Politics and Literature

Showing all 23 results

  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Selections

    Uncle Tom’s Cabin may well have excited more controversy than any other work of fiction in American history. Welcomed by many abolitionists and met with…

  • Civil Disobedience

    In 1848, Henry David Thoreau twice delivered lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, on “the relationship of the individual to the state.” The essay now known as…

  • Billy Budd

    “Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever?” asked Henry David Thoreau. The question has never been academic, but in…

  • 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…

  • On Perpetual Peace

    Kant’s landmark essay “On Perpetual Peace” is as timely, relevant, and inspiring today as when it was first written over 200 years ago. In it…

  • Notes from the Underground

    Notes from the Underground is recounted from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who describes himself as sick, spiteful, and unattractive. His thoughts and his…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Candide

    The philosophical problem of evil—that a supposedly good God could allow terrible human suffering—troubled the minds of eighteenth-century thinkers as it troubles us today. Voltaire’s…

  • The Imperialist

    Set in the fictional Ontario town of Elgin at the beginning of the twentieth century, this 1904 novel was in its own time addressed largely…

  • Illustrations of Political Economy

    Published in 1832, Illustrations of Political Economy established Harriet Martineau as both a successful and controversial author and a pioneer of nineteenth-century “social problem” writing.…

  • The Vagabond

    First published in 1799, George Walker’s The Vagabond was an immediate popular success. Offering a vitriolic critique of post-Bastille Jacobinism and sansculotte-style mob rule, its…

  • The Communist Manifesto

    L.M. Findlay’s elegant new translation is a work of textual and historical scholarship. Few books have had as much of an impact on modern history…

  • Letters Written in France

    Helen Maria Williams was a poet, novelist, and radical thinker deeply immersed in the political struggles of the 1790s. Her Letters Written in France is…

  • Mary Robinson: Selected Poems

    Mary Robinson’s work has begun again to assume a central place in discussions of Romanticism. A writer of the 1790’s—a decade which saw the birth…

  • On Liberty – Ed. Alexander

    Mill predicted that “[t]he Liberty is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written … because the conjunction of [Harriet Taylor’s] mind…

  • The Adventures of Eovaai

    Haywood’s novel is the story of the beautiful Princess Eovaai. Groomed for the throne by her father, who teaches her Lockean notions of liberty, she…

  • The Victim of Prejudice – Second Edition

    Mary Hays was an outspoken Radical intellectual in the turbulent decade of the 1790’s. She argued vehemently for the need to recognise the moral and…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Government and Politics: A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Themed Custom Text

    Broadview anthologies include many readings suitable for courses focused on the representation of government and politics in literature. If you are teaching a course in…