Shakespeare’s greatest achievement in nondramatic verse washis collection of 154 magnificent sonnets that portray a tumultuousworld of love, rivalry, and conflict among a poet, an aristocraticyoung man, a rival poet, and a mysterious “dark lady.” Moreprofound than other Elizabethan sonnet sequences and neversurpassed as archetypes of the form, these poems explore almostevery imaginable emotional complexity related to love andfriendship. Some poems are dark, bitter, and self-hating, othersexpress idealism with unmatchable eloquence–and all are ofquintessential beauty, part of the world’s great literaryheritage. In addition to his sonnets, Shakespeare published two long poemsearly in his career: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.Immediately popular in Shakespeare’s time, they display a richnessthat can also reward us with insights into the powerful imagery ofhis plays. Rounding out this volume are two minor poems, “A Lover’sComplaint” and “The Phoenix and Turtle,”
Professor Chen Han-seng has a unique and remarkable life. Hewaseducated in a well-known Dong Lin School in Wuxi where hewas born;later, he went to the United States to study history atPomonaCollege in southern California where he enrolled underthewesternized name, Geoffrey Chu Chen, and graduated with honorsin1920. He then went to study at the University of Chicago andbecamean assistant to Professor Andrew C. McLaughlin who taughtAmericanConstitution History. In 1921, he received his Master'sDegree withthe title of the thesis——"The Conference of Ambassa-dors in London,1912-13, and the Creation of the Albanian State:A DiplomaticStudy."
As the citizens of Venice compete for advantageousmarriages, wealth, and status, a moneylender is intent on deadlyrevenge. Mistrust and resentment thrive in Shakespeare’s darkcomedy. Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and EricRasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars,this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts andauthoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Eachplay includes an Introduction as well as an overview ofShakespeare’s theatrical career; commentary on past and currentproductions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, anddesigners; scene-by-scene analysis; key facts about the work; achronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; and black-and-whiteillustrations. Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers,these modern and accessible editions from the Royal ShakespeareCompany set a new standard in Shakespearean literature for thetwenty-first century.
The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentiethcentury: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bankofficer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defendhimself against a charge about which he can get no information.Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy ofthe excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness oftotalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chillingtruth for generations of readers. This new edition is based uponthe work of an international team of experts who have restored thetext, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create aversion that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.In his brilliant translation, Breon Mitchell masterfully reproducesthe distinctive poetics of Kafka's prose, revealing a novel that isas full of energy and power as it was when it was firstwritten.
This major collection contains all of Doris Lessing's shortfiction, other than the stories set in Africa, from the beginningof her career until now. Set in London, Paris, the south of France,the English countryside, these thirty-five stories reflect thethemes that have always characterized Lessing's work: the bedrockrealities of marriage and other relationships between men andwomen; the crisis of the individual whose very psyche is threatenedby a society unattuned to its own most dangerous qualities; thefate of women.
In a society dominated by religion and bound by ties of strictfamily loyalty, two teenagers are trapped by their secret love. Asa dangerous vendetta spills onto the streets, the young lovers areforced to risk all to be together in Shakespeare’s fast-pacedtragedy of thwarted love. Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and EricRasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars,this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts andauthoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Eachplay includes an Introduction as well as an overview ofShakespeare’s theatrical career; commentary on past and currentproductions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, anddesigners; scene-by-scene analysis; key facts about the work; achronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; and black-and-whiteillustrations. Ideal for students, theater professionals, and generalreaders, these modern and accessible editions from the RoyalShakespeare Company set
The dramatic concluding months of The Wars of the Rosesprovide the setting for Shakespeare’s incomparable saga of powerand intrigue. Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and EricRasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars,this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts andauthoritative notes from William Shakespeare: CompleteWorks. Each play includes an Introduction as well as anoverview of Shakespeare’s theatrical career; commentary on past andcurrent productions based on interviews with leading directors,actors, and designers; scene-by-scene analysis; key facts about thework; a chronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; andblack-and-white illustrations. Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers,these modern and accessible editions set a new standard inShakespearean literature for the twenty-first century.
When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne,everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. Butwhen Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with talesof a strange party at a mysterious house and a beautiful girlhidden within it, he has been changed forever. In his restlesssearch for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there,Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losingeverything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration andadult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries thereader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal ofdesperate friendship and vanished adolescence.
Pronounced obscene when it was first published in 1915, " TheRainbow" is the epic story of three generations of the Brangwens, aMidlands family. A visionary novel, considered to be one ofLawrence's finest, it explores the complex sexual and psychologicalrelationships between men and women in an increasinglyindustrialized world. "Lives are separate, but life iscontinuous--it continues in the fresh start by the separate life ineach generation," wrote F. R. Leavis. "No work, I think, haspresented this perception as an imaginatively realized truth morecompellingly than "The Rainbow.""
在线阅读本书 An exciting new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare withthese features: Illustrated with photographs from NewYork Shakespeare Festival productions, vivid readable readableintroductions for each play by noted scholar David Bevington, alively personal foreword by Joseph Papp, an insightful essay on theplay in performance, modern spelling and pronunciation, up-to-dateannotated bibliographies, and convenient listing of keypassages.
Considered by some to be her finest work, Edith Wharton's Summer created a sensation when first published in 1917, as it was one of the first novels to deal honestly with a young woman's sexual awakening. Summer is the story of Charity Royall, a child of mountain moonshiners adopted by a family in a poor New England town, who has a passionate love affair with Lucius Harney, an educated man from the city. Wharton broke the conventions of women's romantic fiction by making Charity a thoroughly independent modern woman—in touch with her emotions and sexuality, yet kept from love and the larger world she craves by the overwhelming pressures of heredity and society. Praised for its realism and honesty by such writers as Joseph Conrad and Henry James and compared to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Summer remains as fresh and powerful a novel today as when it was first written.
In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorizethe streets, where government has broken down and meaninglessviolence holds sway, a woman -- middle-aged and middle-class -- isbrought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is herresponsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author hascalled "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal -- aglimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present,and of the forces that alone can save us from totaldestruction.
In the "brilliant novel" ("The New York Times") V.S. Naipaultakes us deeply into the life of one man--an Indian who, uprootedby the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in anisolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independentAfrican nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbingvision yet of what happens in a place caught between thedangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past andtraditions.
With his family’s claim to the throne uncertain, Henry seeksto secure his position by turning the country’s attention abroad.But when his outnumbered army is trapped at Agincourt, disasterseems inevitable. Shakespeare probes notions of leadership andpower in this iconic depiction of England’s charismatic warriorking. Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and EricRasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars,this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts andauthoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Eachplay includes an Introduction as well as an overview ofShakespeare’s theatrical career; commentary on past and currentproductions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, anddesigners; scene-by-scene analysis; key facts about the work; achronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; and black-and-whiteillustrations. Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers,these modern and accessible edition
First published in Arabic in 1983, this brief but powerfulparable is presented as the journal of a traveler known as IbnFattouma. A mystical, lyrical Pilgrim's Progress set in a mythical,timeless Middle East, by the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize forLiterature.
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his nativeRussian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literarycareer. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the worksof Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: thestory of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished e migre poetliving in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write--abook very much like The Gift itself.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Arriving in a village to takeup the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of acastle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter andbaffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about hisduties. As the villagers and the Castle officials block his effortsat every turn, K.'s consuming quest-quite possibly a self-imposedone-to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take itsmeasure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that thewould-be surveyor in "The Castle" is driven by a wish "to get clearabout ultimate things," an unrealizable desire that provided thedriving force behind all of Kafka's dazzlingly uncanny fictions.Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir "From the Hardcoveredition."
FROM THE WORLD FAMOUS ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY, THE FIRSTAUTHORITATIVE, MODERNIZED, AND CORRECTED EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE’SFIRST FOLIO IN THREE CENTURIES. Skillfully assembled by Shakespeare’s fellow actors in 1623,the First Folio was the original Complete Works. It is arguably themost important literary work in the English language. But startingwith Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and continuing to the present day,Shakespeare editors have mixed Folio and Quarto texts, graduallycorrupting the original Complete Works with errors and conflatedtextual variations. Now Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today’s mostaccomplished Shakespearean scholars, have edited the First Folio asa complete book, resulting in a definitive Complete Works for thetwenty-first century. Combining innovative scholarship with brilliant commentary andtextual analysis that emphasizes performance history and values,this landmark edition will be indispensable to students, theaterprofessionals, and general readers alik
Set in a courtly world of masked revels and dances, this playturns on the archetypal story of a lady falsely accused ofunfaithfulness, spurned by her bridegroom, and finally vindicatedand reunited with him. Villainy, schemes, and deceits threaten todarken the brilliant humor and sparkling wordplay–but the hilariouscounterplot of a warring couple, Beatrice and Benedick, steals thescene as the two are finally tricked into admitting their love foreach other in Shakespeare’s superb comedy of manners. Each Edition Includes: Comprehensive explanatory notes Vivid introductions and the most up-to-datescholarship Clear, modernized spelling and punctuation, enablingcontemporary readers to understand the Elizabethan English Completely updated, detailed bibliographies andperformance histories An interpretive essay on film adaptations of the play,along with an extensive filmography From the Paperback edition.
The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant career, AHouse for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired byNaipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentiethcentury's finest novels. In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fightingagainst destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only toface a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to anotherafter the drowning death of his father, for which he isinadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he cancall home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family onwhom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on anarduous–and endless–struggle to weaken their hold over him andpurchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy ofmanners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s questfor autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.
