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During the Middle Ages, Mary was the most powerful of saints, and the combination of her humanity and her proximity to the divine captured the medieval imagination. Her importance is nowhere more clearly reflected than in the genre of “Miracles of the Virgin,” short narrative accounts of Mary’s miraculous intercessory powers. These stories tend to…

This modified eBook is intended for readers outside of the United States and Canada. If you are within the United States or Canada, please see the print and eBook options available on this page. For copyright reasons, some readings are omitted from this modified eBook. However, it includes 88% of the material available in the…

Arguably no medieval English literary work has had as far and wide a reach as Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur; among the many adaptations are Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot. It might also be argued that the late twentieth- and…

Jack of Newbury is an incisive yet remarkably entertaining work of narrative prose—and one that was extremely popular when it was published in the 1590s. The title character, an apprentice weaver, marries his former master’s wife, expands her cloth business into an enormous enterprise, refuses Henry VIII’s offer of a knighthood, and confronts Cardinal Wolsey;…

A century ago Tennyson had begun to be dismissed as a poet whose work embodied everything the modern world was looking to leave behind. He still seems to readers to embody the substance of the Victorian era more fully than any other poet—but nowadays that is counted in his favor. Critics continue to find layers…

R.M. Liuzza’s Broadview edition of Beowulf was published at almost exactly the same time as Seamus Heaney’s; in reviewing the two together in July 2000 for The New York Review of Books, Frank Kermode concluded that both translations were superior to their predecessors, and that it was impossible to choose between the two: “the less…

That James Joyce’s “The Dead” forms an extraordinary conclusion to his collection Dubliners, there can be no doubt. But as many have pointed out, “The Dead” may equally well be read as a novella—arguably, one of the finest novellas ever written. “The Dead,” a “story of public life,” as Joyce categorized it, was written more…

The text of the play included here, prepared by Craig Walker for The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, has been acclaimed for its outstanding introductory material and annotations, and for its inclusion of parellel text versions of key scenes for which the texts of the Quarto and the Folio versions of the play are substantially…

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. Within a year of the novel appearing in book form, no less than three theatrical adaptations appeared on the London stage. Braddon took strong issue with two of these, but…

The Merchant of Venice is best known for its complex and ambiguous portrait of the Jewish moneylender Shylock—and of European anti-Semitism. Fascinating in its engagement with prejudice, the play is also a comedy of cross-dressing and disguise, and a dramatic exploration of justice, mercy, and vengeance. This volume contains the full text of the play…

A man awakens to find himself transformed into a giant vermin; a performer starves himself to death as a circus attraction; a fiendish engine of capital punishment engraves the letter of the law into the body of the condemned. Such are the nightmare scenarios that emerge in the short stories of Franz Kafka, one of…

Regarded by Bernard Shaw as a master of the theatre, Dion Boucicault was arguably the most important figure in drama in North America and in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was largely forgotten during the twentieth century—though he continued to influence popular culture (the iconic image of a woman tied…

This volume includes the full text of More’s 1516 classic, Utopia, together with a wide range of background contextual materials. For this edition the G.C. Richards translation has been substantially revised and modernized by William P. Weaver of Baylor University. As with other volumes in this series, the text and annotations in this edition are…

In Samson Agonistes, Milton’s last great work, he addresses questions that pressed insistently on the imagination of all who were unhappy with the changes wrought by the Restoration. How do we respond to the experience of defeat, and to fears of having been abandoned by the divine? How do we know when our actions accord…

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 the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, an event viewed by its author (as by many in the Middle Ages) as divine retribution against Jews…

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 this ideology of ‘the beauty myth’ was challenged as early as 1801 with the publication of this extraordinary epistolary novel-romance. Something New explores sexual roles and questions with subtlety and…

It is widely known that Charles Dickens gave public readings of his works, and that those readings were enormously popular. Far less well known are the stories themselves; these were not, as is the modern fashion, taken verbatim from the published novels. Instead, Dickens trimmed, reworded, and re-shaped material from the novels to create stories…

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 highly successful dramatist. Among his most popular plays was The Tragedy of Tragedies: Or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb, one of the most extraordinary parodies in English theater.…

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 to Turkey and wrote an extraordinary series of letters that recorded her experiences as a traveller and her impressions of Ottoman culture and society. This Broadview edition includes a broad…

This volume includes the text of Twelfth Night as prepared and annotated by David Swain for The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, and is accompanied by the excellent introduction and supplementary materials from the anthology. The diverse and extensive appendices acquaint readers with Shakespeare’s sources and contextualize the play within Elizabethan society. The appendices include…