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The History of the Kings of Britain is arguably the most influential text written in England in the Middle Ages. The work narrates a linear history of pre-Saxon Britain, from its founding by Trojan exiles to the loss of native British (Celtic) sovereignty in the face of Germanic invaders. Along the way, Geoffrey introduces readers to such familiar figures as King Lear, Cymbeline, Vortigern, the prophet Merlin, and a host of others. Most importantly, he provides the first birth-to-death account of the life of King Arthur. His focus on that king's reign sparked the vogue for Arthurian romance throughout medieval Europe that has continued into the twenty-first century. This new translation is the first in over forty years and the first to be based on the Bern manuscript, now considered the authoritative Latin text. It is accompanied by an introduction that highlights the significance of Geoffrey's work in his own day and focuses in particular on the ambiguous status of the text between history and fiction. Appendices include historical sources, early responses to the History, and other medieval writings on King Arthur and Merlin.

This Broadview edition provides a fascinating selection of contextual material, including contemporary reviews of the novel, Stevenson's essay ""A Chapter on Dreams,"" and excerpts from the 1887 stage version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The novel and appendices. Appendices include primary source material relating to: the novel's reception; women, marriage and work; and landscape in the eighteenth-century fiction. Mary Hays' biographical writing on Smith is also included, as is selected correspondence.

The first teaching edition of Charlotte Smith's major poetic works.

This collection, which includes the four stories originally published in Hauntings and three others, enables readers to consider Lee's work anew for its subtle redefinitions of gender and sexuality during the Victorian fin-de-siecle.

Tells the story, in letters, of the beautiful and virtuoso Clarissa Harlowe's pursuit and abduction by the rake Robert Lovelace. The epistolary structure creates layered and fully realized characters, as well as an intriguing uncertainty about the reliability of the various 'narrators'.

Critically acclaimed as Kate Chopin's most influential work of fiction, The Awakening has assumed a place in the American literary canon. This new edition places the novel in the context of the cultural and regional influences that shape Chopin's narrative. With extensive contemporary readings that examine historical events, including the hurricanes that frequently disrupt life in Louisiana, this edition will contextualize The Awakening for a new generation of readers.

The protagonist of Charlotte Dacre's best known novel, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) is unique in women's Gothic and Romantic literature, and has more in common with the heroines of Sade or M.G. Lewis than with those of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith or Jane Austen. No heroine of Radcliffe or Austen could exult, as Victoria does in this novel, that "there is certainly a pleasure ... in the infliction of prolonged torment." The sexual desires and ambition of Dacre's protagonist, Victoria, drive her to seduce, torture and murder. Victoria is inspired to greater criminal and illicit acts by a seductive Lucifer, disguised as a Moor, before she too is plunged into an abyss by her demon lover. The text's unusual evocations of the female body and feminine subject are of particular interest in the context of the history of sexuality and of the body; after embarking on a series of violent crimes, Victoria's body actually begins to grow stronger and decidedly more masculine. Among the documents included as appendices to this volume are a selection of Dacre's poetry and excerpts from Bienville's Nymphomania, a medical treatise of the time aimed at a lay audience that focuses largely on the dangerous powers of women's imagination; inspired by improper novels, it is alleged that women may plunge into madness, violence and death--much as does the protagonist of Zofloya herself.

Robert Bage's Hermsprong satirizes English society of the 1790s targeting, in particular, corrupt clergymen, grasping lawyers and wicked aristocrats. The protagonist, a European raised among Native Americans, visits Europe and is dismayed by what he encounters. While such satire might seem conventional enough, Hermsprong is distinguished from other political novels of the period by its comedy, and it is a measure of Bage's success that he won the admiration of writers as different in political outlook as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sir Walter Scott. Indeed, Hermsprong is built around debate, and celebrates the pleasures of the lively exchange of ideas. This Broadview edition contains extensive primary source appendices including material by William Godwin, Benjamin Franklin, Pierre de Charlevoix, and Voltaire.

Heart of Darkness tells the story of Marlow as he travels upriver in central Africa to find Kurtz, an ivory agent as consumed by the horror of human life as he is by physical illness.'

The critical introduction to this Broadview Edition gives particular emphasis to Wells's hostility towards religion as well as his thorough knowledge of the Darwinian thought of his time. Appendices provide passages from Darwin and Huxley related to Wells's early writing; in addition, excerpts from other writers illustrate late-nineteenth-century anxieties about social degeneration.

The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was the theatrical sensation of the London stage in 1893. It established Pinero as the leading English dramatist of serious social issues, and created a star out of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the title role.

Written during the English Civil War and Interregnum when the public theatres were closed and Margaret Cavendish was living away from England in exile, Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions are scathing satires that speak to the role of women's agency amidst this cultural tumult. In Bell in Campo, a group of virtuous women follow their husbands to war and, refusing to remain docilely out of harm's way, form an army of their own. The Sociable Companions details the struggles of four women from impoverished Royalist families trying to survive in a rapacious marriage market at the war's end. This Broadview Edition presents these two complementary plays together, along with supplementary materials on Cavendish's life, the participation of women in the combat of the English Civil War, the conduct of the Royalist military forces, and seventeenth-century social and marriage conventions.

This is the story of a young country workman obsessed by his ambition to become an Oxford student, interwoven with his fraught relationships with two women.'

Hobbes' classic work has set the tone for the course of political philosophy through to our own day. This new Broadview edition includes the full text of the 1651 edition, together with a wide variety of background documents that help set the work in context. Also included are an introduction, explanatory notes, and a chronology.

Mansfield Park is Austen's darkest, and most complex novel. It explores important issues such as slavery (the source of the Bertrams' wealth), the oppressive nature of idealised femininity, and women's education. This edition sheds light on these and other issues through its insightful introduction and wide-ranging appendices of contemporary documents.

Arguably the first work of science fiction in English, Francis Godwin's ""The Man in the Moone"" was published in 1638, pseudonymously and posthumously. This title includes a critical introduction that places the text in its scientific and historical contexts.

In 1750 at the age of twenty-seven Sarah Scott published her first novel, a conventional romance. A year later she left her husband after only a few months of marriage and devoted herself thereafter to writing and to promoting such causes as the creation of secular and separatist female communities. This revolutionary concept was given flesh in Millenium Hall, first published in 1762 and generally thought to be the finest of her six novels. The text may be seen as the manifesto of the 'bluestocking' movement--the protean feminism that arose under eighteenth-century gentry capitalism (originating in 1750, largely under the impetus of Scott's sister Elizabeth Montagu), and that rejected a world which early feminists saw symbolized in the black silk stockings demanded by formal society. It is a comment on Western society as well as on the strengths of Scott's novel that the message of Millenium Hall continues to resonate strongly more than two centuries later.

One of Bernard Shaw's early plays of social protest, Mrs Warren's Profession places the protagonist's decision to become a prostitute in the context of the appalling conditions for working class women in Victorian England.

First published in 1785, this is still one of the most widely read and influential works on moral philosophy. This Broadview edition combines a newly revised version of T.K. Abbot's respected translation with material crucial for placing the Groundwork in the context of Kant's broader moral thought.

The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the greatest classics of English literature, but one of the least accessible to contemporary readers. This edition offers the original text together with a facing-page translation. James Winny provides a non-alliterative and sensitively literal rendering in modern English.

Set in seventeenth-century India, The Missionary focuses on the relationship between Hilarion, a Portuguese missionary to India, and Luxima, an Indian prophetess. Both are aristocratic, devoted to their religions, bound by vows of chastity, and begin the novel biased against other cultures. This Broadview Literary Texts edition also includes extensive primary source appendices.

The main plot of the Gothic novel, 'The Monk', concerns Ambrosio, an abbot of irreproachable holiness, who is seduced by a woman disguised as a novice, and who goes on to sell his soul to the Devil. An extravagant blend of sex, death, politics, Satanism and poetry.

To borrow a phrase used by one of the characters in the novel, Dracula is ""nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance."" In her introduction to this edition Glennis Byron first discusses the famous novel as an expression not of universal fears and desires, but of specifically late nineteenth-century concerns.

The novel exemplifies "sensation fiction" in featuring a beautiful criminal heroine, an amateur detective, blackmail, arson, violence, and plenty of suspenseful action. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a broad selection of primary source material.

"In Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger's most successful book, Alger codified the basic formula he would follow in nearly a hundred subsequent novels for boys: a young hero, inexperienced in the temptations of the city but morally armed to resist them, is unexpectedly forced to earn a livelihood. The hero's exemplary struggle--to retain his virtue, to clear his name of accusations, and to gain economic independence--was the basis of the Alger plot. Hugely popular at the turn of the twentieth century, Alger's works have at different times been framed as a model for the "American dream" and as dangerously exciting sensationalism for young readers; Gary Scharnhorst's new introduction separates the myth of Alger as "success ideologue" from the more complex messages conveyed in his work. Ragged Dick is paired in this edition with Risen from the Ranks, another coming-of-age story of a young man achieving respectability. Historical appendices include extensive contemporary reviews, material on the "success myth" associated with Alger, and parodies of Alger's work."--

Woolf's 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is about the casualties of early twentieth-century life, and she explores the gendered forms of mental illness, and the social repercussions of feminism, homosexuality, and colonialism. This Broadview edition provides a reliable text at a very reasonable price. It contains textual notes but no appendices or introduction.

Although Augusta Webster was widely praised in her own time, Webster''s poetry all but disappeared in the early 20th century. This collection brings together a selection of her best work including monologues, lyrics and sonnets.'

The first novel in English to explicitly explore the subject of male homosexuality. Written by a British emigre to America, the New York theatre critic Alfred J. Cohen, under the pseudonym of ""Alan Dale"", this first-person narrative is told by a young Englishwoman, Elsie Bouverie, who gradually discovers that her new husband, Arthur Ravener, is romantically involved with another man.

In April 1888, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the English novelist and journalist Margaret Harkness, expressing his appreciation for her first novel, A City Girl: A Realistic Story, calling it "a small work of art." A City Girl was one of many slum novels set in the East End of London in the 1880s. It tells the story of a young East Ender, Nelly Ambrose, who is seduced and abandoned by a middle-class bureaucrat. After the birth of her child and betrayal by her family, Nelly is rescued by two outside forces: the Salvation Army and a sympathetic local man, George, who wants to marry her despite her "fallen" status. While Nelly's relative passivity and social ignorance distinguish her from contemporary New Woman heroines, Harkness's sympathy for Nelly's position and refusal to judge her morally make A City Girl a fascinating and original novel. This Broadview Edition includes contemporary reviews of A City Girl along with historical documents on London's East End, fallen women in late-Victorian fiction, and reform organizations for East End women.