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This volume contains many of the most important texts in western political and social thought from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. A number of key works, including Machiavelli’s The Prince, Locke’s Second Treatise, and Rousseau’s The Social Contract, are included in their entirety. Alongside these central readings are a diverse range…

Anne Brontë’s second and last novel was widely and contentiously reviewed upon its 1848 publication, in part because its subject matter domestic violence, alcoholism, women’s rights, and universal salvation was so controversial. The tale unfolds through a series of letters between two friends as one man learns more about Helen Huntingdon and the past that…

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 girls, and included two novels. But her reputation is founded on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism—and is…

Fleetwood is a pivotal novel of early English Romanticism and a powerful critique of the Romantic emotionalism being spread across Europe in Rousseau’s name. Godwin’s “new man of feeling” chronicles the impact of his “natural” education in the wilds of Wales, and his behavior allows Godwin to draw attention to an array of contemporary social…

Desmond is a political novel about the French Revolution. It is Charlotte Smith’s only epistolary work, and it is her most politically radical piece. Written in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Smith’s Desmond fuses political discussion with romance, social satire and a suspenseful plot revolving around a liberal hero desperately…

The third Canadian edition of this anthology has been substantially revised and updated for a contemporary audience; a selection of classic essays from earlier eras has been retained, but the emphasis is very much on twenty-first-century expository writing. There is also a focus on issues of great importance in twenty-first-century Canada, such as climate change,…

Long central to the canon of British Romantic literature, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads is a fascinating case study in the history of poetry, publishing, and authorship. This Broadview edition is the first to reprint both the 1798 and the 1800 editions of Lyrical Ballads in their entirety. In the appendices to…

Laon and Cythna is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most celebrated, and most controversial, literary works. At once philosophical treatise and love story, it follows the adventures of a pair of siblings who lead a political uprising based on socialist, feminist, and ecological ideals, only to be executed for treason. In its own time Shelley’s…

Nature and Art commands a central place in the history of the English Jacobin novel. Published in 1796, the story explores the opposition between the upbringing and actions of Henry Norwynne, an unspoiled “child of nature” who has been reared without books on an African island, and the corrupt conduct of his aristocratic older cousin,…

Adeline, the protagonist of Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, became a model for later Gothic heroines. Passionate, imaginative, and sensitive, in the course of the novel she travels rapidly through the forests and Gothic ruins of France, pursued by the villain de Montfort and perpetually threatened by what appear to be supernatural events.…

The Monk is the most sensational of Gothic novels. The main plot concerns Ambrosio, an abbot of irreproachable holiness, who is seduced by a woman (or perhaps a demon) disguised as a novice, and who goes on to sell his soul to the Devil. An extravagant blend of sex, death, politics, Satanism, and poetry, the…

The Broadview Introduction to Philosophy is a comprehensive anthology that surveys core topics in Western philosophy, including philosophy of religion, theories of knowledge, metaphysics, ethics, social-political philosophy, and issues of life, death, and happiness. Unlike other introductory anthologies, the Broadview offers considerable apparatus to assist the student reader in understanding the texts without simply summarizing…

The third edition of this anthology has been substantially revised and updated for a contemporary American audience; a selection of classic essays from earlier eras has been retained, but the emphasis is very much on twenty-first-century expository writing. Works of different lengths and levels of difficulty are represented, as are narrative, descriptive and persuasive essays—and,…

In 1816, John William Polidori travelled to Geneva as Lord Byron’s personal physician. There they met Mary Godwin (later Shelley) and her lover Percy Shelley and decided to while away a wet summer by writing ghost stories. The only two to complete their stories were Mary Shelley, who published Frankenstein in 1818, and Polidori, whose…

This abridgement of Reflections on the Revolution in France preserves the dynamism of Edmund Burke’s polemic while excising a number of detail-laden passages that may be of less interest to modern readers. Brian R. Clack’s introduction offers a compelling overview of the text and explores the consistency and coherence of Burke’s views on revolution. Burke’s…

Published in 1749, the story of Mrs. Teachum and the nine pupils who make up her “little female academy” is widely recognized as the first full-length novel for children, and the first to be aimed specifically at girls. The daily experiences of Mrs. Teachum’s charges are interwoven with fables and fairy tales illustrating the book’s…

This volume of The Broadview Introduction to Philosophy offers an intriguing selection of readings on ethics, social-political philosophy, and issues of life, death, and happiness. Canonical texts from historical figures such as Plato, Hobbes, and Wollstonecraft are included alongside contemporary selections from such thinkers as Claudia Card, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Unlike other…

This comprehensive volume contains much of the important work in political and social philosophy from ancient times until the end of the nineteenth century. The anthology offers both depth and breadth in its selection of material by central figures, while also representing other currents of political thought. Thucydides, Seneca, and Cicero are included along with…

William Godwin was one of the most popular novelists of the Romantic era; P.B. Shelley praised him, Byron drew heavily on his narrative style, and Mary Shelley, Godwin’s daughter, dedicated Frankenstein to him. Caleb Williams is the riveting account of a young man whose curiosity leads him to pry into a murder from the past.…

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 novel. The story turns on the marriage prospects of the five daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, and especially on Elizabeth’s prejudice against the proud and distant Fitzwilliam Darcy. Pride…

This classic novel, first published in 1860, tells the story of Maggie Tulliver. Intelligent and headstrong but trapped by the conventions of family tradition and rural life, Maggie is one of the great heroines of Victorian literature. Along with Maggie’s story, the novel also tells a companion tale of the social pressures that restrict the…

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 the eighteenth century confronts the revolutionary ideas and forms of the Romantic period. Thelwall puts his two main characters, the conflicted English gentleman Henry Montfort and the Creole Seraphina Parkinson,…

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 schools of thought, including Daoism, virtue ethics, Buddhism, natural law, deontology, utilitarianism, contractarianism, liberalism, Marxism, feminism, and communitarianism. In addition to texts from canonical philosophers such as Plato, Mill, Wollstonecraft,…