Willa Cather's My Antonia is considered one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century. Set during the great migration west to settle the plains of the North American continent,
This Broadview edition pairs the first Gothic novel with the first Gothic drama, both by Horace Walpole.Published on Christmas Eve, 1764, on Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill, his Gothicized
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) is one of the most influential utopian novels in English. The narrative follows Julian West, who goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes in the ye
Set in the fictional landscape of Mariposa on the shores of Lake Wissanotti in Missinaba County, Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of A Little Town is an affectionate satire of small town life. This series
This edition assembles the major essays on race and imperialism written by Nancy Cunard in the 1930s and 1940s. As a British expatriate living in France, and as a politically engaged poet, editor, pub
Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is one of the most important and neglected works advocating the establishment of women's academies. Its reception was so controversial that Astell respon
Critics often comment on the importance of landscape in Wuthering Heights, and in this edition, Christopher Heywood locates the text more precisely than previous editions amid Yorkshireâ??s limestone
One of the founders of British Romanticism, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825) was a leading poet, essayist, and writer of pedagogical materials for children. This anthology presents selections from he
Jane Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, is a witty satire of the sentimental novel, a popular genre in Britain throughout the 1790s and the Regency. When it first appeared in 1811,
Little Women, Louisa May Alcotta??s masterpiece of Childrena??s literature, is the story of the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Living in a small Massachusetts town, the girls and Mrs. March mus
Mansfield Park is Austen's darkest and most complex novel. In contrast to the confident and vivacious heroines of Emma and Pride and Prejudice, its central character, Fanny Price, is a shy and vulner
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself was the first work that influenced the nineteenth-century genre of slave narrative autobiogr
Baillie's eminently readable dramas stand at the crossroads of the Scottish Enlightenment and early Romanticism, and compellingly engage with questions of women's rights. Her exploration of the passi
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 m
Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was on of the most successful writers of her time; indeed, the two most popular English novels in the early eighteenth-century were Robinson Crusoe and Haywood's first novel,
The reputation of Frances Burney (1752-1840) was largely established with her first novel, Evelina. Published anonymously in 1778, it is an epistolary account of a sheltered young woman's entrance int
Augusta Webster was very widely praised in her own time—Christina Rossetti thought her "by far the most formidable" woman poet. Her work has again come into favour, so much so that Isobel Armstrong an
Margaret Cavendish was one of the most subversive and entertaining writers of the seventeenth century. She invented new genres, challenged gender roles, and critiqued the new science as well as the mo
Jane Eyre, the story of a young girl and her passage into adulthood, was an immediate commercial success at the time of its original publication in 1847. Its representation of the underside of domesti
Delarivier Manley is increasingly coming to the fore as a prominent figure in early eighteenth-century fiction, and The Adventures of Rivella in particular has been attracting attention not only as an
In Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Elizabeth Hamilton engages directly with the major issues of her day, from colonialism and the "New Philosophy" to the present state of literature and
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 daughte
In Oscar Wilde's famous novel, Dorian Gray is tempted by Henry Wotton to sell his soul in order to hold on to beauty and youth. Dorian succumbs and murders the portrait painter Basil Haliward, who sta
To borrow a phrase used by one of the characters in the novel, Dracula is "nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance." In her introduction to this edition Glennis Byron first discusses the famous
Prolific even by eighteenth-century standards, Eliza Haywood was the author of more than eighty titles, including short fiction, novels, periodicals, plays, poetry, and a political pamphlet for which
The protagonist of Charlotte Dacre's best known novel, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) is unique in women's Gothic and Romantic literature, and has more in common with the heroines of Sade or M.G. Lewis t
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 daugh
In 1750 at the age of twenty-seven Sarah Scott published her first novel, a conventional romance. A year later she left her husband after only a few months of marriage and devoted herself thereafter t
The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the greatest classics of English literature, but one of the least accessible to most twentieth-century readers. Written in an obsc
