British Literature Editions
Showing 49–72 of 379 resultsSorted by latest
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In a Glass Darkly
From the predatory same-sex desire in “Carmilla” to the ghostly hallucinations in “Green Tea,” the five supernatural stories in In a Glass Darkly reflect a…
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Quest of the Holy Grail
The Old French Lancelot-Graal is an important but massive work, providing a place for King Arthur not only in the history of Britain but also…
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Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in English and is perhaps the greatest example of…
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The Lais of Marie de France
Composed in French in twelfth-century England, these twelve brief verse narratives center on the joys, sorrows, and complications of love affairs in a context that…
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A Marriage Below Zero
A Marriage Below Zero is the first novel in English to explicitly explore the subject of male homosexuality. Written by a British émigré to America,…
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The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene
Few medieval plays in English have attracted as much twenty-first-century interest as the Digby Mary Magdalene, an early-fifteenth-century drama that, as Chester Scoville puts it,…
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The Melting-Pot
Israel Zangwill, an Anglo-Jewish author and son of immigrants, wrote The Melting-Pot to demonstrate how immigrants could become good American citizens, hoping to forestall the…
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Othello
Although other Shakespeare plays offer higher body counts, more gore, and more plentiful scenes of heartbreak, Othello packs an unusually powerful affective punch, stunning us…
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A City Girl
In April 1888, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the English novelist and journalist Margaret Harkness, expressing his appreciation for her first novel, A City…
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Coryats Crudities: Selections
The early seventeenth-century traveler Thomas Coryate’s five-month tour of Western Europe culminated in Coryats Crudities, one of the strangest travelogues published in early modern England.…
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The Four Branches of The Mabinogi
Set in a primal past, the Mabinogi bridges many genres; it is part pre-Christian myth, part fairytale, part guide to how nobles should act, and…
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Mathilda
Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, the story of one woman’s existential struggle after learning of her father’s desire for her, has been identified as Shelley’s most important…
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Pizarro
Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s last play, an adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru first performed in 1799, was one of the most popular…
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Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works
Immensely popular with contemporary readers, Smith’s major poetic works are foundational texts of the Romantic period. Smith’s innovations in poetic form have also placed her…
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Manfred
The quintessential depiction of the Byronic hero is accompanied in this edition by a substantial selection of contextual materials, including Byron’s original draft of the…
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The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman
The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778) tells the story of a fictional midshipman abandoned in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, after a battle with Maori…
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The Half-Caste
Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste concerns the coming-of-age of its title character, the mixed-race Zillah Le Poer, daughter of an English merchant and an Indian…
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The Grand Babylon Hotel
The Grand Babylon Hotel opens with New York millionaire Theodore Racksole’s demand for an “Angel Kiss” —an American concoction the Grand Babylon does not serve.…
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Utilitarianism – Ed. Bailey
Utilitarianism is a classic work of ethical theory, arguably the most persuasive and comprehensible presentation of this widely influential position. While he didn’t invent utilitarianism,…
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Dubliners
This group of fifteen brief narratives connected by a place and a time—the city of Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century—was written when…
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The Life of Mr Richard Savage
The Life of Mr Richard Savage was the first important book by a then-unknown Grub Street hack, Samuel Johnson. Richard Savage (1697—1743) was a poet,…
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The Spanish Tragedy
The Spanish Tragedy became one of the most successful plays on the Elizabethan English stage and laid the foundation of the revenge tragedy, a genre…
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Laon and Cythna
Laon and Cythna is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most celebrated, and most controversial, literary works. At once philosophical treatise and love story, it follows…
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The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World
First published in 1666, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World is the first fictional portrayal of women…