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The Story of an African Farm (1883) marks an early appearance in fiction of Victorian society’s emerging New Woman. The novel follows the spiritual quests of Lyndall and Waldo, who each struggle against social constraints in their search for happiness and truth: Lyndall, against society’s expectations of women, and Waldo against stifling class conventions. Written…

Published in 1911, Suffragette Sally is one of the best-known popular novels promoting the cause of women’s suffrage in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. The novel details the militant campaign of the suffragist Women’s Social and Political Union against the political establishment of the time. Through its three female protagonists, each from…

Wells was interested in the implications of evolutionary theory on the future of human beings at the biological, sociological, and cultural levels, and The Time Machine, short and readable, draws on many of the social and scientific debates of the time. The Broadview edition of this science fiction classic includes extensive materials on Wells’s scientific…

The adventure story told in Treasure Island has become a part of popular folklore. John Sutherland discusses the novel’s place in Stevenson’s biography and oeuvre in his learned and lively critical introduction to this new edition. Exploring the novel’s genesis in Stevenson’s “plundering” of other writers, his writer’s block, and the surprisingly disturbing and complex…

Twelfth Night has seldom been off the stage since Shakespeare’s day. It has been performed for its romantic high comedy and its boisterous low comedy; with an emphasis on farce or on autumnal melancholy; as straightforward celebration of heterosexual love and marriage or as exploration of the complexity of gender. David Carnegie and Mark Houlahan’s…

With its gripping plot and pungent dialogue, Uncle Tom’s Cabin offers readers today a passionate portrait of a nation on the verge of disunion and a surprisingly subtle examination of the relationship between race and nationalism that has always been at the heart of the American experience. This Broadview edition is based upon the first…

The Victorian Art of Fiction presents important Victorian statements on the form and function of fiction. The essays in this anthology address questions of genre, such as realism and sensationalism; questions of gender and authorship; questions of form, such as characterization, plot construction, and narration; and questions about the morality of fiction. The editor discusses…

This anthology takes a unique approach to the process of poetry. Each poem included in the book is followed by at least one earlier draft or version of that poem. The reader is thus able to explore the development of the poet’s vision and to make a variety of historical, aesthetic, and intellectual comparisons. The…

Walsingham is both a lively story and a commentary by Mary Robinson on her society’s constraints upon women. The novel follows the lives of two main characters, Walsingham Ainsforth and his cousin, Sir Sidney Aubrey, a girl who is passed off as a son by her mother so that she will become the family heir.…

The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778) tells the story of a fictional midshipman abandoned in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, after a battle with Maori that claims the lives of ten of his shipmates. Inspired by an actual event on Captain Cook’s second voyage, Bowman’s adventures take him to increasingly sophisticated cultures—hunter/ gatherer, pastoral/nomadic, agricultural,…

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,…

Set in a primal past, the Mabinogi bridges many genres; it is part pre-Christian myth, part fairytale, part guide to how nobles should act, and part dramatization of political and social issues. This edition of what has become a canonical text provides a highly engaging new translation of the work, an informative introduction, and a…

Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil War, and after Emancipation. Iola Leroy adopts and adapts three genres that commanded significant audiences in the nineteenth century: the sentimental romance, the slave narrative, and plantation fiction. Written by…

John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in English and is perhaps the greatest example of the genre. From the outset it was mired in disrepute. Cleland penned the novel to liberate himself from debtors’ prison, and the book’s manifestly lewd content led to its legal…

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 Douglass presents new research into his life as an activist and an author. A revolutionary reformer who traveled in Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales as well as the US, Douglass…

In the fall of 1845, a mysterious blight ravaged Ireland’s potato harvest, beginning a prolonged period of starvation, suffering, and emigration that reduced the Irish population by as much as twenty-five per cent in a mere six years. The Famine profoundly impacted Ireland’s social and political history and altered its relationships with the United Kingdom…

Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond—among the most compelling and thought-provoking of Margaret Oliphant’s works of short fiction—tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Lycett-Landon, “two middle-aged people in the fullness of life and prosperity,” and of what becomes of their marriage when Mr. Lycett-Landon becomes uncommunicative while on an extended business trip. In addition to…

Following the success of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe wrote a new fiction, the story of an English pirate whose success eclipsed every buccaneer the Atlantic world had seen. Featuring a haunted, unreliable narrator, a daring trek across the continent of Africa, and mercantile adventures in the China Seas, Captain Singleton is a tale of loneliness,…

In this 1874 novella by Wilkie Collins, the celebrated British writer of sensation fiction tells the tale of two brothers sentenced to be executed for having committed a murder that never occurred, and of the energetic Naomi Colebrook’s efforts to ferret out the truth and save the two innocents. As editor Anna Clark observes, Collins’s…

A portion of the revenue from this book’s sales will be donated to Doctors Without Borders to assist the humanitarian work of nurses, doctors, and other health care providers in the fight against COVID-19 and beyond. Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics is an introduction to contemporary ethical issues in health care, designed especially for…

Agnes Grey was one of a trio of novels that defined the “governess novel” in 1847 and 1848. Alongside Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, Agnes Grey may be the most radical of the three. Agnes Grey is the younger daughter of a clergyman and his wife of modest means, cherished but also infantilized. When her…

This new anthology of early modern philosophy enriches the possibilities for teaching this period by highlighting not only metaphysics and epistemology, but also new themes such as virtue, equality and difference, education, the passions, and love. It contains the works of forty-three philosophers, including traditionally taught figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume,…

The independence movements of Spanish America in the early nineteenth century constitute one of the main junctures in Latin American history. Not only did they put an end to Spanish colonialism in mainland America; they also created the modern countries stretching from Mexico in the north to Chile and Argentina in the south. Spanish American…