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Eighteenth-century critics differed about almost everything, but if there was one point on which they almost universally agreed, it was that they were living through an age of extraordinary change. The texts in this collection respond to a series of fundamental questions about the changing nature of the literary field during a tumultuous age: What…

The Age of Innocence marks the pinnacle of Edith Wharton’s career as one of the finest American novelists of her era. The narrative follows Newland Archer, of upper-crust 1870s New York, whose passion for the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska leads him to question the very foundations of his way of life. Written in the aftermath…

R.M. Liuzza’s translation of Beowulf, first published by Broadview in 1999, has been widely praised for its accuracy and beauty. The translation is accompanied in this edition by genealogical charts, historical summaries, and a glossary of proper names. Historical appendices include related legends, stories, and religious writings from both Christian and Anglo-Saxon traditions. These texts…

In all six of its volumes The Broadview Anthology of British Literature presents British literature in a truly distinctive light. Fully grounded in sound literary and historical scholarship, the anthology takes a fresh approach to many canonical authors, and includes a wide selection of work by lesser-known writers. The anthology also provides wide-ranging coverage of…

This collection provides a representative set of theatrical performances popular on the nineteenth-century British stage. All are newly edited critical editions that account for variant sources reflecting the process of rehearsal, licensing, and production. Detailed introductions and extensive notes explain the texts’ relationship to repertoires, the circulating discourses of intelligibility that constantly recombine in performance.…

This volume features a careful selection of major works in political and social philosophy from ancient times through to the present. Every reading has been painstakingly annotated, and each figure is given a substantial introduction highlighting his or her major contribution to the tradition. The anthology offers both depth and breadth in its selection of…

This new edition includes most of the essays that have made The Broadview Reader one of the most popular first-year textbooks in Canada, and adds 18 fresh selections. As before, essays are gathered into groups by topic, but the editors also provide alternative tables of contents by rhetorical patterns and devices, and by chronology. Each…

The Broadview Canterbury Tales is an edition of the complete tales in a text based on the famous Ellesmere Manuscript. Here one may read a Middle English text that is closer to what Chaucer’s scribe, Adam Pinkhurst, actually wrote than that in any other modern edition. Unlike most editions, which draw on a number of…

Emerging from Dickens’s preoccupation in the early 1840s with issues of poverty, ignorance, and cruelty, this classic story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, visited by four ghosts on Christmas Eve, was first published in 1843 to strong reviews and popular success. The Broadview edition uses the first edition with original drawings by John Leech. This edition also…

This classic novel tells the story, in letters, of the beautiful and virtuous Clarissa Harlowe’s pursuit by the brilliant, unscrupulous rake Robert Lovelace. The epistolary structure allows Richardson to create layered and fully realized characters, as well as an intriguing uncertainty about the reliability of the various “narrators.” Clarissa emerges as a heroine at once…

An important work in the debate between materialists and dualists, the public correspondence between Anthony Collins and Samuel Clarke provided the framework for arguments over consciousness and personal identity in eighteenth-century Britain. In Clarke’s view, mind and consciousness are so unified that they cannot be compounded into wholes or divided into parts, so mind and…

Elizabeth Gaskell’s episodic second novel, sometimes dismissed as nostalgically “charming,” is now considered by many critics to be her most sophisticated work. The country town of Cranford is home to a group of women, affectionately called “Amazons” by the narrator, whose seemingly uneventful lives are full of conflicts, failures, and unexpected connections. A rich commentary…

Critical Thinking is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the essential skills of good reasoning, written by Canadian authors for Canadian readers. The book includes a thorough treatment of such central topics as deductive and inductive reasoning, logical fallacies, how to recognize and avoid ambiguity, and how to distinguish what is relevant from what is…

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 an anomaly, or even an anachronism. His works, with their bizarrely motivated characters and mysterious settings, did not seem to be a part of the literature of early nineteenth-century America.…

In The Egoist, his comic masterpiece, George Meredith takes the traditional marriage plot of English domestic fiction and turns it on its head. The novel describes the repeated and disastrous courtships of Sir Willoughby Patterne, the egoist of the title. Three women become engaged to Sir Willoughby, but, despite his aristocratic arrogance and the manipulative…

Published just after the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Eikon Basilike is a defence of the king’s motivations and actions prior to and during the British civil wars. Nine chapters of Eikonoklastes, John Milton’s response to Eikon Basilike, are also included in this edition. Here Milton, writing from a republican perspective, attacks the…

This is the first edition in over a century to present David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Dissertation on the Passions, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and Natural History of Religion in the format he intended: collected together in a single volume. Hume has suffered a fate unusual among great philosophers. His principal philosophical…

This amply annotated edition of Wharton’s 1911 classic novella includes textual notes and documents, including Wharton’s preface, letters, reviews, and early short story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View.” It is accompanied by the editor’s comprehensive introduction and a wide array of readings on topics central to the novella: tragedy, health and fitness, sex and marriage, and turn-of-the-century…

It wasn’t so long ago that the fairy tale was comfortably settled as an established and respectable part of children’s literature. Since the fairy tale has always been a mirror of its times, however, we should not be surprised that in the latter part of the twentieth century it turned dark and ambiguous; its categorical…

The Father and Daughter was one of the most widely read novels of the early nineteenth century, captivating readers with its pathos and melodrama. It tells the story of Agnes Fitzhenry, whose seduction by the libertine Clifford causes her father to descend into madness. Rooted in the social conditions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century…

When William Blackwood, George Eliot’s publisher, first saw the manuscript of Felix Holt in 1866 he could not contain his enthusiasm; in a letter to a friend he described the novel as “a perfect marvel. The time is 1832 just after the passing of the Reform Bill, and surely such a…series of pictures of English…

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 worlds of tiny people and giants, floating islands and talking horses. But through this fantastic journey, he also gave to literature an enduring model of mankind’s follies, vulnerabilities, vanities, and…

Robert Bage’s Hermsprong satirizes English society of the 1790s targeting, in particular, corrupt clergymen, grasping lawyers and wicked aristocrats. The protagonist, a European raised among Native Americans, visits Europe and is dismayed by what he encounters. While such satire might seem conventional enough, Hermsprong is distinguished from other political novels of the period by its…

The History of the Kings of Britain is arguably the most influential text written in England in the Middle Ages. The work narrates a linear history of pre-Saxon Britain, from its founding by Trojan exiles to the loss of native British (Celtic) sovereignty in the face of Germanic invaders. Along the way, Geoffrey introduces readers…