Books in Oxford Worlds Classics series

A tour-de-force of writing by Daniel Defoe, this extraordinary novel tells the vivid and racy tale of a woman's experience in the seamy side of life in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England and America. Born in Newgate prison, and seduced in the home of her adoptive family, Moll learns to live off her wits, defying the traditional depiction of women as helpless victims. First published in 1722, and one of the earliest novels in the English language, its account of opportunism, endurance, and survival speaks as strongly to us today as it did to its original readers. This new edition offers a critically edited text and a wide-ranging introduction by Linda Bree, who sheds light on the circumstances out of which the novel grew, its strengths and weaknesses as fiction, and the social and cultural issues examined in the novel. In addition, her comprehensive notes clarify meanings, allusions, and other references. Finally, the book includes a glossary, a note on money, and maps of England, London, and the American colonies.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Twenty Years After (1845), the sequel to The Three Musketeers, is a supreme creation of suspense and heroic adventure.Two decades have passed since the musketeers triumphed over Cardinal Richelieu and Milady. Time has weakened their resolve, and dispersed their loyalties. But treasons and strategems still cry out for justice: civil war endangers the throne of France, while in England Cromwell threatens to send Charles I to the scaffold. Dumas brings his immortal quartet out of retirement to cross swords with time, the malevolence of men, and the forces of history. But their greatest test is a titanic struggle with the son of Milady, who wears the face of Evil.The only edition in print, David Coward sets both the author and his exciting tale in their historical and cultural contexts.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

First published in 1844, this is Thackeray's earliest substantial work of fiction and perhaps his most original. The text is that of Saintbury's 1908 Oxford edition which incorporates Thackeray's revisions.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.'Becky Sharp is sharp, calculating, and determined to succeed. Craving wealth and a position in society, she charms, hoodwinks, manipulates everyone she meets, rising in the world as she attaches herself to a succession of rich men. Becky's fortunes are contrasted with those of her best friend Amelia, who has none of Becky's wit and vitality but whose gentle-heartedness attracts the devotion of the loyal Dobbin. Set during the Napoleonic wars, Vanity Fair follows Becky as she cuts a swathe through Regency society. Thackeray paints a panoramic portrait of the age, with war, money and national identity his great subjects. The battle for social success is as fierce as the battle of Waterloo, and its casualties as stricken. The satire is at once biting and profound, sparing none in a clear-eyed exposure of a world on the make. Thackeray's scepticism of human motives borders on cynicism yet Vanity Fair is among the funniest novels of the Victorian age. This new edition includes all Thackeray's original illustrations. 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 volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Combining a sensational story of a man's physical and moral decline through alcohol, a study of marital breakdown, a disquisition on the care and upbringing of children, and a hard-hitting critique of the position of women in Victorian society, this passionate tale of betrayal is set within a stern moral framework tempered by Anne Bront�'s optimistic belief in universal redemption. It tells the story of the estranged wife of a dissolute rake, desperate to protect her son from his destructive influence, in full flight from a shocking world of debauchery and cruelty. Drawing on her first-hand experiences with her brother Branwell, Bront�'s novel scandalized contemporary readers and still retains its power to shock today. The new introduction by Josephine McDonagh sheds light on the intellectual and cultural context of the novel, its complex narrative structure, and the contemporary moral and medical debates about alcohol and the body with which the novel engages. Based on the authoritative Clarendon text, the book has an improved chronology, an up-to-date bibliography, and many informative notes.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts' The greatest 'state of the nation' novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through her portrait of a Midlands town, George Eliot addresses gender relations and class, self-knowledge and self-delusion, community and individualism. Eliot follows the fortunes of the town's central characters as they find, lose, and rediscover ideals and vocations in the world. Through its psychologically rich portraits, the novel contains some of the great characters of literature, including the idealistic but naive Dorothea Brooke, beautiful and egotistical Rosamund Vincy, the dry scholar Edward Casaubon, the wise and grounded Mary Garth, and the brilliant but proud Dr Lydgate. In its whole view of a society, the novel offers enduring insight into the pains and pleasures of life with others, and explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, and, above all, human relationships. This edition uses the definitive Clarendon text.

Alexandre Dumas was already a best-selling novelist when he wrote this historical romance, combining (as he claimed) the two essentials of life--"l'action et l'amour." The Man in the Iron Mask concludes the epic adventures of the three Muskateers, as Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and their friend D'Artagnan, once invincible, meet their destinies.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) is a compelling novel of passion and daring. Set at the beginning of the 19th-century in northern Italy, it traces the joyous but ill-starred amorous exploits of a handsome young aristocrat called Fabrice del Dongo. The novel's great achievement is to conjure up the excitement and romance of youth while never losing sight of the harsh realities which beset the pursuit of happiness. This new translation captures Stendhal's narrative verse, while the Introduction explores the novel's reception and the reasons for its enduring popularity and power.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

One of Dickens's greatest works of social criticism, Little Dorrit is a scathing indictment of mid-Victorian England which centers on the Marshalsea Prison and the Dorrit family who live there, against a background of government incompetence and financial scandal. Revelation and redemption haunt Dickens's portrayal of human relations as fundamentally distorted by class and money. The swindling financier Merdle, the bureaucratic nightmare of the Circumlocution Office, and a teeming cast of characters display the inadequacy of secular morality in the face of contemporary social and political confusion. This edition uses the definitive Clarendon text and includes all forty-one original illustrations by Phiz. The volume boasts a new introduction by Dennis Walder, highlighting Dickens's move from social and political issues to more personal, even spiritual concerns while maintaining the wide scope of his mature fiction. Also included are an up-to-date bibliography and full chronology of the author's life and times, an appendix which reproduces Dickens's number plans for the novel, substantially revised and updated notes, and a map of London. Mixing humor and pathos, irony and satire, Little Dorrit reveals a master of fiction in top form.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous love stories in the English language. It is also, as the Introduction to this edition reveals, one of the most potent revenge narratives. Its ingenious narrative structure, vivid evocation of landscape, and the extraordinary power of its depiction of love and hatred have given it a unique place in English literature. The passionate tale of Catherine and Heathcliff is here presented in a new edition that examines the qualities that make it such a powerful and compelling novel. The Introduction by Helen Small sheds light on the novel's oddness and power, its amorality and Romantic influences, its structure and narration, and the sadistic violence embodied in the character of Heathcliff. The volume retains the authoritative Clarendon text and notes, with new notes that identify literary allusions hitherto unnoticed. In addition, the edition boasts two appendices, one of which contains poems by Emily Brontë selected for their relevance to the novel, and a second which contains Charlotte Brontë's "Biographical Notice of Ellis & Acton Bell" and "Preface to the New Edition."About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Decameron (c.1351) was written in the wake of the Black Death, a shattering epidemic which had shaken Florence's confident entrepreneurial society to its core.In a country villa outside the city, ten young noble men and women who have escaped the plague decide to tell each other stories. Boccaccio's skill as a dramatist is masterfully displayed in this virtuoso performance of one hundred tales, vivid portraits of people from all stations in life, with plots which revel in a bewildering variety of human reactions. Themes are playfully restated from one story to another within an elegant and refined framework. One of Chaucer's most fruitful sources for the Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's work artfully combines the essential ingredients of narrative: fate and desire, crises and quick-thinking.This new translation by Guido Waldman captures the exuberance and variety and tone of Boccaccio's masterpiece.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The second novel in Trollope's Palliser series, Phineas Finn's engaging plot embraces matters as diverse as reform, the position of women, the Irish question, and the conflict between integrity and ambition. Through the engaging figure of the handsome Irishman Phineas Finn, Trollope explores the realities of political life, and the clash between compromise and conviction, that is as topical today as it was in the 1860s. In his introduction, Simon Dentith looks at the British political context and the interwoven strands of politics, the rights of women, and their struggle for equality in marriage. He also considers the novel's interesting publishing history and Trollope's own parliamentary ambitions. One appendix outlines the internal chronology of the series, providing a unique understanding of the six novels as a linked narrative, and a second appendix describes the passage of the second Reform Act of 1867, a controversial measure that extended the franchise and was the subject of heated Conservative and Liberal debate. In addition, there is a biography of Trollope and a chronology of his life as well as extensive notes.