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A man ...is so in the way in the house!' A vivid and affectionate portrait of a provincial town in early Victorian England, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford describes a community dominated by its independent and refined women. Undaunted by poverty, but d ismayed by changes brought by the railway and by new commercial practices, the ladies of Cranford respond to disruption with both suspicion and courage. Miss Matty and her sister Deborah uphold standards and survive personal tragedy and everyday dram as; innovation may bring loss, but it also brings growth, and welcome freedoms. Cranford suggests that representatives of different and apparently hostile social worlds, their minds opened by sympathy and suffering, can learn from each other. Its soc ial comedy develops into a study of generous reconciliation, of a kind that will value the past as it actively shapes the future. This edition includes two related short pieces by Gaskell, 'The Last Generation in England' and 'The Cage at Cranford', as well as a selection from the diverse literary and social contexts in which the Cranford tales take their place.

'Therefore this terror and darkness of the mind Not by the sun's rays, nor the bright shafts of day, Must be dispersed, as is most necessary, But by the face of nature and her laws.' Lucretius' poem On the Nature of the Universe combines a scientific and philosophical treatise with some of the greatest poetry ever written. With intense moral fervour Lucretius demonstrates to humanity that in death there is nothing to fear since the soul is mortal, and the world and everything in it is governed not by the gods, but by the mechanical laws of nature. By believing this, men can live in peace of mind and happiness. Lucretius bases his argument on the atomic theory expounded by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. His poem explores sensation, sex, cosmology, meteorology, and geology through acute observation of the beauties of the natural world and with moving sympathy for man's place in it. Sir Ronald Melville's accessible and accurate verse translation is complemented by an introduction and notes situating Lucretius' scientific theories within the thought of 1st century BCE Rome and discussing the Epicurean philosophy that was his inspiration and why the issues Lucretius' poem raisies about the scientific and poetical views of the world continue to be important.

'I beg as soon as you get Fielding's Joseph Andrews, I fear in Ridicule of your Pamela and of Virtue in the Notion of Don Quixote's Manner, you would send it to me by the very first Coach.' (George Cheyne in a letter to Samuel Richardson, February 1742) Both Joseph Andrews (1742) and Shamela (1741) were prompted by the success of Richardson's Pamela (1740), of which Shamela is a splendidly bawdy parody. But in Shamela Fielding also demonstrates his concern for the corruption of contemporary society, politics, religion, morality, and taste. The same themes - together with a presentation of love as charity, as friendship, and in its sexual taste - are present in Joseph Andrews, Fielding's first novel. It is a work of considerable literary sophistication and satirical verve, but its appeal lies also in its spirit of comic affirmation, epitomized in the celebrated character of Parson Adams. This revised and expanded edition follows the text of Joseph Andrews established by Martin C. Battestin for the definitive Wesleyan Edition of Fielding's works. The text of Shamela is based on the first edition, and two substantial appendices reprint the preliminary matter from Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero and the second edition of Richardson's Pamela (both closely parodied in Shamela). A new introduction by Thomas Keymer situates Fielding's works in their critical and historical contexts.

The fourth of Trollope's Palliser novels, this text tells the story of Phineas Redux, who returns to politics only to find that a series of quarrels hamper his progress. The beautiful and enigmatic Madame Max Goesler, familiar from earlier political novels, plays her part in this tale.

The Virginian (1902) is Owen Wister's classic popular romance, and the most significant shaping influence on cowboy fiction. Its narrator, fresh from the East, encounters in Wyoming cattle country a strange, seductive and often violent land where the handsome figure of the Virginian battles for supremacy with Trampas and other ne'er-do-wells. His courtship of the genteel Vermont schoolteacher, Molly Wood, is a humourously observed battle of the sexes, demonstrating that the 'customs of the country' must eventually prevail. Rich in vernacular wit and portraying a romanticized escape from the decorum of the patrician East, The Virginian exudes a sense of redemptive possibility, drawing on Wister's experience of a summer spent on a Wyoming ranch in 1895. This edition includes Wister's neglected essay, 'The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher' (1895), a revealing companion to a novel that has disturbing undercurrents.

Every man of humanity must wish that slavery, even in its best and most mitigated form, had never found a legal sanction, and must regret that its system is now so incorporated with the welfare of Great Britain as well as of Jamaica, as to make its extirpation an absolute impossibilitiy, without the certainty of producing worse mischiefs than the one which we annihilate. Matthew Lewis is best remembered as the author of the sensational Gothic novel The Monk (1796). He was also a slave-owner, inheriting two large plantations and visiting Jamaica twice in 1815-16 and 1817-18, primarily to investigate the living and working conditions of his slaves. His anecdotal record, the Journal of a West India Proprietor, was not published until 1834, nearly twenty years after his death from yellow fever on the second return voyage. Warmly praised by Coleridge, the Journal's vivid descriptions and lively, self-deprecating tone make it one of the most readable accounts from a slave-owners perspective of plantation life. Yet, although Lewis emerges as a humane and enthusiastic chronicler, his omissions are as significant as the carnivalesque vignettes he sketches, and, for all his geniality, he is unable to break through the framework of imperialist discourse. Situated between the eradication of slavery under British imperialism in 1807 and emancipation in 1834-1838, the Journal of a West India Proprietor records a colonial encounter, between slave-holder and slaves, at a significant historical moment. This unique edition provides full contextual background and includes Lewis's verse narrative The Isle of Devils, as well as a telling last letter and extract from his papers.

She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.' Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century american writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. When her most famous story, The Awakening, was first published in 1899, it stunned readers with its frank portrayal of the inner word of Edna Pontellier, and its daring criticisms of the limits of marriage and motherhood. The subtle beauty of her writing was contrasted with her unwomanly and sordid subject-matter: Edna's rejection of her domestic role, and her passionate quest for spiritual, sexual, and artistic freedom. From her first stories, Chopin was interested in independent characters who challenged convention. This selection, freshly edited form the first printing of each text, enables readers to follow her unfolding career as she experimented with a broad range of writing, from tales for children to decadent fin-de siecle sketches. The Awakening is set alongside thirty-two short stories, illustrating the spectrum of the fiction from her first published stories to her 1898 secret masterpiece, 'The Storm'.

Macabre and melodramtic, set in haunted castles or fantastic landscapes, Gothic tales became fashionable in the late eighteenth century with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Crammed with catastrophe, terror, and ghostly interventions, the novel was an immediate success, and influenced numerous followers. These include William Beckford's Vathek (1786), which alternates grotesque comedy with scenes of exotic magnificence in the story of the ruthless Caliph Vathek's journey to damation. The Monk (1796), by Matthew Lewis, is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest, set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid. Frankenstein (1818, 1831) is Mary Shelley's disturbing and perennially popular tale of young student who learns the secret of giving life to a creature made from human relics, with horrific consequences. This collection illustrates the range and the attraction of the Gothic novel. Extreme and sensational, each of the four printed here is also a powerful psychological story of isolation and monomania.

Alcestis * Heracles * Children of Heracles * Cyclops Euripides wrote about timeless themes, of friendship and enmity, hope and despair, duty and betrayal. The first three plays in this volume are filled with violence or its threat, while the fourth, Cyclops, is our only surviving example of a genuine satyr play, with all the crude and slapstick humour that characterized the genre. There is death in Alcestis, which explores the marital relationship of Alcestis and Admetus with pathos and grim humour, but whose status as tragedy is subverted by a happy ending. The blood-soaked Heracles portrays deep emotional pain and undeserved suffering; its demand for a more humanistic ethics in the face of divine indifference and callousness makes it one of Euripides' more popular and profound plays. Children of Heracles is a rich and complex work, famous for its dialogues and monologues, in which the effects of war on refugees and the consequences of sheltering them are movingly explored. In Cyclops Euripides takes the familiar story of Odysseus' escape from the Cyclops Polyphemus and turns it to hilarious comic effect. Euripides' other plays are all available in Oxford World's Classics.

'It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As Joris -Karl Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete, Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life. Holed up in his private museum of high taste, he offers Huysmans's readers a treasure trove of cultural delights which anticipates many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarme and Poe. This new translation is supplemented by indispensable notes which enhance the understanding of a highly allusive work.

A man ...is so in the way in the house!' A vivid and affectionate portrait of a provincial town in early Victorian England, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford describes a community dominated by its independent and refined women. Undaunted by poverty, but d ismayed by changes brought by the railway and by new commercial practices, the ladies of Cranford respond to disruption with both suspicion and courage. Miss Matty and her sister Deborah uphold standards and survive personal tragedy and everyday dram as; innovation may bring loss, but it also brings growth, and welcome freedoms. Cranford suggests that representatives of different and apparently hostile social worlds, their minds opened by sympathy and suffering, can learn from each other. Its soc ial comedy develops into a study of generous reconciliation, of a kind that will value the past as it actively shapes the future. This edition includes two related short pieces by Gaskell, 'The Last Generation in England' and 'The Cage at Cranford', as well as a selection from the diverse literary and social contexts in which the Cranford tales take their place.

Thomas Dekker: The Shoemaker's Holiday George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston: Eastward Ho! Ben Jonson: Every Man In His Humour Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker: The Roaring Girl Oxford English Drama offers plays from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries in selections that make available both rarely printed and canonical works. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. Critical introductions, wide-ranging annotation, and informative bibliographies illuminate the plays' cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike. 'The series should reshape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University

'he carried Good-nature to that wonderful and uncommon Height, that he never did a single Injury to Man or Woman, by which he himself did not expect to reap some Advantage' The real-life Jonathan Wild, gangland godfather and self-styled 'Thieftaker General', controlled much of the London underworld until he was executed for his crimes in 1725. Even during his lifetime his achievements attracted attention; after his death balladeers sang of his exploits, and satirists made connections between his success and the triumph of corruption in high places. Henry Fielding built on these narratives to produce one of the greatest sustained satires in the English language. Published in 1743, at a time when the modern novel had yet to establish itself as a fixed literary form, Jonathan Wild is at the same time a brilliant black comedy, an incisive political satire, and a profoundly serious exploration of human 'greatness' and 'goodness'.

though a great many men and not a few women knew Ferdinand Lopez very well, none of them knew whence he had come' Despite his mysterious antecedents, Ferdinand Lopez aspires to join the ranks of British society. An unscrupulous financial speculator, he determines to marry into respectability and wealth, much against the wishes of his prospective father-in-law. One of the nineteenth century's most memorable outsiders, Lopez's story is set against that of the ultimate insider, Plantagenet Palliser , Duke of Omnium. Omnium reluctantly accepts the highest office of state; now, at last, he is 'the greatest man in the greatest country in the world'. But his government is a fragile coalition and his wife's enthusiastic assumption of the role of pol itical hostess becomes a source of embarrassment. Their troubled relationship and that of Lopez and Emily Wharton is a conjunction that generates one of Trollope's most complex and substantial novels. Part of the Palliser series, The Prime Minister ' s tale of personal and political life in the 1870s has acquired a new topicality in the early twenty-first century

When shrewd and poor Lizzie Greystock marries she is fully aware of her wealthy husband's approaching death.

B'..melodrama is perennial and the craving for it is perennial and must be satisfied' T. S. Eliot ('Wilkie Collins and Dickens') Collins's ability to construct a gripping situation and to create an atmosphere of mystery and menace is fully evident in the three novellas reprinted here. All proceed through a series of dramatic scenes to a climax that in one case at least is literally explosive. The fast-paced Miss or Mrs? (1871) opens on a yacht, features a remarkably unconventional heroine, and entails murder attempts, blackmail, clandestine marriage and commercial fraud. Dramatic and psychologically absorbing, the action of The Haunted Hotel (1878) takes place in an ancient Venetian palazzo converted into a modern hotel that houses a grisly secreI. Lastly, set in a beautiful water-mill, The Guilty River (1886) depicts a group of alienated characters, whose relationships threaten to erupt in violence and murder. Varied in setting and tone, these stories demonstrate Collins's plot-making skill at its most succinct and intricate. *Introduction * Textual Note * Bibliography * Chronology * * Explanatory Notes *Appendix: Collins's prefaces.