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This is the only edition of these four plays, which are otherwise unavailable, and introduces readers to some of the earliest published women dramatists, to compare and contrast with their better-known male counterparts.

William Wycherley's comedies are admired for their satirical wit, farcical humour, and social criticism. This volume offers his complete dramatic works in a modern-spelling edition, with detailed annotation and a scholarly introduction. Includes: Love in a Wood; The Gentleman Dancing-Master; The Country Wife; The Plain Dealer

Philip Sidney and his sister Mary translated the biblical psalms into some of the greatest lyric poems of the English Renaissance. This is the first complete edition for over forty years, providing the Psalms in an authoritative modernized text, with glosses and notes and an introduction setting the Psalms in their literary and cultural context.

The Man of Feeling (1771) is the foremost novel of sentiment in which the hero, Harley demonstrates his sensiblity in a series of episodes as he is tested against an uncaring world. This edition reprints Brian Vickers's authoritative text with a new introduction and notes discussing the work in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment and European sentimentalism.

Male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the masquerade' of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fid le is the confidence man'? The central motif of Melville's last and most modern' novel can be seen as a symbol of American cultural history.

This authoritative edition brings together all of Hopkins's poetry and a generous selection of his prose writings to explore the essence of his work and thinking. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) was one of the most innovative of nineteenth-century poets. During his tragically short life he strove to reconcile his religious and artistic vocations, and this edition demonstrates the range of his interests. It includes all his poetry, from best-known works such as "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and "The Windhover" to translations, foreign language poems, plays, and verse fragments, and the recently discovered poem "Consule Jones." In addition there are excerpts from Hopkins's journals, letters, and spiritual writings. The poems are printed in chronological order to show Hopkins's changing preoccupations, and all the texts have been established from original manuscripts.

A major new edition, freshly edited in many cases from manuscripts, of Shelley's poetry and prose. It contains the longer poems from Queen Mab to The Triumph of Life, including generous selections from Laon and Cythna, a wide range of his shorter poems, and much of his major prose, including A Defence of Poetry.

Livy's great history of Rome contains, in Books 21 to 30, the definitive ancient account of Hannibal's invasion of Italy in 218 BC, and the war he fought with the Romans over the following sixteen years. This new translation captures the brilliance of Livy's style, and is accompanied by a fascinating introduction and notes.

With its rich and ebullient language, ironic twists and startling juxtapositions, Dead Souls (1842) stands as one of the most dazzling and poetic masterpieces of the nineteenth century. This brilliant new translation by Christopher English is complemented by a superb introductory essay by the pre-eminent Gogol scholar, Robert Maguire.

The first for forty years, this brillaint translation of a medieval classic offers a vivid and unique insight into the life of a great monastery in late twelfth-century England. At the centre of this community is Abbot Samson, a charismatic figure of enormous power, whose exploits include preventing an illegal tournament, excommunicating forty drunken knights who had escaped his enforced sanctuary, countless property disputes, and the opening of the tomb of StEdmund.

This is a verse translation of Lucretius' only known work, "On the Nature of the Universe", a didactic poem in six books of hexameters. Melville's particularly literal translation of the use of metaphor should be helpful to those looking at the text from a scientific or philosophical point of view.

Foxe's Book of Martyrs is a collection of unforgettable accounts of religious persecution. This modernized selection brings together some of the most stirring tales of the interrogation and execution of heretics burnt at the stake in the reign of Mary, with some of the original woodcut illustrations and an illuminating introduction.

This is the fourth volume of Euripides plays in new translation. The four plays it contains, Ion, Orestes, The Phoenician Women and The Suppliant Women, explore ethical and political themes, contrasting the claims of patriotism with family loyalty, pragmatism with justice, the idea that 'might is right' with the ideal of clemency.

Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) was Mark Twain's last serious work of fiction, and perhaps the only real novel that he ever produced. Written in a more sombre vein than his other Mississippi writings, the novel reveals the sinister forces that Mark Twain felt to be threatening the American dream. In spite of a plot which includes child swapping, palmistry, and a pair of Italian twins, this astringent work also raises the serious issue of racial differences.This volume also includes two other late works `Those Extraordinary Twins' and `The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'.

This volume brings together extracts of the major political writings of Mary Wollstonecraft in the order in which they appeared in the revolutionary 1790s. It traces her passionate and indignant response to the excitement of the early days of the French Revolution and then her uneasiness at its later bloody phase. It reveals her developing understanding of women's involvement in the political and social life of the nation and her growing awareness of therelationship between politics and economics and between political institutions and the individual. In personal terms, the works show her struggling with a belief in the perfectibility of human nature through rational education, a doctrine that became weaker under the onslaught of her own miserable experience and the revolutionary massacres. Janet Todd's introduction illuminates the progress or Wollstonecraft's thought, showing that a reading of all three works allows her to emerge as a more substantial political writer than a study of The Rights of Woman alone can reveal.

Written by an emigrant French aristocrat turned farmer, the Letters from an American Farmer (1782) posed the famous question `What, then, is the American, this new man?', as the new nation took shape before the eyes of the world. The Letters addresses some of American literature's most pressing concerns: the issue of American identity, personal determination, and freedom from institutional oppression. Celebrating the largeness and fertility of the land, Cr¿coeur's narrative also introduces darker and more symbolic elements, including slavery, and casts a long shadow of influence on subsequent writing about the moral, spiritual, and material topography of the new nation.

Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) was a goldsmith and sculptor whose autobiography is one of the most vivid and interesting ever written. In it he describes artistic techniques such as bronze casting as well as a fascinating account of life and intrigue in 16th century Italy. This new translation is based on the latest critical edition of the text.

In addition to its interest as one of Plato's dramatic masterpieces, the "Protagoras" presents a vivid picture of the crisis of 5th-century Greek thought. This revised edition contains revisions in the translation and commentary, and features a new preface and an updated bibliography.

Rasselas and his companions leave the 'happy valley' in search of 'the choice of life'. Johnson's philosophical tale considers such things as the nature of poetry, the stability of reason, the immortality of the soul, and the pursuit of happiness. This new edition relates the novel to Johnson's life and the political and social context.

This selection brings together thirty of Woolf's best essays across a wide range of subjects including writing and reading, the role and reputation of women writers, the art of biography, and the London scene. They are enchanting in their own right, and indispensable to an understanding of this great writer.

McTeague (1899) tells the story of charlatan dentist McTeague and his wife Trina, and their spiralling descent into moral corruption. Norris is often considered to be the `American Zola', and this passionate tale of greed, degeneration, and death is one of the most purely naturalistic American novels of the nineteenth century. It also formed the basis for Erich von Stroheim's cult film, Greed (1923).

This collection of eleven stories spans virtually the whole of Tolstoy's creative life. They deal with journeys of self-discovery and the moral and religious questioning that characterizes Tolstoy's criticism and philosophy. The stories range over much of the Russian world of the nineteenth century and present a fascinating picture of Tolstoy's skill and artistry.

Tarr is the blackly comic story of the lives and loves of two artists, set against the backdrop of Paris before the start of the First World War. The first edition to do the novel justice, with an introduction and notes placing it in the context of social satire and avant-garde art movements, offering new insights into a major Modernist novel.

This unique edition of the Gospels presents the Authorized King James text in modernized spelling with invaluable Introduction and Notes, which provide historical and critical context, highlighting how each Gospel offers its own distinctive and memorable portrait of Jesus.

An unhappy orphaned girl is transformed by the redeeming power of nature into an unselfish child who transforms the lives of others in Burnett's classic children's story. This edition explores the relationship between the book and other literary genres and historical influences, and includes the companion-piece, 'My Robin'.

Set in the summer of 1765, Redgauntlet centres around a third, fictitious Jacobite rebellion and a plot to enthrone the exiled Prince Charles Edward Stewart. The last of Scott's major Scottish novels, this is the only available critical edition. It reprints the Magnum text of 1832.