From setting foot in Asia in 1849 (or was it 1845?) as Anna Crawford (or was it Anna Edwards?) to waltzing with Yul Brynner in glorious technicolor, Anna Leonowens and her romanticized experiences as the only Westerner behind the walls of Nang Harm (the walled harem of the king of Siam) have had a long, colourful, and often controversial existence.

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.

One of the first American Gothic novels, Edgar Huntly (1787) mirrors the social and political temperaments of the postrevolutionary United States.

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.

A candid inquiry into the intertwining of religious and sexual fervor, and a telling portrait of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, this novel foreshadows the rise of naturalism in American literature.

Alger’s characteristic theme of youths achieving the American dream through hard work, resistance to temptation, and goodwill is presented in these two tales that reflect nineteenth-century life.

The story of a philandering, dishonest Boston journalist and the woman who divorces him, this is the first serious treatment of divorce in American writing and a powerful example of realism in literature.

In the picaresque tradition of Baccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Laurence Sterne, Jacques the Fatalist is an 18th-century French novel relating the adventures of a servant and his master as they journey through France on horseback. Around the central thread of Jacques' humorous narration of his romantic affairs, the author of the Encyclopedia and Rameau's Nephew fashions a signal work of innovative fiction that slyly investigates philosophical and literary questions such as art, time, reality, freedom, and the definition of the novel itself.

What happens on this journey? Jacques tells his master his adventures; this story in turn is contantly interrupted by other stories or by Diderot, as narrator, who comes in to tease the reader about the future course of the novel. Diderot is eager to be agreeable, so long as the reader realized that the fabricator of a novel can as easily proceed in this way as in that. The book foreshadows a number of 19th and 20th century literary techniques, exchanging the rational and classical for shifting perspectives of time, personality, and viewpoint.

In J. Robert Loy's smooth and accurate translation (the first in English except for a privately printed one of 1798), the reader can now discover the originality of Diderot's witty masterpiece. It is a book that no one interested in the evolution of modern fiction, or the ideas of the Enlightenment, will want to miss.

The Portable Stephen Crane allows us to appreciate the full scope and power of this writer's vision. It contains three complete novels—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George's Mother, and Crane's masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage; nineteen short stories and sketches, including "The Blue Hotel" and "The Open Boat", a barely fictionalized account of his own escape from shipwreck while covering the Cuban revolt against Spain; the previously unpublished essay "Above All Things"; letters and poems, plus a critical essay and notes by the noted Crane scholar Joseph Katz.

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.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America-an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naivete of their own time in a work which endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.

Emma es una novela en la que peculiarmente el dialogo es accion y la accion es dialogo, la verdad es mentira y la mentira verdad, donde reir y llorar es lo mismo. La historia de una joven inglesa de la clase media alta cuyas magnificas dotes intelectuales la precipitan a amanar las relaciones amorosas de los demas pensando que esta construyendo una pequena sociedad perfecta hasta que descubre con una desdicha transitoria que lo que ha construido es su perfecta pequenez.

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.

Set in seventeenth-century New England in the aftermath of the Pequod War, Hope Leslie not only chronicles the role of women in building the republic but also refocuses the emergent national literature on the lives, domestic mores, and values of American women.

Imlay’s delightful epistolary adventure of 1793, set on the American frontier, was one of the first American novels. The trials of an emigrant family in the Ohio River Valley of Kentucky contrast the decadence of Europe with the utopian promise of the American West. Its sensational love plots also dramatize the novel’s surprising feminist allegiances.

During the pivotal period of America?s international emergence, between the Civil War and WWI, the aligned literary movements of Realism and Naturalism not only shaped the national literature of the age, but also left an indelible and far-reaching influence on twentieth-century American and world literature. Seeking to strip narrative from pious sentimentalities, and, according to William Dean Howells, to ?Apaint? life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation,? Realism is best represented by this volume?s masterly pieces by Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather among others. The joining of Realist methods with the theories of Marx, Darwin, and Spencer to reveal the larger forces (biological, evolutionary, historical) which move humankind, are exemplified here in the fiction of such writers as Jack London, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser.

A superb depiction of a utopian community that cannot survive the individual passions of its members. In language that is suggestive and often erotic, Nathaniel Hawthorne tells a tale of failed possibilities and multiple personal betrayals as he explores the contrasts between what his characters espouse and what they actually experience in an 'ideal' community. A theme of unrealized sexual possibilities serves as a counterpoint to the other failures at Blithedale: class and sex distinctions are not eradicated, and communal work on the farm proves personally unrewarding and economically disastrous. Based in part on Hawthorne's own experiences at Brook Farm, an experimental socialist community, The Blithedale Romance is especially timely in light of renewed interest in self-sufficient and other cooperative societies.

Las aventuras de una joven abandonada por su madre al nacer, sus correrias como ladrona y estafadora, su estancia en la carcel, su final como prospera heredera de una plantacion dejada por su madre en una atmosfera de penitencia y prosperidad, hacen de Moll Flanders el personaje picaresco femenino mas popular de la literatura universal.

Elizabeth Stoddard combines the narrative style of the popular nineteenth-century male-centered bildungsroman with the conventions of women's romantic fiction in this revolutionary exploration of the conflict between a woman's instinct, passion, and will, and the social taboos, family allegiances, and traditional New England restraint that inhibit her. Set in a small seaport town (1862), The Morgesons is the dramatic story of Cassandra Morgeson's fight against social and religious norms in a quest for sexual, spiritual, and economic autonomy. An indomitable heroine, Cassandra not only achieves an equal and complete love with her husband and ownership of her family's property, but also masters the skills and accomplishments expected of women.

Counterpointed with the stultified lives of her aunt, mother, and sister, Cassandra's success is a striking and radical affirmation of women's power to shape their own destinies. Embodying the convergence of the melodrama and sexual undercurrents of gothic romance and Victorian social realism, The Morgesons marks an important transition in the development of the novel and evoked comparisons during Stoddard's lifetime with such masters as Balzac, Tolstoy, Eliot, the Brontes, and Hawthorne.

Questing after Pancho Villa's revolutionary forces, Ambrose Bierce rode into Mexico in 1913 and was never seen again. He left behind him the Devil's Dictionary and a remarkable body of short fiction.

This new collection gathers some of Bierce's finest stories, including the celebrated Civil War fictions 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' and 'Chickamauga', his macabre masterpieces, and his tales of supernatural horror.

Reminiscent of Poe, these stories are marked by a sardonic humour and a realistic study of tense emotional states.

Alcott’s enchanting debut novel.

Written in 1849, when Louisa May Alcott was just seventeen years old, The Inheritance is the captivating tale of Edith Adelon, an impoverished Italian orphan who innocently wields the charms of virtue, beauty, and loyalty to win her true birthright. A long lost letter reveals her secret inheritance, nothing less than the English estate on which she is a paid companion. But Edith is loath to claim it – for more important to her by far are the respect and affection of her wealthy patrons, and the love of a newfound friend, the kind and noble Lord Percy.

Her first novel shows a young Alcott writing under the influence of the gothic romances and sentimental novels of her day. In their introduction, Professors Myerson and Shealy, who recovered Alcott’s unpublished manuscript, explore how her unconventional upbringing and early literary influences shaped The Inheritance, and consider it in the light of her mature style, particularly that of her classic, Little Women.

An early masterwork among American literary treatments of miscegenation, Chesnutt’s story is of two young African Americans who decide to pass for white in order to claim their share of the American dream.