English Studies

  • Valperga

    Originally published in 1823, Valperga is probably Mary Shelley’s most neglected novel. Set in 14th-century Italy, it represents a merging of historical romance and the…

  • Persuasion

    For her last novel’s plot, Austen returns to the tensions of inheritance; but the once satisfactory solution—security on a landed estate—no longer applies. Here, Anne,…

  • Burning Brightly

    Burning Brightly is the first full-length book treatment of professional storytelling in North America today. For some years there has been a major storytelling revival…

  • The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless

    Prolific even by eighteenth-century standards, Eliza Haywood was the author of more than eighty titles, including short fiction, novels, periodicals, plays, poetry, and a political…

  • Great Expectations

    Originally published in serial form from December 1860 to August 1861, Great Expectations is the ‘autobiography’ of Pip, as he transformed from apprentice village blacksmith…

  • Aurora Floyd

    Aurora Floyd is one of the leading novels in the genre known as ‘sensation fiction’—a tradition in which the key texts include Wilkie Collins’s The…

  • The Odd Women

    George Gissing’s The Odd Women dramatizes key issues relating to class and gender in late-Victorian culture: the changing relationship between the sexes, the social impact…

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray

    In Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, Dorian Gray is tempted by Henry Wotton to sell his soul in order to hold on to beauty and youth.…

  • The Broadview Reader – Third Edition

    This new edition includes most of the essays that have made The Broadview Reader one of the most popular first-year textbooks in Canada, and adds…

  • Dracula

    To borrow a phrase used by one of the characters in the novel, Dracula is “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance.” In her introduction to…

  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon – Selected Writings

    The work of ‘L.E.L.’ began to be published when she was only seventeen, and in her early twenties Landon had already achieved considerable renown. As…

  • The Vindications: The Rights of Men and The Rights of Woman

    The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ranged from the early Thoughts on the Education of Daughters to The Female Reader, a selection of texts for…

  • Zofloya

    The protagonist of Charlotte Dacre’s best known novel, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) is unique in women’s Gothic and Romantic literature, and has more in…

  • Nostromo

    Nostromo, first published in 1904, is arguably Conrad’s greatest and most complex novel. A compelling adventure story, it is also a novel of profound psychological…

  • New Contexts of Canadian Criticism

    Times change, lives change, and the terms we need to describe our literature or society or condition—what Raymond Williams calls “keywords”—change with them. Perhaps the…

  • Counterbalance

    Like other composition readers, Counterbalance has as its primary purpose to improve thinking, reading and writing skills, recognizing throughout the degree to which these are…

  • Poetic Designs

    There are numerous introductions to poetry and prosody available, but none at once so comprehensive and so accessible as this. With the increasing emphasis on…

  • The Mayor of Casterbridge

    This 1886 novel may be Hardy’s most intense and gripping narrative. We first see the central character, Michael Henchard, as a drunken and unemployed hay-trusser…

  • Lodore

    Beset by jealousy over an admirer of his wife’s, Lord Lodore has come with his daughter Ethel to the American wilderness; his wife Cornelia, meanwhile,…

  • Heart and Science

    Wilkie Collins’s later novels are often as concerned with social issues as they are with simple storytelling—but as more and more critics are suggesting, the…

  • Set in Authority

    In 1906, two years after the appearance of her best-known novel, The Imperialist, Duncan published its darker twin, an Anglo-Indian novel which returns to political…

  • The Last Man

    Mary Shelley’s third published novel, The Last Man, is a disillusioned vision of the end of civilization, set in the twenty-first century. The book offers…

  • Something New

    To be a heroine is to be beautiful—such has been the unstated assumption from the time of chivalric romance to that of Harlequin romance. But…

  • Hard Times

    Despite the title, Dickens’s portrayal of early industrial society here is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or…