Topics in Literature
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The Siege of Jerusalem
The Siege of Jerusalem (c. 1370-90 CE) is a difficult text. By twenty-first-century standards, it is gruesomely violent and offensive. It tells the story of…
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A Child of the Jago
“Learn to read and write, learn all you can, learn cunning, spare nobody and stop at nothing. … Do your devilmost … for the Jago’s…
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Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph
In 1761, Frances Sheridan published her novel The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, which became a popular and widely praised example of the sentimental novel.…
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Doctor Faustus: The B Text
Doctor Faustus is one of early modern English drama’s most fascinating characters, and Doctor Faustus one of its most problematic plays. Selling his soul to…
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A Letter Concerning Toleration
Locke argued that religious belief ought to be compatible with reason, that no king, prince or magistrate rules legitimately without the consent of the people,…
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The Daughter of Adoption
John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times is a witty and wide-ranging work in which the picaresque and sentimental novel of…
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The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys
The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys is a fast-paced tale of political intrigue and aristocratic vanity—a romp through 1793 Dublin as Ireland pitches towards the United…
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Lady Audley’s Secret – A Drama in Two Acts
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s shocking and suspenseful novel Lady Audley’s Secret was one of the most popular examples of the “sensation fiction” craze of the 1860s.…
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The Tragedy of Tragedies
Best known today for the novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Henry Fielding was just as renowned in his own time as a prolific and…
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Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
“The art of travelling is only a branch of the art of thinking,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in one of her many reviews of works of…
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Mrs. Dalloway – Broadview Edition
Mrs. Dalloway takes place on one day in the middle of June 1923. Its plot is seemingly thin: a middle-aged society hostess is having a…
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Herland and Related Writings
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s provocative utopian novel Herland, first published in 1915, tells its story through the observations of three male explorers who discover a land…
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The Turkish Embassy Letters
In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s husband Edward Montagu was appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. Montagu accompanied her husband…
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Secret Commissions
Lurid, controversial, and vulnerable to accusations of titillation or rabble-rousing, the works of Victorian investigative journalism collected here nonetheless brought unseen suffering into the light…
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Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Tales
Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems are among the most haunting and indelible in American literature, but critics for decades persisted in seeing Poe as…
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The Rivals and Polly Honeycombe
The Rivals and Polly Honeycombe revolve around young women who wish the world would conform to novelistic convention. Unlike most eighteenth-century heroines keen on novel…
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As You Like It
Both a witty satire of literary cliché and a tender meditation on the varieties of love, As You Like It continues to be one of…
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Frankenstein – Third Edition
D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf’s edition of Frankenstein has been widely acclaimed as an outstanding edition of the novel—for the general reader and the student…
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Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote these two novellas at the beginning and end of her years of writing and political activism. Though written at different times, they…
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Gulliver’s Travels
In this narrative of the gullible ship’s doctor Lemuel Gulliver and his extraordinary travels, Jonathan Swift takes readers through a series of apparently child-like fantasy…
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The Future of an Illusion
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, declared that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis in his famous work of 1927, The Future of an Illusion.…
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Three Guineas
In Three Guineas, first published in June, 1938 (as the threat of war between Britain and Nazi Germany was looming larger day by day) Virginia…
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Emma Corbett
Set both in England and in America, Emma Corbett is the moving story of a family torn apart by the American revolutionary war. Edward Corbett…
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The Jew of Malta
First performed by Shakespeare’s rivals in the 1590s, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta was a trend-setting, innovative play whose black comedy and final tragic…
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Daisy Miller
Henry James’s Daisy Miller was an immediate sensation when it was first published in 1878 and has remained popular ever since. In this novella, the…
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At the Back of the North Wind
The unique blend of fairy tale atmosphere and social realism in this novel laid the groundwork for modern fantasy literature. In the novel, Little Diamond,…
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A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
Drifting on a sailing boat off the Canary Islands, four British gentlemen take turns reading a manuscript that they find inside a copper cylinder discovered…
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Mrs. Spring Fragrance
Among the first works of fiction in English by a North American writer of Asian descent, the stories collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance present a…
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Travels through France and Italy
Tobias Smollett travelled through Europe with his wife in 1763-65 in a journey designed to recover his mental and physical health after the death of…
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The Coquette and The Boarding School
Hannah Webster Foster based The Coquette on the true story of Elizabeth Whitman, an unmarried woman who died in childbirth in New England. Fictionalizing Whitman’s…
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The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph
The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph was hugely popular in circulating libraries in the years after its publication, and its emotional intensity was often remarked…
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Peter Pan
For twenty-six years after his first mention of the character, J.M. Barrie worked on the story of Peter Pan as he appeared through different incarnations:…
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The Awakening and Other Writings
Critically acclaimed as Kate Chopin’s most influential work of fiction, The Awakening has assumed a place in the American literary canon. This new edition places…
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Rights of Man
Advocating equality, meritocracy, and social responsibility in plain language, Thomas Paine galvanized tens of thousands of readers and changed the framework of political discourse with…
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Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud’s most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces…
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
From its first appearance onward, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been both praised and condemned, enshrined as one of the world’s great novels and banned…