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Natural Beauty was selected for the Choice Outstanding Academic Title list for 2008! Natural Beauty presents a bold new philosophical account of the principles involved in making aesthetic judgments about natural objects. It surveys historical and modern accounts of natural beauty and weaves elements derived from those accounts into a “syncretic theory” that centers on…

Tobias Smollett travelled through Europe with his wife in 1763-65 in a journey designed to recover his mental and physical health after the death of their daughter. The resulting travel narrative provoked controversy and anger in the eighteenth century, when it was often negatively compared to Laurence Sterne’s fictional European travels in A Sentimental Journey…

This 1886 novel may be Hardy’s most intense and gripping narrative. We first see the central character, Michael Henchard, as a drunken and unemployed hay-trusser who sells his wife Susan and his daughter Elizabeth-Jane at a fair. When he is eventually reunited with the two, he has become the contented and prosperous mayor of a…

A classic of science fiction and a dark meditation on Darwinian thought in the late Victorian period, The Island of Doctor Moreau explores the possibility of civilization as a constraint imposed on savage human nature. The protagonist, Edward Prendick, finds himself stranded on an island with the notorious Doctor Moreau, whose experiments on the island’s…

This anthology offers a fresh approach to the ethics of business, casting a critical eye on entrenched assumptions and practices. It includes central works from such thinkers as John Locke, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, and Thomas Piketty, while also introducing new voices on a range of pressing practical topics, including racial discrimination in…

War Ethics: Theory, Practice and Memoir is an extraordinarily diverse collection of over ninety readings on the ethics, law, morality, and justice of armed conflict. Each of the foundational theories of war ethics—realism, pacifism, just war theory, and international law—is examined in depth, as are challenging alternative perspectives from feminist thinkers and the world’s major…

This group of fifteen brief narratives connected by a place and a time—the city of Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century—was written when James Joyce was a precocious young graduate of University College. With great subtlety and artistic restraint, Joyce suggests what lies beneath the pieties of Dublin society and its surface drive…

This lively anthology provides classic and contemporary defenses and critiques of the central ethical theories, along with readings on a selection of moral issues such as freedom of expression, immigration, and the treatment of non-human animals. Generous excerpts of canonical texts are included alongside contemporary works, all carefully selected and thoughtfully edited for student use.…

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…

Arthur Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes novel is both a detective story and an imperial romance. Ostensibly the story of Mary Morstan, a beautiful young woman enlisting the help of Holmes to find her vanished father and solve the mystery of her receipt of a perfect pearl on the same date each year, it gradually…

On the Genealogy of Morality is a history of ethics, a text about interpreting that history, and a primer on interpretation in general. It also has elements of archaeology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and etymology. Nietzsche’s history-based approach to the development of morality, as well as his keen understanding of how power relations—especially the role played…

Jane Austen in Context is a flexible and user-friendly online research tool that provides classrooms with a wide range of materials for the study of Austen’s novels, including critical articles, visual materials, and interactive timelines and maps. A selection of over thirty critical articles and chapters balances classic interpretations with more contemporary approaches, including feminist,…

Over a hundred and fifty years after its initial publication, Emily Brontë’s turbulent portrayal of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, two northern English households nearly destroyed by violent passions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, continues to provoke and fascinate readers. Heathcliff remains one of the best-known characters in the English novel, and…

New Grub Street is the only one of George Gissing’s two dozen novels never to have gone out of print, and has long been recognized as the most important novel of the nineteenth century on the subject of the writing professions. Indeed, no novel in the English tradition even remotely approximates the thoroughness, sophistication, and…

This book features various accounts of a cholera outbreak in West London that killed over 500 people in ten days during the late summer of 1854. What had caused the outbreak? Local authorities of the time were flummoxed about the mode by which the disease had spread. What has become known as “the Broad Street…

Written in 1890, at the close of William Morris’s most intense period of political activism, News from Nowhere is a compelling articulation of his mature views on art, work, community, family, and the nature and structure of the ideal society. A utopian narrative of a future society, it is also an immensely entertaining novel. This…

The prose fiction of Penelope Aubin offers a delightful and provocative challenge to many of our standard ways of thinking about both the “rise of the novel” and early women writers. Aubin’s fast-paced narratives highlight the persistence and vitality of romance as a form of storytelling and the centrality of teenaged girls to tales that…

Written collaboratively by writing instructors at the Queen’s University Writing Centre, A Writer’s Handbook is a compact yet thorough guide to academic writing for a North American audience. This clear and concise handbook outlines strategies both for thinking assignments through and for writing them well. The fourth edition is revised and updated throughout and reflects…

First published in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began as a story told to Alice Liddell and her two sisters on a boating trip in July 1862. The novel follows Alice down a rabbit-hole and into a world of strange and wonderful characters who constantly turn everything upside down with their mind-boggling logic, word play,…

Deeply engaged in women’s rights debates and discussions of the “third sex,” Are They Women? is about the lively communities of lesbians across turn-of-the-century central Europe. It is one of the first lesbian novels written in German—indeed, in any language—and one of the very few pre-Second Wave feminist texts to provide a positive and romantic…

This volume provides new translations of René Descartes’s two most important philosophical works. The Discourse offers a concise presentation and defense of Descartes’s method of intellectual inquiry—a method that greatly influenced both philosophical and scientific reasoning in the early modern world. Considered a foundational text in modern philosophy, the Meditations presents numerous powerful arguments that…

For her last novel’s plot, Austen returns to the tensions of inheritance; but the once satisfactory solution—security on a landed estate—no longer applies. Here, Anne, the unappreciated middle daughter of the Elliots, has new choices to make, between the customs and traditions in which she was brought up and the excitement of the unknown.

This 1818 novel is set in a former abbey whose owner, Christopher Glowry, is host to visitors who enjoy his hospitality and engage in endless debate. Among these guests are figures recognizable to Peacock’s contemporaries, including characters based on Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mr. Glowry’s son Scythrop (also modeled on a famous Romantic,…