'There was a rumour, too, that he was a devil-worshipper, or something of that sort, and also that he had the evil eye...'Arthur Conan Doyle was the greatest genre writer Britain has ever produced. Throughout a long writing career, he drew on his own...

Hard Times--Dickens's shortest novel and one of his triumphs--tells the tragic story of Louisa Gradgrind and her father and has had lasting appeal to generations of readers.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the...

In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written.In writing Anna Karenina he moved away from...

'it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well developed human beings'Mill's four essays, 'On Liberty', 'Utilitarianism', 'Considerations on Representative Government', and 'The Subjection of Women' examine the most central issues that face liberal democratic regimes - whether in the...

What is poetry, how many kinds of it are there, and what are their specific effects?'Aristotle's Poetics is the most influential book on poetry ever written. A founding text of European aesthetics and literary criticism, from it stems much of our modern understanding of the creation...

'It is impossible to explain why Yevgeny chose Liza Annenskaya, as it is always impossible to explain why a man chooses this and not that woman.'This collection of eleven stories spans virtually the whole of Tolstoy's creative life. While each is unique in form,...

This volume unites, for the first time, Books IV and V of Mill's great treatise on political economy with his fragmentary chapters on socialism. It shows him applying his classical economic theory to policy questions of abiding concern, particularly the desirability of sustained growth...

'I am not a man, I am dynamite.'Ecce Homo is an autobiography like no other. Deliberately provocative, Nietzsche subverts the conventions of the genre and pushes his philosophical positions to combative extremes, constructing a genius-hero whose life is a chronicle of incessant self-overcoming. Written in...

'I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre.'Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck's...

'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo'So begins one of the most significant...

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.George Orwell was one of the most celebrated essayists in the English language, and there are quite a few of his essays which...

'Of man's first disobedience, and the fruitOf that forbidden tree, whose mortal tasteBrought death into the world...Sing heavenly muse'From almost the moment of its first publication in 1667, Paradise Lost was considered a classic. It is difficult now to appreciate both how audacious an undertaking it...

'If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: "To fight against Fascism," and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: "Common decency."'Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's account of the Spanish...

"Poverty is what I am writing about".In the late 1920s, Eric Blair resigned his post as a colonial policeman in Burma, immersed himself in the slums of Paris and London, and reinvented himself as George Orwell, one of the most revered prose stylists in...

'About things that are within our power and those that are not.'Epictetus's Discourses have been the most widely read and influential of all writings of Stoic philosophy, from antiquity onwards. They set out the core ethical principles of Stoicism in a form designed to help people...

'I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing.'The Sorrows of Young Werther propelled Goethe to instant fame when it first appeared in 1774. Goethe drew on his own unhappy experiences to tell...

The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers.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...

The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the works for modern readers.- a new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings- on-page and facing-page commentary and notes explain language and allusions- detailed introductions...

Sparkling with the witty dialogue between Beatrice and Benedicts, Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare's most enjoyable and theatrically successful comedies.This edition offers a newly edited text and an exceptionally helpful and critically aware introduction. Paying particular attention to analysis of the play's minor...

Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was in when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured `nihilist' who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook...

'no one pitied him as he would have liked to be pitied'As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' and the other works in this...

'Fitzgerald has solved virtually every problem that has plagued translators of Homer.' Atlantic MonthlyThe Iliad is the story of a few days' fighting in the tenth year of the legendary war between the Greeks and the Trojans, which broke out when Paris, son of King Priam of...

'The love of repetition is in truth the only happy love'So says Constantine Constantius on the first page of Kierkegaard's Repetition. Life itself, according to Kierkegaard's pseudonymous narrator, is a repetition, and in the course of this witty, playful work Constantius explores the nature of...

Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the answer will be 'Which war?'The approach of the Second World War finds suburban insurance agent George Bowling in a reflective mood. As he thinks back to the...

Notes from the Underground (1864) is one of the most profound works of nineteenth-century literature. A probing, speculative book, often regarded as a forerunner of the Existentialist movement, it examines the important political and philosophical questions that were current in Russia and Europe at the...

'She sees, coming up a second time,Earth from the ocean, eternally green;the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them,over the mountain hunting fish.'After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The Poetic Edda begins with The Seeress's...

'War, the bringer of tears...'For 2,700 years the Iliad has gripped listeners and readers with the story of Achilles' anger and Hector's death. This tragic episode during the siege of Troy, sparked by a quarrel between the leader of the Greek army and its mightiest warrior,...

'In recent decades, interest in hunger artists has greatly diminished.'Kafka published two collections of short stories in his lifetime, A Country Doctor: Little Tales (1919) and A Hunger Artist: Four Stories (1924). Both collections are included in their entirety in this edition, which also contains other, uncollected stories...

'. . . the more honourable animals have been allotted a more honourable soul. . . 'What is the nature of the soul? It is this question that Aristotle sought to answer in De Anima (On the Soul). In doing so he offers a psychological theory...

'A good essay must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.'According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure...It should lay us under a spell with its...

The Politics is one of the most influential texts in the history of political thought, and it raises issues which still confront anyone who wants to think seriously about the ways in which human societies are organized and governed.The work of one of the world's greatest...

Henry V, the climax of Shakespeare's sequence of English history plays, is an inspiring, often comic celebration of a young warrior-king. But it is also a study of the costly exhilarations of war, and of the penalties as well as the glories of human...

'...behind them all was New York, looking at Karl with the hundred thousand windows of its skyscrapers'Entering New York harbour, the young immigrant Karl Rossmann sees the Statue of Liberty, 'her arm with the sword stretched upward'. This forbidding introduction sets the tone for...

Written in 1595, Richard II occupies a significant place in the Shakespeare canon, marking the transition from the earlier history plays dominated by civil war and stark power to a more nuanced representation of the political conflicts of England's past where character and politics are inextricably...

Following his father's death John Harmon returns to London to claim his inheritance, but he finds he is eligible only if he marries Bella Wilfur. To observe her character he assumes another identity and secures work with his father's foreman, Mr Boffin, who is...

'I tender these tales of the Jazz Age into the hands of those who read as they run and run as they read.'Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) was Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, and it contains some of the best examples of his...

The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the works for modern readers- a new, modern-spelling text, based on the 1623 Folio text- on-page commentary and notes explain meaning, staging, language and allusions- detailed introduction considers...

The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most perfectly realized tragi- comedy, as notable for its tragic intensity as for its comic grace and, throughout, for the richness and complexity of its poetry. It concludes, moreover, with the most daring and moving reconciliation scene in all Shakespeare's...

One of France's best-selling writers at the time of the novel's composition, Dumas here combines what he considered to be life's essentials - `l'action et l'amour'. This historical romance is the climax of his epic of chivalry and valour that began with The Three Musketeers,...

Rene Weis reveals Shakepeare's use of multiple sources to be eclectic in the extreme in this radical reconsideration of the play's date and text. He also argues for the first time that Falstaff was called Oldcastle in Part 2 as well as in Part...

This authoritative edition was formerly published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Wordsworth's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by important letters, prefaces, and essays - to...

'Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.'F. Scott Fitzgerald's first story collection, Flappers and Philosophers, appeared in 1920 on the heels of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and immediately established him as a master of popular fiction.Love stories such as 'The...

'Listen, Stranger!'Wordsworth and Coleridge's joint collection of poems has often been singled out as the founding text of English Romanticism. Within this initially unassuming, anonymous volume were many of the poems that came to define their age and which have continued to delight readers...

Audiences have always delighted in the robust comedy and verbal inventiveness of The Taming of the Shrew. It has survived many adaptations ranging from, probably, the play printed in 1594 as The Taming of the Shrew through several eighteenth-century versions to modern-dress productions and transformations into ballet,...

When Claudio breaks the new laws against vice in Vienna by getting his financee, Julietta, pregnant, a series of ethical issues is brought under scrutiny. His sister's virtue is held to ransom by the deputy rule of the city until justice is done, mercy...

The Oxford ShakespeareGeneral Editor Stanley WellsThe Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the works for modern readers- a new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings- on-page commentary and notes explain meaning, staging,...

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, based on the 1623 First Folio- detailed introduction considers composition, sources, historical events, performances and changing critical attitudes to...