forms attachments successively to Elizabeth and to her sister Lydia. Irvine's extensive introduction sets the novel in the context of the literary and intellectual history of the period, and deals with such crucial background issues as early-nineteenth century class relations in Britain, and female exclusion from property and power. The appendices present an unrivaled selection of background contextual documents.
At her death in 1825, Anna Letitia Barbauld was considered one of the great writers of her time. Distinguished as a poet and essayist, she was also in innovator in children's literature, an eloquent supporter of liberal politics, and a literary critic of stature. This edition includes a generous selection of her poetry and the first comprehensive body of her prose in more than a century, with essays-some never before reprinted-on literature, religion, education, prejudice, women's fashions, and class conflict.
Desmond is a political novel about the French Revolution. It is Charlotte Smith's only epistolary work, and it is her most politically radical piece. Written in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Smith's Desmond fuses political discussion with romance, social satire and a suspenseful plot revolving around a liberal hero desperately in love with a woman who is married to a drunken anti-revolutionary. Whereas Burke represented the French Revolution as a sentimental drama, Smith draws out the parallel between political and domestic tyranny to show how the disenfranchisement of British women under eighteenth-century common law resembled the political tyranny of the French absolutist monarchy.
Mansfield Park is Austen's darkest, and most complex novel. In contrast to the confident and vivacious heroines of Emma and Pride and Prejudice, its central character, Fanny Price, is a shy and vulnerable poor relation who finds the courage to stand up for her principles and desires. Fanny comes to live at Mansfield Park, the home of the wealthy Bertram family, and of Fanny's aunt, Lady Bertram. Though the family impresses upon Fanny her inferior status, she finds a friend in Edmund, the younger brother.Mansfield Park explores important issues such as slavery (the source of the Bertrams' wealth), the oppressive nature of idealized femininity, and women's education. This edition sheds light on these and other issues through its insightful introduction and wide-ranging appendices of contemporary documents.
Wells was interested in the implications of evolutionary theory on the future of human beings at the biological, sociological, and cultural levels, and The Time Machine, short and readable, draws on many of the social and scientific debates of the time. The Broadview edition of this science fiction classic includes extensive materials on Wells's scientific and political influences.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself was the first work that influenced the nineteenth-century genre of slave narrative autobiographies. Written and published by Equiano, a former slave, it became a prototype for those that followed. Kidnapped in Africa as a child, Equiano was transported to the Caribbean and then to Virginia, bought by a Quaker shipowner, and placed in service at sea. Aboard various American and British ships, he sailed throughout the world, and he continued to do so after having purchased his freedom in 1766. Once settled in London, he fought tirelessly to end slavery. This edition of Equiano's Narrative places the text in the center of abolitionist activity in the late eighteenth century. Equiano knew many of the leading abolitionist figures of his time, and this edition allows readers to trace the common ideas and cross-influences in the works of the political and literary figures who fought for the end of slavery in America and England. The original 1789 text of the narrative has been used for the Broadview edition with Equiano's subsequent emendations included in the appendices.
Jane Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, is a witty satire of the sentimental novel, a popular genre in Britain throughout the 1790s and the Regency. When it first appeared in 1811, the words in its title carried significant cultural weight beyond the confines of the novel, and into both popular and learned discourse. Through her dual heroines, Austen addresses, and satirizes, notions of sense and sensibility, and engages with the issues of inheritance, marriage, and love. The story concerns two sisters: the level-headed Elinor and the passionate and impulsive Marianne. When their father dies, his son by a previous marriage assumes possession of the family home. Marianne and Elinor, left to the care of their mercenary brother John and his wife Fanny, must remove to a cottage with their mother. Each sister meets a man in whom she is interested, and as with other Austen novels, requited love does not come easily. This newly annotated edition offers a thorough and perceptive introduction and a wide range of carefully selected contextual materials that further explore the term sensibility.
The Woman of Colour is a unique literary account of a black heiress' life immediately after the abolition of the British slave trade. Olivia Fairfield, the biracial heroine and orphaned daughter of a slaveholder, must travel from Jamaica to England, and as a condition of her father's will either marry her Caucasian first cousin or become dependent on his mercenary elder brother and sister-in-law. As Olivia decides between these two conflicting possibilities, her letters recount her impressions of Britain and its inhabitants as only a black woman could record them. She gives scathing descriptions of London, Bristol, and the British, as well as progressive critiques of race, racism, and slavery. The narrative follows her life from the heights of her arranged marriage to its swift descent into annulment and destitution, only to culminate in her resurrection as a self-proclaimed widow who flouts the conventional marriage plot. The appendices, which include contemporary reviews of the novel, historical documents on race and inheritance in Jamaica, and examples of other women of colour in early British prose fiction, will further inspire readers to rethink issues of race, gender, class, and empire from an African woman's perspective.
Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was on of the most successful writers of her time; indeed, the two most popular English novels in the early eighteenth-century were Robinson Crusoe and Haywood's first novel, Love in Excess. As this edition enables modern readers to discover, its enormous success is easy to understand. Love in Excess is a well crafted novel in which the claims of love and ambition are pursued through multiple storylines until the heroine engineers a melodramatic conclusion. Haywood's frankness about female sexuality may explain the later neglect of Love in Excess. (In contrast, her accomplished domestic novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, has remained available.) Love in Excess and its reception provide a lively and valuable record of the challenge that female desire posed to social decorum. For the second Broadview edition, the appendix of eighteenth-century responses to Haywood has been considerably expanded.
Baillie's eminently readable dramas stand at the crossroads of the Scottish Enlightenment and early Romanticism, and compellingly engage with questions of women's rights. Her exploration of the passions, first published in 1798, is here reissued with a wealth of contextual materials including The Introductory Discourse, Baillie's own brand of feminist literary criticism. The three plays included here are Count Basil: A Tragedy, and The Tryal: A Comedy, which show love from opposing perspectives; and De Monfort: A Tragedy, which explores the drama of hate. Among other appendices, the Broadview edition includes materials on the contemporary philosophical understanding of the passions, and contemporary reviews. Baillie's work is enjoying a revival of interest. She lived a long life, (1762-1851), and had a wide circle of literary friends including Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott (who termed her a female Shakespeare ). Scottish born, she moved to England in her twenties where she then resided. Her Plays on the Passions, alternatively known as A Series of Plays in which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind-Each Passion being the Subject of a Tragedy and Comedy was produced in three volumes between 1798 and 1812. The first volume created quite a stir amongst the literary circles of London and Edinburgh when introduced anonymously. The speculation into the authorship concluded two years later when Baillie came forward as the writer of the collection, thereby causing a subsequent sensation since no one had considered the shy spinster a candidate in the mystery.
The reputation of Frances Burney (1752-1840) was largely established with her first novel, Evelina. Published anonymously in 1778, it is an epistolary account of a sheltered young woman's entrance into society and her experience of family. Its comedy ranges from the violent practical joking reminiscent of Smollett's fiction to witty repartee that influenced Austen. The Broadview edition is based on the second edition of the novel (1779), which incorporates Burney's revisions and corrections. Its appendices include contemporary reviews of Evelina as well as eighteenth-century works on the family and on comedy
Intrigue, investigations, thievery, drugs and murder all make an appearance in Collins's classic who-done-it, The Moonstone. Published in serial form in 1868, it was inspired in part by a spectacular murder case widely reported in the early 1860s. Collins's story revolves around a diamond stolen from a Hindu holy place. On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder receives the diamond, but by the following morning the stone has been stolen again. As the story unravels through multiple eyewitness accounts, the elderly Sergeant Cuff-with a face sharp as a hatchet -looks for the culprit. One of Collins's best-loved novels, with an exciting plot moved along by deftly-drawn characters and elegant pacing, The Moonstone was also turned into a play by Collins; the play appears as an appendix to this edition.
Mill predicted that [t]he Liberty is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written...because the conjunction of [Harriet Taylor's] mind with mine has rendered it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to bring out in ever greater relief. Indeed, On Liberty is one of the most influential books ever written, and remains a foundational document for the understanding of vital political, philosophical and social issues. In addition to its many useful appendices, this new edition includes a chronology, bibliography, and a substantial introduction which outlines Mill's life and works, and sets this central work of 1859 in the context of both his own intellectual development and of the play of ideas and political forces in Victorian society. Please note: Broadview offers two separate editions of On Liberty. The Kahn edition is particularly relevant to readers who are interested in how the work is situated in the history of political philosophy, whereas the Alexander edition is recommended to those most interested in the work's Victorian literary and social contexts.
The story of Marlow travelling upriver in central Africa to find Kurtz, an ivory agent as consumed by the horror of human life as he is by physical illness, has long been considered a classic, and continues to be widely read and studied. This edition, edited by one of the leading figures in `the Conrad controversy,' includes an introduction and explanatory notes, as well as a fascinating variety of contemporary documents that help to set this extraordinary work in the context of the period from which it emerged. The introduction and bibliography have been updated, and two new appendices have been added; the second of these is a selection of Alice Harris's extraordinary but little-known photographs documenting the horrors of colonialism in turn-of-the-century Congo.
In The Pool in the Desert, first published in 1903, Sara Jeannette Duncan explores the impact of isolation on the small British communities of Victorian India. In the four stories collected here- The Pool in the Desert, A Mother in India, An Impossible Ideal, and The Hesitation of Miss Anderson -Duncan's women have certain freedoms living amidst the reaches of Empire, but they also must negotiate their way through a landscape dominated by the constraints of small military societies. The stories that result combine a delicacy of manners and movement that recalls Henry James, with a wit and sharp eye for small town foibles that bring Stephen Leacock to mind.
Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is one of the most important and neglected works advocating the establishment of women's academies. Its reception was so controversial that Astell responded with a lengthy sequel, also in this volume. The cause of great notoriety, Astell's Proposal was imitated by Defoe in his An Academy for Women, parodied in the Tatler, satirized on the stage, plagiarized by Bishop Berkeley, and later mocked by Gilbert and Sullivan in Princess Ida.
When Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure appeared in 1895, it immediately caused scandal and controversy. Its frank treatment of Jude's sexual relationships with Arabella and Sue, its scathing criticisms of late-Victorian hypocrisy, its depiction of the New Woman, and its attacks on holy wedlock and religious bigotry outraged numerous reviewers; one called the book Jude the Obscene. Others saw it as brilliantly progressive in its ideas and techniques. Vivid and complex, satiric and harrowing, this novel marked the culmination of Hardy's development as a leading novelist of the cultural transition from the Victorian to the Modernist era. The Broadview edition restores the original, controversial 1895 text.
Imre is one of the first openly gay American novels with a happy ending. Described by the author as a little psychological romance, the narrative follows two men who meet by chance in a cafe; in Budapest, where they forge a friendship that leads to a series of mutual revelations and gradual disclosures. With its sympathetic characterizations of homosexual men, Imre's 1906 publication marked a turning point in English literature. This edition includes material relating to the novels origins, contemporary writings on homosexuality, other writings by Prime-Stevenson, and a contemporary review.
When first published, King Solomon's Mines (1885) was an enormous popular success. The narrative follows the explorations of Allan Quatermain, a fortune hunter who travels to Africa in search of ancient treasures and a lost fellow explorer. Written as an adventure story, the novel is also a late-Victorian imperial romance that illuminates the politics of British imperialist capitalism in 1870s and 1880s South Africa. This edition includes contemporary reviews, other writings by Haggard on Africa and romance, and documents focusing on imperialism and diamond mining in late nineteenth-century South Africa.
Augusta Webster was very widely praised in her own time-Christina Rossetti thought her by far the most formidable woman poet. Her work has again come into favour, so much so that Isobel Armstrong and her co-editors of the influential anthology, Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, declare that there can be no doubt that Augusta Webster ranks as one of the great Victorian poets. This collection is the first edition of Webster's poems since 1895. It is a selection of her best work, emphasizing her powerful dramatic monologues and including a substantial number of her lyrics. With an introduction and background documents that highlight the distinctiveness of her work, this edition will help to re-establish Augusta Webster as a major figure of nineteenth-century English literature.
Jane Eyre, the story of a young girl and her passage into adulthood, was an immediate commercial success at the time of its original publication in 1847. Its representation of the underside of domestic life and the hypocrisy behind religious enthusiasm drew both praise and bitter criticism, while Charlotte Bronte's striking expose of poor living conditions for children in charity schools as well as her poignant portrayal of the limitations faced by women who worked as governesses sparked great controversy and social debate. Jane Eyre, Bronte's best-known novel, remains an extraordinary coming-of-age narrative, and one of the great classics of literature.
Felicia Hemans was the most widely read woman poet in the nineteenth-century English-speaking world. Broadview's edition shows why she was one of the few standard poets to be found in middle-class homes on both sides of the Atlantic, despite being routinely disparaged as a merely feminine poet. Included here is poetry representative of her entire career, from often-anthologized works, such as The Homes of England and Casabianca, to several long poems in their entirety, such as The Forest Sanctuary. Also included are selections of her prose and letters, a comprehensive introduction, and selections of views and reviews showing her changing and controversial place in culture into the twentieth century. All selections are edited, annotated, and introduced.
Mary Hays was an outspoken Radical intellectual in the turbulent decade of the 1790's. She argued vehemently for the need to recognise the moral and rational qualities of women, the necessity of a better system of education for girls, and the importance of giving women without fortunes a career without 'servitude in prostitution.' The Victim of Prejudice-Hays' second novel, first published in 1799-is a powerful indictment of man-made institutions such as the courts and legislative systems which favour persons of wealth and rank. In the novel the metaphor of women's confinement becomes real as the heroine's worst nightmares, her horrors and sense of helplessness become a physical reality. The Victim of Prejudice is of great interest for its strong feminist content, and it is both powerful and moving as a literary work; this edition makes this important late eighteenth-century text again available to a wide readership.
Originally published in 1823, Valperga is probably Mary Shelley's most neglected novel. Set in 14th-century Italy, it represents a merging of historical romance and the literature of sentiment. Incorporating intriguing feminist elements, this absorbing novel shows Shelley as a complex and intellectually astute thinker.
For her last novel's plot, Austen returns to the tensions of inheritance; but the once satisfactory solution-security on a landed estate-no longer applies. Here, Anne, the unappreciated middle daughter of the Elliots, has new choices to make, between the customs and traditions in which she was brought up and the excitement of the unknown.
Originally published in serial form from December 1860 to August 1861, Great Expectations is the `autobiography' of Pip, as he transformed from apprentice village blacksmith to a London gentleman. Unlike many of Dickens's earlier works, the novel is not so much a protest against social evils as a sustained meditation upon the process of social reform in Victorian England. It is this which gives such importance to the book's handling of the theme of the gentleman, a theme central both to Dickens's society and to his own life story.
In Oscar Wilde's famous novel, Dorian Gray is tempted by Henry Wotton to sell his soul in order to hold on to beauty and youth. Dorian succumbs and murders the portrait painter Basil Haliward, who stands between him and his goal. Though in the end vice is punished and virtue rewarded, the novel remains one of the most important expressions of fin de siecle decadence. It is in the preface to the expanded edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray that Wilde coined the most famous expression of his aesthetic: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly-written. That is all. Like other Broadview Editions, this edition includes a wide range of materials from the period that help to set the text in context. In particular, the editor locates the text both in relation to elements in the mainstream culture of the day (such as the aesthetes); and in relation to the gay subculture.
To borrow a phrase used by one of the characters in the novel, Dracula is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. In her introduction to this edition Glennis Byron first discusses the famous novel as an expression not of universal fears and desires, but of specifically late nineteenth-century concerns. And she discusses too the ways in which to the modern reader it is not Transylvania but London that is the location of the monstrosity in Dracula.The many appendices include contemporary reviews; source materials drawn on by Stoker; documents expressing contemporary views on trances, sleepwalking and hypnotism; and other relevant writing by Stoker, including the censorship of Fiction, in which he expresses his belief in the need to defend the social and moral purity of the nation.
Prolific even by eighteenth-century standards, Eliza Haywood was the author of more than eighty titles, including short fiction, novels, periodicals, plays, poetry, and a political pamphlet for which she was briefly jailed. From her early successes (most notably Love in Excess) to later novels such as Betsy Thoughtless (her best known work) she remained widely read, yet sneered at as a 'stupid, infamous, scribbling woman' by the likes of Swift and Pope. Betsy Thoughtless is the story of the slow metamorphosis of the heroine from thoughtless coquette to thoughtful wife. Ironically, the most decisive moment in this development may be when Betsy decides to leave her emotionally abusive and financially punishing husband; it is only after experiencing independence that she returns to her marriage and to what becomes her husbands deathbed. Betsy Thoughtless may be the first real novel of female development in English. In this edition the text is accompanied by appendices, including writings from the period that shed light on Haywood's life and work, and on her relationship with contemporaries such as Henry Fielding.
The protagonist of Charlotte Dacre's best known novel, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) is unique in women's Gothic and Romantic literature, and has more in common with the heroines of Sade or M.G. Lewis than with those of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith or Jane Austen. No heroine of Radcliffe or Austen could exult, as Victoria does in this novel, that there is certainly a pleasure...in the infliction of prolonged torment. The sexual desires and ambition of Dacre's protagonist, Victoria, drive her to seduce, torture and murder. Victoria is inspired to greater criminal and illicit acts by a seductive Lucifer, disguised as a Moor, before she too is plunged into an abyss by her demon lover. The text's unusual evocations of the female body and feminine subject are of particular interest in the context of the history of sexuality and of the body; after embarking on a series of violent crimes, Victoria's body actually begins to grow stronger and decidedly more masculine. Among the documents included as appendices to this volume are a selection of Dacre's poetry and excerpts from Bienville's Nymphomania, a medical treatise of the time aimed at a lay audience that focuses largely on the dangerous powers of women's imagination; inspired by improper novels, it is alleged that women may plunge into madness, violence and death-much as does the protagonist of Zofloya herself.
Beset by jealousy over an admirer of his wife's, Lord Lodore has come with his daughter Ethel to the American wilderness; his wife Cornelia, meanwhile, has remained with her controlling mother in England. When he finally brings himself to attempt a return, Lodore is killed en route in a duel. Ethel does return to England, and the rest of the book tells the story of her marriage to the troubled and impoverished Villiers (whom she stands by through a variety of tribulations) and her long journey to a reconciliation with her mother. Lodore's scope of character and of idea is matched by its narrative range and variety of setting; the novel's highly dramatic story-line moves at different points to Italy, to Illinois, and to Niagara Falls. And in this edition, which includes a wealth of documents from the period, the reader is provided with a sense of the full context out of which Shelley's achievement emerged.
Wilkie Collins's later novels are often as concerned with social issues as they are with simple storytelling-but as more and more critics are suggesting, the best of them are as readable and thought-provoking today as they were when they first appeared. Of none is this more true than of his 1883 novel Heart and Science, which Collins himself placed alongside his masterpiece The Woman in White. Heart and Science turns on the fate of the orphaned Carmina Graywell, who is left in the charge of her aunt and guardian Mrs. Gallilee when her fiance is forced to take an extended trip to Canada's drier climes in order to recover his health. Over the issue of her inheritance Mrs. Gallilee schemes to manipulate, control and ultimately destroy the naive but strong-willed Carmina. The story is complicated by the machinations of Dr. Benjulia, a dark genius whose passionate devotion to the study of diseases of the brain leads him to encourage the progress of Carmina's life-threatening brain illness for the sake of scientific observation; the narrative builds to a pair of spectacularly lurid climactic scenes. Collin's novel tackles the debate over what he termed `the hideous secrets of Vivisection' with a passionate intensity aroused in large part by the sensational 1880s case of a doctor who was acquitted on charges laid under the new Cruelty to Animals Act of having practiced live experimentation on animals without a license. Excerpts from a contemporary account of this trial, together with other documents relating to the vivisectionist controversy and a variety of contemporary reviews of the book, are included among the appendices of this volume. The edition also includes a full introduction, chronology, explanatory notes and a note on the text. Heart and Science's story of the struggle between strong-willed women will strike chords of sympathetic understanding with modern readers-as will its vivisectionist theme, with it's clear parallels to the animal welfare/ animal rights debates of today.
Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society here is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love, of Sissy the circus girl with love to spare who is deserted and adopted into their family, and of the honest mill worker Stephen Blackpool and the bombastic mill owner Josiah Bounderby. The key contrasts created are finally less those between wealth and poverty, or capitalists and workers, than those between the head and the heart, between Fact -the cold, rationalistic approach to life that Dickens associates with utilitarianism-and Fancy -a warmth of the imagination and of the feelings, which values individuals above ideas. Concentrated and compressed in its narrative form, Hard Times is at once a fable, a novel of ideas, and a social novel that seeks to engage directly and analytically with political issues. The central conflicts raised in the text, between government's duty not to intervene to guarantee the liberty of the subject, and between quantitative and qualitative assessments of progress, remain unresolved today in the late or post industrial stages of liberal democracies.
In 1906, two years after the appearance of her best-known novel, The Imperialist, Duncan published its darker twin, an Anglo-Indian novel which returns to political themes but with a deeper and more clinical irony than in her previous work. Set in Authority is about illusions: the imperial illusions of those who rule and are ruled; the illusions of families about their members; the illusions of men and women about each other. The setting moves between the political drawing rooms of London and the English station at Pilaghur in the province of Ghoom, where the murder of a native by an English soldier changes the lives of a cast of ruthlessly observed characters. Duncan, who grew up in Ontario, led a remarkably varied life, working as a political correspondent (writing for the Washington Post, the Toronto Globe and the Montreal Star) and living in India for over twenty years. She is increasingly being regarded as deserving of a place among the first rank of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelists; the re-publication of Set in Authority will do nothing to dispel that view.
In 1750 at the age of twenty-seven Sarah Scott published her first novel, a conventional romance. A year later she left her husband after only a few months of marriage and devoted herself thereafter to writing and to promoting such causes as the creation of secular and separatist female communities. This revolutionary concept was given flesh in Millenium Hall, first published in 1762 and generally thought to be the finest of her six novels. The text may be seen as the manifesto of the 'bluestocking' movement-the protean feminism that arose under eighteenth-century gentry capitalism (originating in 1750, largely under the impetus of Scott's sister Elizabeth Montagu), and that rejected a world which early feminists saw symbolized in the black silk stockings demanded by formal society. It is a comment on Western society as well as on the strengths of Scott's novel that the message of Millenium Hall continues to resonate strongly more than two centuries later.
Though critics and literary historians have always had to admit that Susanna Centlivre's comedies were extremely popular, they have tended to devote themselves to a search for evidence in them of supposed deficiencies of 'the female pen,' and to pay as much attention to the playwright's marriages and amorous liasons than to the plays themselves. Only in recent years has Centlivre come to be recognized quite straightforwardly as on of the most brilliant playwrights of her time. A Bold Stroke for a Wife is perhaps the finest example of Centlivre's masterful plotting of comic intrigue. The soldier Fainwell and Anne Lovely are in love, but their path to the altar is blocked by her guardians, each of whom has a different view of what sort of husband would make the right match. Fainwell resorts to disguises of social types. The play thus provides a wide range of opportunity for Centlivre to satirize Tory respectability, religious propriety and capitalist speculative greed-and to give voice to tolerance: 'tis liberty of choice that sweetens life.' Yet in the end it is Centlivre's comic muse that gives enduring life to the play as one of the most entertaining of eighteenth-century comedies.
Original text along with facing-page translation.The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the greatest classics of English literature, but one of the least accessible to most twentieth-century readers. Written in an obscure dialect, it is far more difficult to digest in the original than are most other late medieval English works. Yet any translation is bound to lose much of the flavour of the original. This edition of the poem offers the original text together with a facing-page translation. With the alliterative Middle English before the reader, James Winny provides a non-alliterative and sensitively literal rendering in modern English. This edition also provides an introduction, explanatory and textual notes, a further note on some words that present particular difficulties, and, in the appendices, two contemporary stories, The Feast of Bricriu and The Knight of the Sword, which provide insight on the poem.
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