British Literature

  • Castle Rackrent

    Castle Rackrent

    Castle Rackrent—Maria Edgeworth’s first novel, and the work for which she was and is best known—occupies a most unusual place in the history both of…

  • Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond

    Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond

    Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond—among the most compelling and thought-provoking of Margaret Oliphant’s works of short fiction—tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Lycett-Landon, “two…

  • The Works of Gwerful Mechain

    The Works of Gwerful Mechain

    All of Gwerful Mechain’s known work is included here—as are several poems of uncertain authorship, and a selection of other works that help to fill…

  • The Invisible Man

    The Invisible Man

    The Invisible Man stands out as possessing one of the most complicated heroes, or perhaps anti-heroes, in literature. A thoroughly unlikeable character, the Invisible Man…

  • The York Corpus Christi Play: Selected Pageants

    The York Corpus Christi Play: Selected Pageants

    The York Corpus Christi Play as we know it consists of 47 surviving individual plays or “pageants,” 27 of which are included in this volume;…

  • Hamlet

    Hamlet

    In the introduction to this new edition, David Bevington explores some key dilemmas and puzzles in this most famous of Shakespeare’s tragedies. What is the…

  • In a Glass Darkly

    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…

  • Quest of the Holy Grail

    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…

  • Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

    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…

  • The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism - Third Edition

    The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism – Third Edition

    In all six of its volumes The Broadview Anthology of British Literature presents British literature in a truly distinctive light. Fully grounded in sound literary…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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 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…

  • The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Poetry

    The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Poetry

    Intended for courses with a major focus on poetry during the Romantic period, this volume includes all the poetry selections from Volume 4 of The…

  • The Half-Caste

    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…