`What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?` Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostly visitor foretells three apparitions who will thaw Scrooge`s frozen heart. "A Christmas Carol" has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. This edition reprints the story alongside Dickens`s four other Christmas Books: "The Chimes", "The Cricket on the Hearth", "The Battle of Life", and "The Haunted Man". All five stories show Dickens at his unpredictable best, jumbling together comedy and melodrama, genial romance and urgent social satire,...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: октябрь 2011
The first of the Sherlock Holmes stories, this was also the first of Conan Doyle`s books to be published. In this fascinating and exciting tale, the two towering creations of detective fiction-Holmes, the master of the science of detection, and Watson, his faithful companion-make their auspicious debut. The two detectives are immediately in fine form as Holmes plucks the solution to the mystery from the heart of Victorian London.
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: октябрь 2012
`You don`t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", but that ain`t no matter.` So begins, in characteristic fashion, one of the greatest American novels. Narrated by a poor,...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: декабрь 2011
Chekhov`s worldwide reputation as a dramatist rests on five great plays: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. All are presented in this collection, taken from the authoritative Oxford Chekhov, in Ronald Hingley`s acclaimed translation. Hingley has also written an introduction specifically for this volume in which he provides a detailed history of Chekhov`s involvement in the theater and an assessment of his accomplishment as a dramatist.
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: ноябрь 2011
"Frankenstein" was Mary Shelley`s immensely powerful contribution to the ghost stories which she, Percy Shelley, and Byron wrote one wet summer in Switzerland. Its protagonist is a young student of natural philosophy, who learns the secret of imparting life to a creature constructed from relics of the dead, with horrific consequences. "Frankenstein" confronts some of the most feared innovations of evolutionism: topics such as degeneracy, hereditary disease, and mankind`s status as a species of animal. The text used here is from the 1818 edition, which is a mocking exposé of leaders and achievers who leave desolation in their wake, showing mankind its choice - to live cooperatively or to die of selfishness. It is also a black comedy,...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: декабрь 2011
Henry Fielding wrote both Joseph Andrews (1742) and Shamela (1741) in response to Samuel Richardson`s book Pamela (1740), of which Shamela is a splendidly bawdy travesty. Joseph Andrews begins as a parody, too, but soon outgrows its origins, and its deepest roots lie in Cervantes and Marivaux. In both stories, Fielding demonstrates his concern for the corruption of contemporary society, politics, religion, morality, and taste. 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 the second edition of Richardson`s...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: ноябрь 2011
The definitive English version of the stories of King Arthur, "Le Morte Darthur" was completed in 1469-70 by Sir Thomas Malory, `knight-prisoner`. In a resonant prose style, Malory charts the tragic disintegration of the fellowship of the Round Table, destroyed from within by warring factions. Recounting the life of King Arthur, the knightly exploits of Sir Lancelot du Lake, Sir Tristram, Sir Gawain, and the quest for the Holy Grail, "Le Morte Darthur" depicts the contradictions that underscore the Fellowship`s chivalric ideals. A pervading tension cumulates in the revelation of Lancelot and Guenivere`s illicit passion, and in Arthur`s powerlessness to prevent a related outbreak of violence and revenge. This generously annotated edition...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: май 2013
The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. Its prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil--gifted, wealthy, and bored--form an unholy alliance and turn seduction into a game. And they play this game with such wit and style that it is impossible not to admire them, until they discover mysterious rules that they cannot understand. In the ensuing battle there can be no winners, and the innocent suffer with the guilty. This new translation gives Laclos a modern voice, and readers will be able to judge whether the novel is as "diabolical" and "infamous" as its critics have claimed, or whether it...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: ноябрь 2011
He that is to govern a whole nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but mankind. Leviathan is both a magnificent literary achievement and the greatest work of political philosophy in the English language. Permanently challenging, it has found new applications and new refutations in every generation. Hobbes argues that human beings are first and foremost concerned with their own individual desires and fears. He shows that a conflict of each against every man can only be avoided by the adoption of a compact to enforce peace. The compact involves giving up some of our natural freedom to a sovereign power which will enforce the laws of peace on all citizens. Hobbes also analyses the subversive forces - religion,...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: декабрь 2016
The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers. a new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings; on-page commentary and notes explain meaning, staging, allusions, and much else; detailed introduction considers composition, sources, performances, and changing critical attitudes to the play; illustrated with production photographs and related art; full index to introduction and commentary; durable sewn binding for lasting use. Edited by Nicholas Brooke.
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: сентябрь 2013
In this almost documentary account of his own experience of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. The intricate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Turgenev to passages from Dante`s Inferno. Terror and resignation - the rampages of a psychopath, the brief serene interlude of Christmas Day - are evoked by Dostoevsky, writing several years after his release, with a strikingly uncharacteristic detachment. For this reason, House of the Dead is certainly the least Dostoevskian of his works, yet, paradoxically, it ranks among...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: ноябрь 2011
`Verlaine, possessed by the madnesses of love, brimming over with desires and prayers, the rebel railing against the complacent platitudes of society, of love, of language`. Jean Rousselot Verlaine ranks alongside Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Rimbaud as one of the most outstanding poets of late nineteenth-century France whose work is associated with the early Symbolists, the Decadents, and the Parnassiens. Remarkable not only for his delicacy and exquisitely crafted verse, Verlaine is also the poet of strong emotions and appetites, with an unrivalled gift for the sheer music of poetry, and an inventive approach to its technique. This bilingual edition provides the most comprehensive selection of his poetry yet, offering some 170 poems in...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: октябрь 2012
`Little Matters they are to be sure, but highly important`. Letter-writing was something of an addiction for young women of Jane Austen`s time and social position, and Austen`s letters have a freedom and familiarity that only intimate writing can convey. Wiser than her critics, who were disappointed that her correspondence dwelt on gossip and the minutiae of everyday living, Austen understood the importance of `Little Matters`, of the emotional and material details of individual lives shared with friends and family through the medium of the letter. Ironic, acerbic, always entertaining, Jane Austen`s letters are a fascinating record not only of her own day-to-day existence, but of the pleasures and frustrations experienced by women of her...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: октябрь 2011
Byron was a legend in his own lifetime and the dominant influence on the Romantic movement. The most European of the English writers in an age of revolution, Byron was deeply involved in contemporary events, and a passionate supporter of the struggle for Greek independence. Describing himself as `born for opposition`, his work was largely directed against what he called the `cant political, cant poetical, and cant moral` of the English and European worlds. He was rocketed to fame by the publication of "Childe Harold" in 1812, and lionized by society until his departure from England amid a whirlpool of private gossip and newspaper scandal in 1816. His is, in every sense, a poetry of experience, and a Romantic emphasis on the personality...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: декабрь 2011
`Lorca brought an understanding of the paradox that was Spain - sensuality chafing under a rigid moral code, individual desire at war with tradition`. Manuel Duran Federico Garcia Lorca is perhaps the most celebrated of all twentieth-century Spanish writers, known not only for his plays but also for several collections of poems published both in his short lifetime and after. Lorca`s poetry is steeped in the land, climate, and folklore of his native Andalusia, though he writes memorably of New York and Cuba too. Often in modernist idiom, and full of startling imagery, he evokes a world of intense feelings, silent suffering, and dangerous love. This selection balances poems from Lorca`s early collections with his better-known work to give...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: октябрь 2012
``I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of``. Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was not the only writer to admire Mansfield`s work: Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Elizabeth Bowen all praised her stories, and her early death at the age of thirty-four cut short one of the finest short-story writers in the English language. This selection covers the full range of Mansfield`s fiction, from her early satirical stories to the subtly nuanced comedy of `The Daughters of the Late Colonel` and the macabre and ominous `A Married Man`s Story`. The stories that pay what Mansfield calls `a debt of love` to New Zealand are as sharply etched as the European stories, and she recreates her childhood world with mordant...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: сентябрь 2012
"Sister Carrie" was first printed in 1900 but publication was effectively held up until 1912 because its realism and supposed immorality were judged likely to give offence. Theodore Dreiser intertwined his narrative of a young woman seduced by the lure of the modern city with the counter-narrative of a middle-aged man seduced by desire for Carrie herself. This eminently American story of rags to riches is balanced between Carrie Meeber`s rise to stardom in the theatre and George Hurstwood`s slow decline. The twin poles of exuberance and exhaustion in American life are captured as never before. The premier example of American naturalism, "Sister Carrie" has deeply influenced a number of writers, from William Faulkner and F. Scott...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: октябрь 2012
The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of `The Beach at Falesé, the folktale plots of `The Bottle Imp` and `The Isle of Voices`, and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in "The...
Издательство:
Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: октябрь 2012
`Whoever best acquits himself, and tells The most amusing and instructive tale, Shall have a dinner, paid for by us all`... In Chaucer`s most ambitious poem, The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), a group of pilgrims assembles in an inn just outside London and agree to entertain each other on the way to Canterbury by telling stories. The pilgrims come from all ranks of society, from the crusading Knight and burly Miller to the worldly Monk and lusty Wife of Bath. Their tales are as various as the tellers, including romance, bawdy comedy, beast fable, learned debate, parable, and Eastern adventure. The resulting collection gives us a set of characters so vivid that they have often been taken as portraits from real life, and a series of stories...
