'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.' Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. More than seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and improper, she broke off her engagement to a naval captain with neither fortune, ancestry, nor prospects. However, when peacetime arrives and brings the Navy home, and Anne encounters Captain Wentworth once more, she starts to believe in second chances. Persuasion celebrates romantic constancy in an era of turbulent change. Written as the Napoleonic Wars were ending, the novel examines how a woman can at once remain faithful to her past and still move forward into the future. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. .

Jane Austen's most ambitious novel, Mansfield Park, has always generated debate. Austen herself noted that debate when she conducted a reader survey, recording her acquaintances' mixed reviews in a booklet she entitled "Opinions of Mansfield Park." Is this novel's dutiful heroine, Fanny Price, admirable? Or is she (as Austen's own mother asserted) "insipid"? Is Fanny actually the heroine, or does that title belong more properly to her rival, Mary Crawford? Does Fanny's uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, act as her benefactor, or as a domestic tyrant? In her notes and introduction to this final volume in Harvard's celebrated annotated Austen series, Deidre Shauna Lynch outlines the critical disagreements Mansfield Park has sparked and suggests that Austen's design in writing the novel was to highlight, not downplay, the conflicted feelings its plot and heroine can inspire. Lynch also engages head-on with the novel's experimentalism, its technical virtuosity, and its undiminished capacity, two centuries later, to disturb and to move. Annotations clarify the nuances of Austen's language and explain the novel's literary allusions and its engagements with topical controversies over West Indian slavery and the conduct of Britain's war against France. The volume's numerous illustrations enable readers to picture the world Mansfield Park's characters inhabit, underscoring the novel's close attention to setting and setting's impact on character. Mansfield Park: An Annotated Edition opens up facets of the novel for even devoted Janeites while extending an open hand to less experienced readers. It will be a welcome addition to the shelf of any library.

From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eleventh Edition, showcases exciting new authors, works, and textual clusters that demonstrate the relevance of literature to contemporary students and trace the creative arc that has yielded the ever-changing and ever-fascinating body of material called English literature. This anthology offers the experience of literature as part of the world—not apart from it. It is also available for the first time as a Norton Illumine Ebook—the digital edition provides an active reading environment that equips students with tools for placing works within their social and historical contexts.

At the start of the 18th century, literary "characters" referred as much to letters and typefaces as it did to persons in books. However, this text shows how, by the 19th century, characters in books became identified with the reader, as friends with whom they empathized. The story of this shift in meaning is usually told in terms of the "rise of the individual", but this text proposes an alternative solution. Elaborating a "pragmatics of character" it shows how readers used transactions with characters to accommodate themselves to newly-commmercialized social relations. Ranging from Defoe and Smollett to Burney and Austen, this account should interest those with a concern for the inner workings of consumer culture and the history of emotions.

Of the many charges laid against contemporary literary scholars, one of the most common--and perhaps the most wounding--is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studies does acknowledge and address personal attachments to literature, that answer risks obscuring a more fundamental question: Why should they?
That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of "Loving Literature." How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to "love" literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have long played a role in the formation of private life--that the love of literature, in other words, is neither incidental to, nor inextricable from, the history of literature. Yet at the same time, there is nothing self-evident or ahistorical about our love of literature: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history.
While never denying the very real feelings that warm our relationship to books, "Loving Literature" nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase "the love of literature" as if its meaning were transparent, its essence happy and healthy. Lynch writes, "It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love's edginess and complexities." With this masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges, and allows us to revel in those complexities.

Written during a time of great political turmoil, social anxiety, and against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft s argument continues to challenge and inspire. This revised and expanded Third Edition is again based on the 1792 second-edition text and is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations.

Backgrounds and Contexts is also significantly expanded and contains twenty-four works organized thematically into these groupings: Legacies of English Radicalism, Education, Wollstonecraft s Revolutionary Moment, and The Wollstonecraft Debate. Opinions on a variety of reforms that may be compared and contrasted with Wollstonecraft s include those by John Milton, John Locke, Mary Astell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hannah More, Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin, among others.

Criticism includes six seminal essays on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Elissa S. Guralnick, Mitzi Myers, Cora Kaplan, Mary Poovey, Claudia L. Johnson, and Barbara Taylor.

A Chronology of Wollstonecraft s life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included."

One of the most common--and wounding--misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don't love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have played a vital role in the formation of private life--that the love of literature, in other words, is deeply embedded in the history of literature. Yet at the same time, our love is neither self-evident nor ahistorical: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history. While never denying the very real feelings that warm our relationship to books, Loving Literature nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase "the love of literature" as if its meaning were transparent. Lynch writes, "It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love's edginess and complexities." With this masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges and allows us to revel in those complexities.