Books published by publisher Broadview Press

Among the first works of fiction in English by a North American writer of Asian descent, the stories collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance present a complex and sympathetic picture of life in American Chinese communities in the early twentieth century. Far’s seemingly simple stories of family life reveal the tensions created by cultural assimilation. Rather than embracing any particular identity, the stories show a cosmopolitan sensibility that embraces “the motley throng of all nationalities’ in the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Appendices include materials on Chinese exclusion, missionaries and assimilation, and contemporary representations of Chinatown.

Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous literary characters in history, and his story has spawned hundreds of retellings. Inspired by the life of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who lived for several years on a Pacific island, the novel tells the story of Crusoe’s survival after shipwreck on an island, interaction with the mainland’s native inhabitants, and eventual rescue. Read variously as economic fable, religious allegory, or imperialist fantasy, Crusoe has never lost its appeal as one of the most compelling adventure stories of all time. In addition to an introduction and helpful notes, this Broadview Edition includes a wide range of appendices that situate Defoe’s 1719 novel amidst castaway narratives, economic treatises, reports of cannibalism, explorations of solitude, and Defoe’s own writings on slavery and the African trade. A final appendix presents images of Crusoe’s rescue of Friday from a dozen of the most significant illustrated editions of the novel published between 1719 and 1920.

The Beetle (1897) tells the story of a fantastical creature, “born of neither god nor man,” with supernatural and hypnotic powers, who stalks British politician Paul Lessingham through fin de siècle London in search of vengeance for the defilement of a sacred tomb in Egypt. In imitation of various popular fiction genres of the late nineteenth century, Marsh unfolds a tale of terror, late imperial fears, and the “return of the repressed,” through which the crisis of late imperial Englishness is revealed. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a rich selection of historical documents that situate the novel within the contexts of fin de siècle London, England’s interest and involvement in Egypt, the emergence of the New Woman, and contemporary theories of mesmerism and animal magnetism.

This volume brings together the full contents of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922), together with an informative introduction and a selection of background materials. Included as well are two of Eliot’s most influential essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). As with other volumes in this series, the material appearing here is for the most part drawn from The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, acclaimed as “the new standard” in the field. Appendices include a wide range of contextual materials pertaining to Modernism; writings by Ezra Pound, H.D., and Mina Loy; reviews of The Waste Land; art by Wyndham Lewis; and excerpts from essays by Virginia Woolf and others.

L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables is one of the best-known and most enduringly popular novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1908, it has never been out of print, and it continues, nearly a century after its first appearance, to appeal to new readers in many locations around the world. Anne of Green Gables is the story of how a little girl, adopted from an orphan asylum by a brother and sister seeking a boy to help them on their Prince Edward Island farm, grows to responsible young adulthood and, as she grows, brings light and life to her adoptive home. Although it is, as Montgomery described it in her journal, a “simple little tale,” it has nonetheless generated not only an international readership but, more recently, an increasing critical interest that focuses on the text’s engagement with social and political issues, its relation to Montgomery’s life and her other writing, and its circulation as a popular cultural commodity in Canada and elsewhere. This Broadview edition is based on the first edition of Anne of Green Gables. It includes a critical introduction and a fascinating selection of contemporary documents, including contemporary reviews of the novel, other writings by L.M. Montgomery (stories, writings on gender and on writing), and excerpts from the “Pansy” books by Isabella Macdonald Alden.

William Godwin was one of the most popular novelists of the Romantic era; P.B. Shelley praised him, Byron drew heavily on his narrative style, and Mary Shelley, Godwin’s daughter, dedicated Frankenstein to him. Caleb Williams is the riveting account of a young man whose curiosity leads him to pry into a murder from the past. The first novel of crime and detection in English literature, Caleb Williams is also a powerful exposé of the evils and inequities of the political and social system in 1790s Britain. In addition to the text itself, the editors have included an extensive selection of primary source materials from the period, ranging from Godwin’s original manuscript ending and excerpts from his political writings to contemporary reviews, the political writings of Burke and Paine, and materials on criminals and the English prison system.

First performed by Shakespeare’s rivals in the 1590s, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta was a trend-setting, innovative play whose black comedy and final tragic irony illuminate the darker regions of the Elizabethan cultural imagination. Although Jews were banished from England in 1291, the Jew in the form of Barabas, the play’s protagonist, returns on the stage to embody and to challenge the dramatic and cultural anti-Semitic stereotypes out of which he is constructed. The result is a theatrically sophisticated but deeply unsettling play whose rich cultural significance extends beyond the early modern period to the present day. The introduction and historical documents in this edition provide a rich context for the world of the play’s composition and production, including materials on Jewishness and anti-Semitism, the political struggles over Malta, and Christopher Marlowe’s personal and political reputation.

Emerging from Dickens’s preoccupation in the early 1840s with issues of poverty, ignorance, and cruelty, this classic story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, visited by four ghosts on Christmas Eve, was first published in 1843 to strong reviews and popular success. The Broadview edition uses the first edition with original drawings by John Leech. This edition also includes Washington Irving’s descriptions of English Christmas customs; essays by Dickens on Christmas, and his essay “A Walk in a Workhouse”; a British government report on the lives of child labourers; a speech by Dickens on the importance of educating the poor; selected letters; contemporary reviews; and a listing of film, television, and radio adaptations of the book.

Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman originally appeared in serial form in the women’s weekly The Lady’s Pictorial. Like Hepworth Dixon herself, the novel’s heroine Mary Erle is a woman writer struggling to make her living as a journalist in the 1880s. Forced by her father’s sudden death to support herself, Mary Erle turns to writing three-penny-a-line fiction, works that (as her editor insists) must have a ball in the first volume, a picnic and a parting in the second, and an opportune death in the third. This Broadview edition’s rich selection of historical documents helps contextualize The Story of a Modern Woman in relation to contemporary debates about the “New Woman.”

In 1848, Henry David Thoreau twice delivered lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, on “the relationship of the individual to the state.” The essay now known as Civil Disobedience is a significant and widely admired contribution to abolitionist literature, as well as an anti-war tract, but Thoreau’s focus is less on political organization and solidarity than it is on personal choice and individual responsibility. Cultivating personal integrity in the face of political injustice is the project Thoreau defends in Civil Disobedience; this focus has made the work highly influential for twentieth- and twenty-first-century political movements. Bob Pepperman Taylor’s new Introduction explains the work’s specific political context, helping readers to understand the text as Thoreau wrote it. The edition also offers a number of historical documents on Thoreau’s abolitionism; the war with Mexico; and Thoreau’s philosophical development in relation to other thinkers.

When first published, King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was an enormous popular success. The narrative follows the explorations of Allan Quatermain, a fortune hunter who travels to Africa in search of ancient treasures and a lost fellow explorer. Written as an adventure story, the novel is also a late-Victorian imperial romance that illuminates the politics of British imperialist capitalism in 1870s and 1880s South Africa. This edition includes contemporary reviews, other writings by Haggard on Africa and romance, and documents focusing on imperialism and diamond mining in late nineteenth-century South Africa.