A beautiful and hearty farm girl, Tess Durbeyfield is about tohave her life tragically changed by forces outside her control:lust, poverty, and hypocrisy. This controversial Victorian tale hascome to be recognized as a triumph of literary art.
Jude Fawley is a bright but impoverished stonemason who aspiresto attend university and become a scholar. H is failure to fulfillthe expectations of the two women he loves points to his finaltragedy. Concerned with the destructive conventions of marriage andthe English class system, Jude the Obscure is a raging indictmentof Victorian society; the censure of this insightful book wasalmost without precedent in the history of English literature.
In The Purgatorio , Dante describes his journey to therenunciation of sin, accepting his suffering in preparation for hiscoming into the presence of God. This brilliant translation ofDante's canticle crystallizes the great poet's immortal conceptionof the aspiring soul.
If there ever has been a groundbreaking edition that likewisereturns the reader to the original Shakespeare text, it will be theApplause Folio Texts. If there has ever been an accessible versionof the Folio, it is this edition, set for the first time in modernfonts. The Folio is the source of all other editions. The Foliotext forces us to re-examine the assumptions and prejudices whichhave encumbered over four hundred years of scholarship andperformance. Notes refer the reader to subsequent editorialinterventions, and offer the reader a multiplicity ofinterpretations. Notes also advise the reader on variations betweenFolios and Quartos. The heavy mascara of four centuries ofShakespearean glossing has by now glossed over the originalcountenance of Shakespeare's work. Never has there been a Folioavailable in modern reading fonts. While other complete Folioeditions continue to trade simply on the facsimile appearance ofthe Elizabethan "look," none of them is easily and practicallyutilized in general Shakespeare
Free when packaged with any Damrosch World Literature title.
The epic tale of Don Quixote and his faithful squire, SanchoPanza, and their picaresque adventures in the world of seventeenthcentury Spain, form the basis of one of the great treasures ofWestern literature - a book that is both a hilarious satire of thechivalric code and a biting portrayal of an age in which nobilitycan be a form of madness. This brand-new, thoroughly moderntranslation, and the extensive introduction and footnotes, makeCervantes' masterpiece more delightful and accessible to Englishreaders than ever before.
HarperCollins is pround to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!' Challenging the hypocrisy and social conventions of the rural Victorian world, Tess of the D'Urbervilles follows the story of Tess Durbeyfield as she attempts to escape the poverty of her background, seeking wealth by claiming connection with the aristocratic D'Urberville family. It is through Tess's relationships with two very different men that Hardy tells the story of his tragic heroine, and exposes the double standards of the world that she inhabits with searing pathos and heart-rending sentiment.
Purchase of this book includes free trial access towww.million-books.com where you can read more than a million booksfor free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IllSTEVE TREATS It was for several minutes, I suppose, that I stooddrawing these silent morals. No man occupied himself with me. Quietvoices, and games of chance, and glasses lifted to drink, continuedto be the peaceful order of the night. And into my thoughts brokethe voice of that card-dealer who had already spoken so sagely. Healso took his turn at moralizing. "What did I tell you?" heremarked to the man for whom he continued to deal, and whocontinued to lose money to him. "Tell me when?" " Didn't I tell youhe'd not shoot ? " the dealer pursued with complacence. " You gotready to dodge. You had no call to be concerned. He's not the kinda man need feel anxious about." The player looked over at theVirginian, doubtfully. " Well," he said, " I don't know what youfolks call a dangerous man." " Not him " exclaimed the dealer withadmi
Since its publication in 1905 The House of Mirth has commandedattention for the sharpness of Wharton's observations and the powerof her style. Its heroine, Lily Bart, is beautiful, poor, andunmarried at 29. In her search for a husband with money andposition she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of thetragedy that finally overwhelms her. The House of Mirth is a lucid,disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon womenof Wharton's generation. Herself born into Old New York Society,Wharton watched as an entirely new set of people living by newcodes of conduct entered the metropolitan scene. In telling thestory of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts theage-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways thattransform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting moderndocument of cultural anthropology. --This text refers to an outof print or unavailable edition of this title.
First published in book form in 1885, William Dean Howells'stimeless epic of a self-made man, The Rise of Silas Lapham was thefirst important novel to center on the American businessman-and thefirst to treat its theme with a realism that was to foreshadow thework of modern writers.
