Written in epistolary form and drawn from actual events, Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Foster’s The Coquette (1797) were two of the earliest novels published in the United States. Both novels reflect the eighteenth-century preoccupation with the role of women as safekeepers of the young country’s morality.

New translation of Machado's famous novel is for the most part faithful and readable. However, work has occasional odd errors and omissions, and fails to give sufficient attention to Machado's rhythm and syntax. Given Rabassa's vast experience as a translator, it is hard not to suspect that carelessness and haste explain the mistakes and lapses. Also poorly edited and inadequately proofread"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

For almost 150 years, the writings of Branwell Bronte, the tragically self-destructive brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, have remained largely inaccessible, scattered in incomplete manuscript form across the world's libraries and private collections. This is the first publication of two of the longest of Branwell's surviving manuscripts, The Life of...Northangerland and Real Life in Verdopolis. A prolific writer, Branwell's work took the form of chronicles detailing the activities of his central character, Alexander Percy, revolutionary leader and ruthless statesman. These two Angrian Chronicles, newly transcribed, reconstructed, and annotated under the editorship of Robert G. Collins, reveal the dramatic world of the Brontes' Angria, not from the more sentimentalized viewpoint of Charlotte, but focusing instead on the lawless and brutal society of Branwell's robber-king, statesman and self-proclaimed Lucifer. The stories suggest a detailed psychological description of Branwell's own tragic life, and indicate a significant influence on the work of his more celebrated sisters. Read for its own narrative interest, its biographical relevance, and for the many ways in which it reflects significant aspects of the novels his sisters later wrote, The Hand of the Arch-Sinner reveals an astonishing and neglected talent in the fourth Bronte."

Hawthorne's novel of Americans abroad, the first novel to explore the influence of European cultural ideas on American morality. Although it is set in Rome, the fictive world of The Marble Faun depends not on Italy's social or historical significance, but rather on its aesthetic importance as a definer of 'civilization'. As in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne is concerned here with the nature of transgression and guilt. A murder, motivated by love, affects not only Donatello, the murderer, but his beloved Miriam and their friends Hilda and Kenyon. As he explores the reactions of each to the crime, Hawthorne dramatizes both the freedoms a new cultural model inspires and the self-censoring conformities it requires. His examination of the influence of European culture on American travellers lay the groundwork for such later works of American fiction as Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad and Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady.

Praise for the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot "It is the best available edition....The Clarendon format...establishes the history of the text with impeccable research."--Journal of English and Germanic Philology. "Clarendon editions of nineteenth-century novels are almost invariably without parallel."--Nineteenth-Century Literature Often considered George Eliot's finest novel, Middlemarch is a masterpiece of literary realism. This is the first edition of the novel to be published with full critical apparatus since it appeared in 1871-2. It records all the variants in the main edition as well as many of the deletions in the manuscript. The introduction traces the history of composition, publication, and revision.

Philida is gebaseer op historiese werklikheid en sluit wat tema en tydperk betref aan by een van Brink se vroeër romans, Houd-den-bek. Philida was ’n slavin wat tussen 1820 en 1835 op die plaas Zandvliet in die Drakenstein-distrik gewoon het. (Die plaas wat vandag bekend is as Solms Delta). Sy het ’n paar kinders gehad by Frans, die seun van Cornelis Brink, die eienaar van die plaas. Maar toe besluit Cornelis dat Frans met die dogter van ’n ryk Kaapse familie moet trou en dat dit beter is om Philida en haar kinders te verkoop.

Die roman begin waar Philida by die drostdy op Stellenbosch ’n klag teen haar baas gaan lê, ongehoorde optrede vir ’n slawevrou, optrede wat haar duur te staan kom: Philida en haar kinders word in 1833 deur Brink op ’n slaweveiling op Worcester verkoop. Die Britse regering stel kort daarna die slawe vry, maar Philida is vir vier jaar by haar nuwe eienaar, Meester de la Bat, ingeboek.

Die swaarkry en vernedering van baie jare het Philida egter gebrei en op ’n dag eien sy vir haarself vryheid toe. Saam met die Moslem-slaaf, Labyn, trek sy deur die barre Karoo na die verre Gariep – “die grote Gariep: hy is die hele land en die hele wêreld …die rivier in onse binneste. My Gariep…” dink Philida. “Hier in sy nabyte is ons almal saam.”

Philida is ’n versetsroman – maar dit is ook ’n bevrydingsroman. Dit demonstreer wat vryheid beteken, en óók wat aan die kern van baasskap lê. En alhoewel daar onthutsende tonele is, is daar ook oomblikke van teerheid en humor. En boweal, die stem van ’n meesterverteller.

’n Interessante aspek van die roman is dat Brink gebruik maak van geskiedkundige feite wat een van sy voorsate insluit.

Little Women is one of the  best loved books of all time. Lovely Meg, talented  Jo, frail Beth, spoiled Amy: these are hard lessons  of poverty and of growing up in New England during  the Civil War. Through their dreams, plays,  pranks, letters, illnesses, and courtships, women of all  ages have become a part of this remarkable family  and have felt the deep sadness when Meg leaves the  circle of sisters to be married at the end of Part  I. Part II, chronicles Meg's joys and mishaps as a  young wife and mother, Jo's struggle to become a  writer, Beth's tragedy, and Amy's artistic pursuits  and unexpected romance. Based on Louise May  Alcott's childhood, this lively portrait of  nineteenth-century family life possesses a lasting vitality  that has endeared it to generations of readers.

Set against a vividly depicted background of fin de siécle New York, this novel centers on the conflict between a self-made millionaire and a fervent social revolutionary-a conflict in which a man of goodwill futilely attempts to act as a mediator, only to be forced himself into a crisis of conscience. Here we see William Dean Howells's grasp of the realities of the American experience in an age of emerging social struggle. His absolute determination to fairly represent every point of view is evident throughout this multifaceted work. Both a memorable portrait of an era and a profoundly moving study of human relationships, A Hazard of New Fortunes fully justifies Alfred Kazin's ranking of Howells as "the first great domestic novelist of American life."

The appreciation of Zen philosophy and art has become universal, and Zen poetry, with its simple expression of direct, intuitive insight and sudden enlightenment, appeals to lovers of poetry, spirituality, and beauty everywhere. This collection of translations of the classical Zen poets of China, Japan and Korea includes the work of Zen practioners and monks as well as scholars, artists, travellers and recluses, and covers fifteen centuries of Oriental literature with poets ranging from Xie Lingyun (5th century) through Wang Wei and Hanshan (8th century) and Yang Wan-li (12th century) to Shinkei (15th) Basho (17th) and Ryokan (19th).

A historical adventure reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley romances, Cooper’s novel centers on Harvey Birch, a common man wrongly suspected of being a spy for the British.

The final novel in Cooper’s epic, The Prairie depicts Natty Bumppo at the end of his life, still displaying his indomitable strength and dignity.

Thomas Love Peacock is literature's perfect individualist. He has points in common with Aristophanes, Plato, Rabelais, Voltaire, and even Aldous Huxley, but resembles none of them; we can talk of the satirical novel of ideas, but his satire is too gay and good-natured, his novel too rambling, and his ideas too jovially destructive for the label to stick.

A romantic in his youth and a friend of Shelley, he happily made hay of the romantic movement in Nightmare Abbey, clamping Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley himself in a kind of painless pillory. And in Crotchet Castle he did no less for the political economists, pitting his gifts of exaggeration and ridicule against scientific progress and the March of Mind.

Yet the romantic in him never died: the long, witty and indecisive talk of his characters is set in wild, natural scenery which Peacock describes with true feeling.

A desperate young man plans the perfect crime -- the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law -- if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins one of the greatest novels ever written: a powerful psychological study, a terrifying murder mystery, a fascinating detective thriller infused with philosophical, religious and social commentary. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in a garret in the gloomy slums of St. Petersburg, carries out his grotesque scheme and plunges into a hell of persecution, madness and terror. Crime And Punishment takes the reader on a journey into the darkest recesses of the criminal and depraved mind, and exposes the soul of a man possessed by both good and evil ... a man who cannot escape his own conscience.

"The story of the monster man whose horrible deformities cause fear and terror, his search for love and acceptance, and his haunting of the opera house in Paris is told in very simple language. Beautifully adapted, the story flows along so easily that readers will be immediately caught up in the tangle of events and emotions. McMullan conveys all of the anger, grief, joy, and love that make the phantom a truly believable character. Will attract reluctant readers."--School Library Journal.  


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Many cultures identify mourning as the very source of poetry and music, what Elizabeth Bishop calls the art of losing. That might well be the title of this collection. Not every poem is cornered with death, but all are about loss. The poems chosen traverse a surprisingly wide range of emotions from despair to joy, resignation to anger, all articulated in language of the greatest power and beauty . All the major verse forms of mourning are represented here: epitaph, requiem and lament. Three great elergies by Milton, Whitman and Rilke are surrounded by a wide variety of shorter poems. Naturally, the pathos of death predominates, but its comedy has not been neglected, whether in the savage poems of World War I or the gentle teasing of seventeenth-century satire. Poets include: Akhmatova, Auden, Bishop, Brodsky, Browning, Carew, Cory, Cowley, Dickinson, Donne, Dryden, Dyer, Fletcher, Graves, Gurney, Hardy, Harrison, Herrick, Hopkins, Horace, King, Leopardi, Lowell, MacCaig, Mandelstam, Milosz, Philips, Propertius, Roethke, Smith, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas and Wordsworth.

In one volume, the two short-story collections that established Kate Chopin as one of America's best-loved realist writers.

The first English-language edition of a major work by George Sand. Translated by the winner of the 1994 BOMC-PEN Translation Award. "A courageous work, nowadays unjustly neglected". -- Renee Winegarten "Sand develops her most advanced political, social and sexual views in this classic work". -- Feminist Bookstore News