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.

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.

Henry James called The Blithedale Romance "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest" of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels."

Written in one of the most productive periods of Hawthorne's career, The Blithedale Romance was published a year after The House of the Seven Gables and two years after his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. With The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne writes fully in his own time, not haunting his characters with the American past. Drawn from his stay at Brook Farm, a communal experiment in living the pastoral life, this engaging story touches on many of the issues of Hawthorne's day, from brotherhood to women's rights and socialism to mesmerism and spiritualism.

Published in 1852, The Blithedale Romance remains a captivating work about politics, love, the supernatural, and idealism, written with Hawthorne's sharp wit and deep intelligence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Published for the first time as Chopin intended, this is a collection of her most innovative stories, including "The Story of an Hour," "An Egyptian Cigarette," and "The Kiss."

Unfinished at the time of Flaubert’s death in 1880, Bouvard and Pécuchet features two Chaplinesque figures in a farce that mocks bourgeois stupidity and the banality of intellectual life in France.

The Early American Women Writers series offers rare works of fiction by eighteenth- and nineteenth century women, each reprinted in its entirety, each introduced by Cathy N. Davidson, who places it in an historical and literary perspective. Ranging from serious cautionary tales about moral corruption to amusing and trenchant social satire, these novels provide today's reader with a unique window into the earliest American popular fiction and way of life.

Set in Philadelphia, ^Kelroy focuses on the limited options for women in early nineteenth century America. The plot revolves around the dilemma of Mrs. Hamilton, who is suddenly left penniless by the unexpected death of her wealthy husband. Not willing to live in poverty, Mrs. Hamilton sees as her only available recourse her two unmarried daughters. As the daughters make the rounds of the marriage market and suffer the machinations of their mother, Kelroy exposes the contradictions of class interest and the profound limitations women suffered in the political and social economies of the early Republican years.

This is the first time Rebecca Rush's novel has been available since the printing of the original, single edition in 1812. With an illuminating introduction by Dana D. Nelson, this exceptional novel is certain to shed new light on the role of women, as well as the state of fiction, in early America.

This collection of ten stories--three collaborative, all uncollected, demonstrate varieties of technique, subject matter, and genre that are rarely, if ever found elsewhere in Hardy's canon.

The collection includes: An Indiscretion in the Life of a Heiress; Destiny and a Blue Cloak; The Spectre of the Real; The Unconquerable; Old Mrs Chuncle; Our Exploits at West Poley; and The Thieves Who Couldn't Help Sneezing.

"The Macdermots of Ballycloran" (1847) was Trollope's first novel, set in the violent Ireland of the 1830s before the Famine. This edition of the text contains supplementary notes, a chronology and an appendix containing three original chapters which Trollope later suppressed.;Robert Tracy has also written "Trollope's Later Novels" and has edited "The Aran Islands and Other Writings" by John Millington Synge and Trollope's "The Way We Live Now".

These twelve stories provide an entertaining exploration of this extensive and fascinating corner of English popular fiction, celebrating the detective's intellectual and intuitive powers when confronted with murder, theft, and other mysteries. The main focus of this collection is from the 1890s to the 1920s, the period when the classic English detective story was at its confident and original best, but it also offers examples from earlier and later periods. Presenting a balance of classic and more unusual stories, and featuring works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Michael Innes, this anthology will appeal to both the newcomer and aficionado of the genre.

The author uses Thomas Robbins' 1820 edition of Mather's work to show how a Puritanical political sentiment prompted American Renaissance writers to address the implications of democracy. Hawthorne, Stoddard, and Stowe used Mather's work to discover the importance of democratic concepts and categori