Editions

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  A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West

  Mary Ann Shadd’s pamphlet A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West is, as the title promises, a settler guide designed to inform prospective…

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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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  Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

  The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us…

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  Clotel

  As nearly all of its reviewers pointed out, Clotel was an audience-minded performance, an effort to capitalize on the post—Uncle Tom’s Cabin “mania” for abolitionist…

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  Kelroy

  Kelroy, a nearly-forgotten 1812 novel by Rebecca Rush, combines the refinement of the novel of manners with the Gothic novel’s hidden evil to tell the…

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  The Apology and Related Dialogues

  Socrates, one of the first of the great philosophers, left no written works. What survives of his thought are second-hand descriptions of his teachings and…

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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 Garies and Their Friends

  Unjustly overlooked in its own time, Frank J. Webb’s novel of pre-Civil War Philadelphia weaves together action, humor, and social commentary. The Garies and Their…

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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…

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  Troilus and Criseyde

  Geoffrey Chaucer’s most significant literary accomplishment may well be Troilus and Criseyde, a single, profoundly philosophical narrative of a tragic love affair. Set in ancient…

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  The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories

  In 1898, The Strand Magazine, one of the most influential publications of the Victorian fin de siècle, deemed best-selling author and editor L.T. Meade a…

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  Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America

  E. Pauline Johnson, also known as Tekahionwake, is remarkable as one of a very few early North American Indigenous poets and fiction writers. Most Indigenous…

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  Colonel Jack

  Long dismissed by critics as a novel of merely historical interest, Colonel Jack is one of Daniel Defoe’s most entertaining, revealing, and complex works. It…

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  Civilization and Its Discontents

  In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud extends and clarifies his analysis of religion; analyzes human unhappiness in contemporary civilization; ratifies the critical importance of the…

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  Poems, in Two Volumes

  Published seven years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s popular collection Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes shocked readers and drew scornful reviews.…

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  Ann Veronica

  H.G. Wells’s 1909 novel centres on the coming of age of the spirited Ann Veronica, who runs away from her sheltered suburban home to live…

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  Black Beauty

  Continuously in print and translated into multiple languages since it was first published, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is a classic work of children’s literature and…

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  Mandeville

  William Godwin’s Mandeville was described as his best novel by Percy Shelley, who sent a copy to Lord Byron, and it was immediately recognized by…

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  The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

  A man awakens to find himself transformed into a giant vermin; a performer starves himself to death as a circus attraction; a fiendish engine of…