British Literature

  • When the Sleeper Wakes

    When the Sleeper Wakes

    As George Orwell wrote in 1940, “Everyone who has ever read When the Sleeper Wakes remembers it.” Graham, the “sleeper” of the title, falls into…

  • Captain Singleton

    Captain Singleton

    Following the success of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe wrote a new fiction, the story of an English pirate whose success eclipsed every buccaneer the Atlantic…

  • The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Volume B - Third Edition

    The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Volume B – Third Edition

    Guided by the latest scholarship, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature is acclaimed for its inclusiveness and its deep attention to literature’s historical and cultural…

  • The Library Window

    The Library Window

    In this Victorian tale, a young woman recuperating at her aunt’s house in a Scottish town is spending a good deal of time looking out…

  • Richard Coeur de Lion

    Richard Coeur de Lion

    The Middle English romance of Richard Coeur de Lion transforms the historical Richard I of England—a Frenchman by upbringing, who spent only four months of…

  • Heart of Darkness - Ed. Peters

    Heart of Darkness – Ed. Peters

    Heart of Darkness is based upon Joseph Conrad’s own experience in the Congo; “it is,” as he remarks in his 1916 author’s note to Youth:…

  • 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

    Guided by the latest scholarship, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature is acclaimed for its inclusiveness and its deep attention to literature’s historical and cultural…

  • 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…