Editions

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Fundamental Political Writings

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Fundamental Political Writings

    This classroom edition includes On the Social Contract, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and the…

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

    Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

    Published in the bicentenary year of Frederick Douglass’s birth and in a Black Lives Matter era, this edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick…

  • Iola Leroy

    Iola Leroy

    Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil…

  • The Lais of Marie de France

    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…

  • Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Essayist, lecturer, poet, and America’s first “public intellectual,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) is the central figure in nineteenth-century American letters and the leader (albeit reluctantly)…

  • A Marriage Below Zero

    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,…

  • Tender Buttons

    Tender Buttons

    The first publisher of Tender Buttons described the book’s effect on readers as “something like terror, there are no known precedents to cling to.” Written…

  • The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene

    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,…

  • The Melting-Pot

    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…

  • Othello

    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…

  • A City Girl

    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…

  • Coryats Crudities: Selections

    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.…

  • The Four Branches of The Mabinogi

    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…

  • Mathilda

    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…

  • Pizarro

    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…

  • The Decameron: Selected Tales

    The Decameron: Selected Tales

    This edition presents 33 of the 100 tales, with at least two from each of the ten days of storytelling. Boccaccio’s general introduction and conclusion…

  • Ida May

    Ida May

    The sentimental antislavery novel Ida May appeared so like its predecessor in the genre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that for the month of November 1854, reviewers…

  • Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works

    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…

  • Ragged Dick and Risen from the Ranks

    Ragged Dick and Risen from the Ranks

    In Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s most successful book, Alger codified the basic formula he would follow in nearly a hundred subsequent novels for boys: a…

  • Manfred

    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…

  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich

    The Death of Ivan Ilyich

    This edition brings together Tolstoy’s 1886 masterpiece and several shorter works that connect with it in thought-provoking ways. The stories are accompanied by a fascinating…

  • The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman

    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…

  • Civil Disobedience

    Civil Disobedience

    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…

  • Billy Budd

    Billy Budd

    “Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever?” asked Henry David Thoreau. The question has never been academic, but in…