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Shaped by sound literary and historical scholarship, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature takes a fresh approach to many canonical authors and includes a broad selection of work by lesser-known writers. The anthology also provides wide-ranging coverage of the worldwide connections of British literature, and it pays attention throughout to matters such as race, gender,…

Castle Rackrent—Maria Edgeworth’s first novel, and the work for which she was and is best known—occupies a most unusual place in the history both of Irish literature and of English-language fiction. It has sometimes been called the first historical novel in English literature, yet in its tone it more closely resembles a comedy of manners…

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,…

Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, the story of one woman’s existential struggle after learning of her father’s desire for her, has been identified as Shelley’s most important work after Frankenstein. The two texts share many characteristics, besides authorship and contemporaneity: both concern parental abandonment; both contribute to the Gothic form through themes of incest, insanity, suicidality, monstrosity,…

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…

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…

The early seventeenth-century traveler Thomas Coryate’s five-month tour of Western Europe culminated in Coryats Crudities, one of the strangest travelogues published in early modern England. This edition abridges the Crudities’ more than 900 pages to a manageable size, focusing on episodes most likely to be of interest to students—such as Coryate’s descriptions of Venetian mountebanks,…

Mary Ann Shadd’s pamphlet A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West is, as the title promises, a settler guide designed to inform prospective immigrants of conditions in their proposed new home. But whereas most such works were addressed to potential white emigrants to North America from Britain or continental Europe, Shadd’s aimed to…

This package contains volumes 4-6 of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, covering the Romantic era through present day. PACKAGE ISBN: 978-1-0393-0019-4 / 1-0393-0019-7 PACKAGE CONTENTS: The Broadivew Anthology of British Literature: Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism – Third Edition ISBN: 9781554813117 The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 5: The Victorian Era – Third Edition ISBN:…

This volume brings together the full contents of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922), together with an informative introduction and a selection of background materials. Included as well are two of Eliot’s most influential essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). As with other…

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…

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;…

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…

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…

Concert of Voices combines poetry, fiction, drama, and essays in an anthology of world literature in English. This second edition preserves the first edition’s breadth and its balance of established and less widely known authors, while including a large selection of exciting new material. Biographical information and explanatory notes have been updated and expanded, and…

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…

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…

While philosophical speculation into the nature and value of emotions is at least as old as the Pre-Socratics, William James’ “What is an emotion?” reinvigorated interest in the question. Coming to grips with James’ proposals, particularly in the light of subsequent concerns for the difficulties inherent in a so-called private language, led philosophers away from…

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…