Liberal Studies / Core Texts

Showing 1–24 of 58 results

  • The Prince

    Provocative, brutally honest, and timeless, Machiavelli’s The Prince is one of the most important yet misunderstood writings in history. In it, Machiavelli lays bare the…

  • On the Genealogy of Morality

    On the Genealogy of Morality is a history of ethics, a text about interpreting that history, and a primer on interpretation in general. It also…

  • King Lear – Ed. Best & Joubin

    King Lear is a play for our times. The central characters experience intense suffering in a hostile and unpredictable world. They face domestic cruelty, political…

  • Readings in Ethics

    Readings in Ethics offers a vast collection of carefully edited readings arranged chronologically across five historical periods. The selections cover many major Western and non-Western…

  • The Tempest

    The world that William Shakespeare creates in The Tempest has many features that make it recognizably like our own. There are bad, self-seeking people; brothers…

  • Discourse on Method

    The Discourse on the Method for Reasoning Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences offers a concise presentation and defense of René Descartes’s method…

  • Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy

    This volume provides new translations of René Descartes’s two most important philosophical works. The Discourse offers a concise presentation and defense of Descartes’s method of…

  • Heart of Darkness – Ed. Goonetilleke – Third Edition

    The first incarnation of this Broadview edition of Heart of Darkness appeared in 1995, the second in 1999; both were widely acclaimed, and the Goonetilleke…

  • Pride and Prejudice – Second Edition

    Elizabeth Bennet is Austen’s most liberated and appealing heroine, and Pride and Prejudice has remained over most of the past two centuries Austen’s most popular…

  • The Alchemist

    The Alchemist has long been admired as one of Ben Jonson’s best dramas; its satiric cleverness and metatheatricality have delighted audiences from its first performance…

  • We

    Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We is one of the great classics of dystopian fiction. Experimental and provocative in both style and content, it was the first…

  • Benito Cereno

    “Benito Cereno,” a story of atmospheric Gothic horror and striking political resonance, represents Herman Melville’s most profound and unsettling engagement with the horrors of New…

  • The Odyssey

    This new edition of Homer’s epic poem is designed with the needs of undergraduate students in mind. The selections, totalling almost half the full work,…

  • Life Examined: Foundational Themes in Ethical and Socio-Political Thought

    Life Examined is an anthology of carefully edited readings designed to serve as an introduction to many of the fundamental concepts of ethical and socio-political…

  • Thomas Aquinas: Basic Philosophical Writing

    This volume contains new translations of the essential philosophical writings of Thomas Aquinas, from the Summa Theologiae and The Principles of Nature. The included texts…

  • 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…

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Fundamental Political Writings

    This classroom edition includes On the Social Contract, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and the…

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

    Published in the bicentenary year of Frederick Douglass’s birth and in a Black Lives Matter era, this edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick…

  • Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Essayist, lecturer, poet, and America’s first “public intellectual,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) is the central figure in nineteenth-century American letters and the leader (albeit reluctantly)…

  • 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…

  • The Decameron: Selected Tales

    This edition presents 33 of the 100 tales, with at least two from each of the ten days of storytelling. Boccaccio’s general introduction and conclusion…

  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich

    This edition brings together Tolstoy’s 1886 masterpiece and several shorter works that connect with it in thought-provoking ways. The stories are accompanied by a fascinating…

  • 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…

  • Utilitarianism – Ed. Bailey

    Utilitarianism is a classic work of ethical theory, arguably the most persuasive and comprehensible presentation of this widely influential position. While he didn’t invent utilitarianism,…