bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Chapter LXX: Compelled to volunteer
Authors: Blackmore R. D.
Published: December 2020

THERE had been some trouble in our own home, during the previous autumn, while yet I was in London. For certain noted fugitives from the army of King Monmouth (which he himself had deserted, in a low and currish manner), having failed to...
Chapter LXXV: Give away the Grandeur
Authors: Blackmore R. D.
Published: December 2020

WHEN the little boy came back with the bluebells, which he had managed to find—as children always do find flowers, when older eyes see none—the only sign of his father left was a dark brown bubble, upon a new-formed patch of blackness. But to the...
The American Senator
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

Arabella Trefoil, the beautiful anti-heroine of The American Senator, was described by Trollope one of the ‘women who run down husbands’. Her actions are seen through the eyes of The American senator of the title, Elias Gotobed, who sits in the US Senate for the fictional state of Mikewa. The guest of John Morton (Arabella’s betrothed), Senator Gotobed learns about the English over one winter in England. He witnesses intrigue and romance (as Arabella stalks the rich but elusive Lord Rufford), and English country life in all aspects from the richest of peers and the poorest of farmers. Through his often-tactless remarks in conversation, through his letters to a friend in America, and through a lecture in London titled “The Irrationality of Englishmen”, he comments on British justice and government, the Church of England, and other aspects of English life.
Chapter XXXI The Rufford Correspondence
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

IT might be surmised from the description which Lord Rufford had given of his own position to his sister and his sister’s two friends, when he pictured himself as falling over the edge of the precipice while they hung on behind to save him,...
Chapter XLV Lord Rufford Makes up his Mind
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

AS it happened, Lord Rufford got the two letters together, the cause of which was as follows:

When he ran away from Mistletoe, as he certainly did, he had thought much about that journey home in the carriage, and was quite aware that he...
Chapter LVII Mrs. Morton Returns
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

A FEW days after that on which Lady Augustus and her daughter left Bragton, old Mrs. Morton returned to that place. She had gone away in very bitterness of spirit against her grandson in the early days of his illness. For some period antecedent...
Chapter III
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

The idea of this further compromise, of this something more than compromise, of this half acknowledgement of their own weakness, came from Mr. Flick, of the firm of Norton and Flick, the solicitors who were employed in substantiating the Earl’s position. When Mr. Flick...
Chapter XXX
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

It must not be thought that the Countess was unmoved when she received Daniel Thwaite’s letter from Keswick enclosing the copy of his father’s will. She was all alone, and she sat long in her solitude, thinking of the friend who was gone and...
Chapter V. Mr. Comfort Gives his Advice
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

Mrs. Tappitt was very full of her party. It had grown in her mind as those things do grow, till it had come to assume almost the dimensions of a ball. When Mrs. Tappitt first consulted her husband and obtained his permission for the...
Chapter XXVIII. What Took Place at Bragg’s End Farm
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

When Mrs. Tappitt had settled within her own mind that the brewery should be abandoned to Rowan, she was by no means, therefore, ready to assent that Rachel Ray should become the mistress of the brewery house. “Never,” she had exclaimed when Cherry had...
Chapter XXIX. Mrs. Prime Reads her Recantation
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

Above an hour had passed after the interruption mentioned at the end of the last chapter before Mrs. Ray and Rachel crossed back from the farmhouse to the cottage, and when they went they went alone. During that hour they had been sitting in...
The Elf-Child and The Minister
Authors: Hawthorne Nathaniel
Published: December 2020

Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap,—such as elderly gentlemen loved to indue themselves with, in their domestic privacy,—walked foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and expatiating on his projected improvements. The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath...
A Forest Walk
Authors: Hawthorne Nathaniel
Published: December 2020

Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to Mr. Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior consequences, the true character of the man who had crept into his intimacy. For several days, however, she vainly sought an opportunity of...
Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel
Authors: Jerome Jerome K.
Published: December 2020

Other works may excel this in depth of thought and knowledge of human nature: other books may rival it in originality and size; but, for hopeless and incurable vivacity, nothing yet discovered can surpass it.’ Three Men in a Boat describes a comic expedition by middle-class Victorians up the Thames to Oxford. It provides brilliant snap-shots of London's playground in the late 1880s, where the fashionable steam-launches of river swells encounter the hired skiffs of city clerks. The medley of social vignettes, farcical incidents, descriptions of river fashions, and reflections on the Thames's history, is interspersed with humorous anecdotes told by a natural raconteur. Three Men on the Bummel records a similar escapade, a break from the claustrophobia of suburban life some ten years later; their cycling tour in the Black Forest, at the height of the new bicycling craze, affords Jerome the opportunity for a light-hearted scrutiny of German social customs at a time of increasing general interest in a country that he loved. This account of middle-aged Englishmen abroad is spiced with typical Jeromian humour.
Seen Again
Authors: Le Fanu Sheridan
Published: December 2020

It was not to be expected that Captain Barton’s changed and eccentric habits should long escape remark and discussion. Various were the theories suggested to account for it. Some attributed the alteration to the pressure of secret pecuniary embarrassments; others to a repugnance to fulfil...
Chief Justice Twofold
Authors: Le Fanu Sheridan
Published: December 2020

The Judge found himself in a corridor lighted with dingy oil- lamps, the walls of bare stone; it looked like a passage in a prison. His guards placed him in the hands of other people. Here and there he saw bony and gigantic soldiers passing...
Prologue
Authors: Le Fanu Sheridan
Published: December 2020

Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS illuminates.

This mysterious subject he treats, in that Essay, with his usual...
Her Habits — A Saunter
Authors: Le Fanu Sheridan
Published: December 2020

I told you that I was charmed with her in most particulars.

There were some that did not please me so well.

She was above the middle height of women. I shall begin by describing her. She was slender, and wonderfully graceful. Except that her...
Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings
Authors: Paine Thomas
Published: December 2020

‘An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot . . . it will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer.’ Thomas Paine was the first international revolutionary. His Common Sense (1776) was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution; his Rights of Man (1791-2) was the most famous defence of the French Revolution and sent out a clarion call for revolution throughout the world. He paid the price for his principles: he was outlawed in Britain, narrowly escaped execution in France, and was villified as an atheist and a Jacobin on his return to America. Paine loathed the unnatural inequalities fostered by the hereditary and monarchical systems. He believed that government must be by and for the people and must limit itself to the protection of their natural rights. But he was not a libertarian: from a commitment to natural rights he generated one of the first blueprints for a welfare state, combining a liberal order of civil rights with egalitarian constraints. This collection brings together Paine's most powerful political writings from the American and French revolutions in the first fully annotated edition of these works.
American Crisis I
Authors: Paine Thomas
Published: December 2020

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sun-shine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country: but he that stands it now, deserves the thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell,...
Chapter XII He Bites
Authors: Schreiner Olive
Published: December 2020

Bonaparte
Blenkins was riding home on the grey mare. He had ridden out that afternoon, partly for the benefit of his health, partly to maintain his character as overseer of the farm. As he rode on slowly, he thoughtfully touched the ears of the...
An Authentic Ghost Story
Authors: Stowe Harriet Beecher
Published: December 2020

For some remarkable reason, ghostly legends were uncommonly rife, about this time, among the servants on Legree’s place.

It was whisperingly asserted that footsteps, in the dead of night, had been heard descending the garret stairs, and patrolling the house. In vain the doors of...
Walden
Authors: Thoreau Henry David
Published: December 2020

‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ In 1845 Henry David Thoreau left his home town of Concord, Massachusetts to begin a new life alone, in a rough hut he built himself a mile and a half away on the north-west shore of Walden Pond. Walden is Thoreau’s classic autobiographical account of this experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth and above all the freedom it gave him to adapt his living to the natural world around him. This new edition of Walden traces the sources of Thoreau’s reading and thinking and considers the author in the context of his birthplace and his sense of its history - social, economic and natural. In addition, an ecological appendix provides modern identifications of the myriad plants and animals to which Thoreau gave increasingly close attention as he became acclimatized to his life in the woods by Walden Pond.
31
Authors: Verne Jules
Published: December 2020

I Woke up the next day completely cured. I thought a bathe would do me a great deal of good, and so went and plunged for a few minutes in the waters of this Mediterranean Sea. Such a name, surely, suited the sea...
Castles in the Air
Authors: May Alcott Louisa
Published: December 2020

Laurie lay luxuriously swinging to and fro in his hammock, one warm September afternoon, wondering what his neighbors were about, but too lazy to go and find out. He was in one of his moods; for the day had been both unprofitable and unsatisfactory, and...
The Law and the Lady
Authors: Collins Wilkie
Published: December 2020

Valeria Woodville’s first act as a married woman is to sign her name in the marriage register incorrectly, and this slip is followed by the gradual disclosure of a series of secrets about her husband’s earlier life, each of which leads on to another set of questions and enigmas. Her discoveries prompt her to defy her husband’s authority, to take the law into into a labyrinthine maze of false clues and deceptive identities, in which the exploration of the tangled workings of the mind becomes linked to an investigation into the masquerades of femininity. Probably the first full-length novel with a woman detective as its heroine, The Law and the Lady is a fascinating example of Collins’s later fiction. First published in 1875, it employs many of the techniques used in The Moonstone, developing them in bizarre and unexpected ways, and in its Gothic and fantastic elements The Law and the Lady adds a significant dimension to the history of detective fiction.
Man and Wife
Authors: Collins Wilkie
Published: December 2020

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.
Nicholas Nickleby
Authors: Dickens Charles
Published: December 2020

Our hero confronts a large and varied cast, including Wackford Squeers, the fantastic ogre of a schoolmaster, and Vincent Crummles, the grandiloquent ham actor, on his comic and satirical adventures up and down the country. Punishing wickedness, befriending the helpless, strutting the stage, and falling in love, Nicholas shares some of his creator’s energy and earnestness as he faces the pressing issues of early Victorian society.
The Nether World
Authors: Gissing George
Published: December 2020

The Nether World (1889) is generally regarded as the finest of Gissing’s early novels. A fast moving story of highly dramatic, sometimes violent scenes, it depicts life amongst the artisans, factory-girls, and slum-dwellers of Clerkenwell in the 1870s. But this is not just a novel of documentary realism. It is one man’s mordant vision -shaped by bitter personal experience of poverty - of the quality of life endured by a variety of characters in the nether world. With Zolaesque intensity and relentlessness, Gissing lays bare the economic forces which determine the aspirations and expectations of those born to a life of labour. This is a tale of intrigue, as rapacious schemers try to wrest a fortune out of a mysterious old man who has returned to their midst, and of thwarted love. There is no sentimentality. This is a world in which the strong exercise power against their own kind, scheming and struggling for survival, a world from which, Gissing bleakly maintains, there can be no escape.
The Three Musketeers
Authors: Dumas Alexandre
Published: December 2020

The Three Musketeers (1844) is one of the most famous historical novels ever written. It is also one of the world’s greatest historical adventure stories, and its heroes have become symbols for the spirit of youth, daring, and comradeship. The action takes place in the 1620s at the court of Louis XIII, where the musketeers, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, with their companion, the headstrong d’Artagnan, are engaged in a battle against Richelieu, the King’s minister, and the beautiful, unscrupulous spy, Milady. Behind the flashing blades and bravura, in this first adventure of the Musketeers, Dumas explores the eternal conflict between good and evil. This new edition is the most fully annotated to date in English, providing explanatory notes which set the work in its historical, literary, and cultural context.
Wessex Tales
Authors: Hardy Thomas
Published: December 2020

In this, his first collection of short stories, Hardy sought to record the legends, superstitions, local customs, and lore of a Wessex that was rapidly passing out of memory. But these tales also portray the social and economic stresses of 1880s Dorset, and reveal Hardy's growing scepticism about the possibility of achieving personal and sexual satisfaction in the modern world. By turns humorous, ironic, macabre, and elegiac, these seven stories show the range of Hardy's story-telling genius. The critically established text, the first to be based on detailed study of all revised texts, presents manuscript readings which have never before appeared in print. The stories include: The Three Strangers; A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four; The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion; The Withered Arm; Fellow-Townsmen; Interlopers at the Knap; The Distracted Preacher
The Ambassadors
Authors: James Henry
Published: December 2020

Lambert Strether, a mild middle-aged American of no particular achievements, is dispatched to Paris from the manufacturing empire of Woollett, Massachusetts. The mission conferred on him by his august patron, Mrs Newsome, is to discover what, or who, is keeping her son Chad in the notorious city of pleasure, and to bring him home. But Strether finds Chad transformed by the influence of a remarkable woman; and as the Parisian spring advances, he himself succumbs to the allure of the ‘vast bright Babylon’ and to the mysterious charm of Madame de Vionnet. The text of this Oxford World’s Classics paperback is that of the New York edition, with James’s Preface.
Daisy Miller and Other Stories
Authors: James Henry
Published: December 2020

This volume includes “Daisy Miller”, “Pandora”, “The Patagonia”, and “Four Meetings”.
Plain Tales from the Hills
Authors: Kipling Rudyard
Published: December 2020

This was Kipling's first published volume of fiction. The stories with their brevity and concentration of effect are a landmark in the history of the short story.
Trilby
Authors: Du Maurier George
Published: December 2020

‘You shall see nothing, hear nothing, think of nothing but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali!’ First published in 1894, the story of the diva Trilby O'Ferrall and her mesmeric mentor, Svengali, has entered the mythology of the time alongside Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. Immensely popular for a number of years, the novel led to a hit play, a series of popular films, and the trilby hat. The setting of the story reflects the author's bohemian years as an art student in Paris; indeed James McNeill Whistler was to recognize himself in one of the early serialized instalments. George Du Maurier was a celebrated caricaturist for Punch magazine and his drawings for the novel form part of its appeal - this edition includes his most significant illustrations.
The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories
Authors: Gilman Charlotte Perkins
Published: December 2020

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection of her short fiction ever printed. In addition to her pioneering masterpiece, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1890), which draws on her own experience of depression and insanity, this edition features her Impress ‘story studies’, works in the manner of writers such as James, Twain, and Kipling. These stories, together with other fiction from her neglected California period (1890-5), throw new light on Gilman as a practitioner of the art of fiction. In her Forerunner stories she repeatedly explores the situation of ‘the woman of fifty’ and inspires reform by imagining workable solutions to a range of personal and social problems.
The Diary of a Nobody
Authors: Grossmith George and Weedon
Published: December 2020

‘Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see - because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’ - why my diary should not be interesting.’ The Diary of a Nobody (1892) created a cultural icon, an English archetype. Anxious, accident-prone, occasionally waspish, Charles Pooter has come to be seen as the epitome of English suburban life. His diary chronicles encounters with difficult tradesmen, the delights of home improvements, small parties, minor embarrassments, and problems with his troublesome son. The suburban world he inhabits is hilariously and painfully familiar in its small-mindedness and its essential decency. Both celebration and critique, The Diary of a Nobody has often been imitated, but never bettered. This edition features Weedon Grossmith's hilarious illustrations and is complemented by an enjoyable introduction discussing the book's social background and suburban fiction as a genre.
Cecilia
Authors: Burney Fanny , Doody Margaret Anne
Published: December 2020

abstract

Cecilia is an heiress, but she can only keep her fortune if her husband will consent to take her surname. Fanny Burney’s unusual love story and deft social satire was much admired on its first publication in 1782 for its subtle interweaving of comedy, humanity, and social analysis. Controversial in its time, this eighteenth-century novel seems entirely fresh in relation to late twentieth-century concerns.
The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories
Authors: Crane Stephen
Published: December 2020

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a vivid psychological account of a young man’s experience of fighting in the American Civil War, based on Crane’s reading of popular descriptions of battle. The intensity of its narrative and its naturalistic power earned Crane instant success, and led to his spending most of his brief remaining life war reporting. The other stories collected in this volume draw on this experience; ‘The Open Boat’ (1898) was inspired by his fifty hour struggle with waves after his ship was sunk during an expedition to Cuba; ‘The Monster’ (1899) is a bitterly ironic commentary on the ostracization of a doctor for harbouring the servant who was disfigured and lost his sanity rescuing his son. As a rare example of Crane working in a vein of American Gothic, it is particularly striking for its treatment of race and social injustice. ‘The Blue Hotel’ traces the events that lead to a murder at a bar in a small Nebraska town. This edition is the most generously annotated edition of Crane’s work, exploring it from a fresh critical perspective and focusing on his place as an experimental writer, his modernist legacy and his social as well as literary revisionism.
Looking Backward 2000-1887
Authors: Bellamy Edward
Published: December 2020

‘No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.’ Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people’s everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont’s lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.
The Adventures of Pinocchio
Authors: Collodi Carlo
Published: December 2020

The story of the wooden puppet who learns goodness and becomes a real boy is famous the world over, and has been familiar in English for over a century. From the moment Joseph the carpenter carves a puppet that can walk and talk, this wildly inventive fantasy takes Pinocchio through countless adventures, in the course of which his nose grows whenever he tells a lie, he is turned into a donkey, and is swallowed by a dogfish, before he gains real happiness. This new translation does full justice to the vibrancy and wit of Collodi's original. Far more sophisticated, funny, and hard-hitting than the many abridged versions (and the sentimentalized film) of the story would suggest, Ann Lawson Lucas's translation captures the complexity of Collodi's word-play, slapstick humour, and immediacy of dialogue. An adult reader will recognize social and political satire, and the invaluable introduction and notes illuminate the cultural traditions on which Collodi drew.
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Authors: Gaskell Elizabeth
Published: December 2020

It is in every way worthy of what one great woman should have written of another.' Patrick Brontë Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Charlotte Brontë, and, having been invited to write the offical life, determined both to tell the truth and to honour her friend. She contacted those who had known Charlotte and travelled extensively in England and Belgium to gather material. She wrote from a vivid accumulation of letters, interviews, and observation, establishing the details of Charlotte's life and recreating her background. Through an often difficult and demanding process, Gaskell created a vital sense of a life hidden from the world. This edition is based on the Third Edition of 1857, revised by Gaskell. It has been collated with the manuscript, and the previous two editions, as well as with Charlotte Bront'e's letters, and thus offers fuller information about the process of composition than any previous edition.
A Study in Scarlet
Authors: Doyle Arthur Conan
Published: December 2020

The very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet was also the first of Conan Doyle’s books to be published. His two creations, Holmes, the master of the science of detection and Watson, the great detective’s faithful companion, are immediately in fine form. The mystery itself, its solution plucked unerringly by Holmes from the heart of Victorian London, proves to be the inevitable consequence of a tragedy of the American West. The story is harrowing in its alternating hope and despair, although Holmes himself was later to complain that the book ‘produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid’.
Against Nature
Authors: Huysmans Joris-Karl
Published: December 2020

‘It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.’ As Joris -Karl Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete, Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life. Holed up in his private museum of high taste, he offers Huysmans's readers a treasure trove of cultural delights which anticipates many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarmé and Poe. This new translation is supplemented by indispensable notes which enhance the understanding of a highly allusive work.
Aurora Floyd
Authors: Braddon Mary Elizabeth
Published: December 2020

abstract

‘With Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon had established herself, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood, as one of the ruling triumvirate of ‘sensation novelists’. Aurora Floyd (1862–3), following hot on its heels, achieved almost equal popularity and notoriety. Like Lady Audley, Aurora is a beautiful young woman bigamously married and threatened with exposure by a blackmailer. But in Aurora Floyd, and in many of the novels written in imitation of it, bigamy is little more than a euphemism, a device to enable the heroine, and vicariously the reader, to enjoy the forbidden sweets of adultery without adulterous intentions. Passionate, sometimes violent, Aurora does succeed in enjoying them, her desires scarcely chastened by her disastrous first marriage. She represents a challenge to the mid-Victorian sexual code, and particularly to the feminine ideal of simpering, angelic young ladyhood. P. D. Edward’s introduction evaluates the novel’s leading place among ‘bigamy-novels’ and Braddon’s treatment of the power struggle between the sexes, as well as considering the similarities between the author and her heroine.
The American
Authors: James Henry
Published: December 2020

‘You you a nun; you with your beauty defaced and your nature wasted you behind locks and bars! Never, never, if I can prevent it!’ A wealthy American man of business descends on Europe in search of a wife to make his fortune complete. In Paris Christopher Newman is introduced to Claire de Cintré, daughter of the ancient House of Bellegarde, and to Valentin, her charming young brother. His bid for Claire's hand receives an icy welcome from the heads of the family, an elder brother and their formidable mother, the old Marquise. Can they stomach his manners for the sake of his dollars? Out of this classic collision between the old world and the new, James weaves a fable of thwarted desire that shifts between comedy, tragedy, romance and melodrama a fable which in the later version printed here takes on some of the subtleties associated with this greatest novels.
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Authors: Rousseau Jean-Jacques
Published: December 2020

In his Discourses (1755), Rousseau argues that inequalities of rank, wealth, and power are the inevitable result of the civilizing process. If inequality is intolerable - and Rousseau shows with unparalledled eloquence how it robs us not only of our material but also of our psychological independence - then how can we recover the peaceful self-sufficiency of life in the state of nature? We cannot return to a simpler time, but measuring the costs of progress may help us to imagine alternatives to the corruption and oppressive conformity of modern society. Rousseau's sweeping account of humanity's social and political development epitomizes the innovative boldness of the Englightment, and it is one of the most provocative and influential works of the eighteenth century. This new translation includes all Rousseau's own notes, and Patrick Coleman's introduction builds on recent key scholarship, considering particularly the relationship between political and aesthetic thought.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
Authors: Wollstonecraft Mary
Published: December 2020

This volume brings together extracts of the major political writings of Mary Wollstonecraft in the order in which they appeared in the revolutionary 1790s. It traces her passionate and indignant response to the excitement of the early days of the French Revolution and then her uneasiness at its later bloody phase. It reveals her developing understanding of women’s involvement in the political and social life of the nation and her growing awareness of the relationship between politics and economics and between political institutions and the individual. In personal terms, the works show her struggling with a belief in the perfectibility of human nature through rational education, a doctrine that became weaker under the onslaught of her own miserable experience and the revolutionary massacres. Janet Todd’s introduction illuminates the progress of Wollstonecraft’s thought, showing that a reading of all three works allows her to emerge as a more substantial political writer than a study of The Rights of Woman alone can reveal.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Authors: Doyle Arthur Conan
Published: December 2020

abstract

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes are overshadowed by the event with which they close - the meeting of the great detective and Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime. Their struggle, seemingly to the death, was to leave many readers desolate at the loss of Holmes, but was also to lead to his immortality as a literary figure. However illogical as a detective story, ‘The final Problem’ has proved itself an unforgettable tale. The stories that precede it included two narratives from Holmes himself, on a mutiny at sea and a treasure hunt in a Sussex country house, as well as a meeting with his brilliant brother Mycroft, of whom Holmes says, ‘If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from any armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived.’
The Antiquary
Authors: Scott Walter
Published: December 2020

‘It was early in a fine summer’s day, near the end of the eighteenth century, when a young man, of genteel appearance, having occasion to go towards the north-east of Scotland, provided himself with a ticket in one of those public carriages which travel between Edinburgh and the Queensferry...’ So begins Scott’s personal favourite among his novels, in characteristically wry and urbane style, as a mysterious young man calling himself ‘Lovel’ travels idly but fatefully toward the Scottish seaside town of Fairport. Here he is befriended by the antiquary Jonathan Oldbuck, who has taken refuge from his own personal disappointments in the obsessive study of miscellaneous history. Their slow unravelling of Lovel’s true identity will unearth and redeem the secrets and lies which have devastated the guilt-haunted Earl of Glenallan, and will reinstate the tottering fortunes of Sir Arthur Wardour and his daughter Isabella. First published in 1816 in the aftermath of Waterloo, The Antiquary deals with the problem of how to understand the past so as to enable the future. Set in the tense times of the wars with revolutionary France, it displays Scott’s matchless skill at painting the social panorama and in creating vivid characters, from the earthy beggar Edie Ochiltree to the loqacious and shrewdly humorous Antiquary himself. The text is based on Scott’s own final, authorized version, the ‘Magnum Opus’ edition of 1829.
The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
Authors: Irving Washington
Published: December 2020

The Sketch-Book (1820–1) looks simultaneously towards audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, as Irving explores the uneasy relationship of an American writer to English literary traditions. He sketches a series of encounters with the cultural shrines of the parent nation, and in two brilliant experiments with tales transplanted from Europe creates the first classic American short stories, ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow’. The result was not only a hugely successful travel book; it exerted a strong formative influence on American writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to Henry James, and is well worth rediscovery in its own right today. Based on Irving’s final revision of his most popular work, this new edition includes comprehensive explanatory notes of The Sketch-Book’s sources for the modern reader. In her introduction, Susan Manning suggests that the author forged a new idiom, the ‘Literary Picturesque’, to accommodate and turn to advantage his dilemma of dual literary allegiances.
Treasure Island
Authors: Stevenson Robert Louis
Published: December 2020

There were only seven out of the twenty-six on whom we knew we could rely; and out of those seven one was a boy.’ When a mysterious seafarer puts up at the Admiral Benbow, young Jim Hawkins is haunted by his frightening tales; the sailor’s sudden death is the beginning of one of the most exciting adventure stories in literature. The discovery of a treasure map sets Jim and his companions in search of buried gold, and they are soon on board the Hispaniola with a crew of buccaneers recruited by the one-legged sea cook known as Long John Silver. As they near their destination, and the lure of Captain Flint’s treasure grows ever stronger, Jim’s courage and wits are tested to the full. Stevenson reinvented the genre with Treasure Island, a boys’ story that appeals as much to adults as to children, and whose moral ambiguities turned the Victorian universe on its head. This edition celebrates the ultimate book of pirates and high adventure, and also examines how its tale of greed, murder, treachery, and evil has acquired its classic status.
Can You Forgive Her?
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

‘She loved him much, and admired him even more than she loved him…Would that he had some faults!’ Alice Vavasor is torn between a risky marriage with her ambitious cousin George and the safer prospect of a union with the formidably correct John Grey. Her indecision is reflected in the dilemmas of her friend Lady Glencora, confined in the proprieties of her life with Plantagenet Palliser but tempted to escape with her penniless lover Burgo Fitzgerald, and of her aunt, the irreverent widow Mrs Greenow, who must choose between a solid farmer and an untrustworthy soldier as her next husband. Each woman finds her choice bound up with the cold realities of money, and the tension between public expectation and private inclination. Can You Forgive Her? is the first of Trollope’s six Palliser novels, and its focus on the exercise of power, whether in the masculine world of parliament and the professions, or within the domesticities of friendship, courtship, and marriage, signals a new breadth and diversity of interest in his fiction.
The Duke's Children
Authors: Trollope Anthony
Published: December 2020

‘I do not know that one ought to be surprised at anything.’ The Duke of Omnium is overwhelmed by the death of his vivacious wife, Lady Glencora. Once the British Prime Minister, he is now in sole charge of his three wilful children. Lord Gerald has been sent down from University; Lord Silverbridge has defected from the Liberal cause of his father's party to the Conservative, and is badly in debt; Lady Mary has fallen in love with Frank Tregear, a commoner with a will of iron but no money. The Duke, troubled and without easy relationships with any of his children, tries to impose his own will. But the result seems to move the novel towards calamity. Searching the great topics of compromise and principle, of obedience and dissent, of personal integrity and the conflicts between generations, The Duke's Children is a domestic story with far-reaching political issues at stake. It is a fitting end to the Palliser series, one of the most remarkable achievements of British fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Esther Waters
Authors: Moore George
Published: December 2020

I daresay I shall get through my trouble somehow.’ Esther Waters is a young, working-class woman with strong religious beliefs who takes a position as a kitchen-maid at a horse-racing estate. She is seduced and abandoned, and forced to support herself and her illegitimate child in any way that she can. The novel depicts with extraordinary candour Esther's struggles against prejudice and injustice, and the growth of her character as she determines to protect her son. Her moving story is set against the backdrop of a world of horse racing, betting, and public houses, whose vivid depiction led James Joyce to call Esther Waters ‘the best novel of modern English life’. Controversial and influential on its first appearance in 1894, the book opened up a new direction for the English realist tradition. Unflinching in its depiction of the dark and sordid side of Victorian culture, it remains one of the great novels of London life and labour in the 1890s.
Little Dorrit
Authors: Dickens Charles , Walder Dennis
Published: December 2020

‘Clennam rose softly, opened and closed the door without a sound, and passed from the prison, carrying the quiet with him into the turbulent streets.’ Introspective and dreamy, Arthur Clennam returns to England from many years abroad to find a people gripped in their self-made social and mental prisons. Against a background of government incompetence and financial scandal, he searches for the key to the affairs of the Dorrit family, prisoners for debt in the Marshalsea. He discovers through the seamstress Amy Dorrit the fulfilment of which he dreams, but only after he learns to understand his own heart. Revelation and redemption haunt Dickens’s portrayal of human relations as fundamentally distorted by class and money. The swindling financier Merdle, the bureaucratic nightmare of the Circumlocution Office, and a teeming cast of characters display the inadequacy of secular morality in the face of contemporary social and political confusion. Mixing humour and pathos, irony and satire, Dickens’s eleventh novel reveals a master of fiction in top form. This new edition, based on the definitive Clarendon text, includes all of Phiz’s original illustrations and a wide-ranging introduction highlighting Dickens’s move to more personal and spiritual concerns.
Redgauntlet
Authors: Scott Walter
Published: December 2020

‘Far and wide was [Redgauntlet] hated and feared. Men thought he had a direct compact with Satan – that he was proof against steel.’ Set in the summer of 1765, Redgauntlet centres around a third, fictitious, Jacobite rebellion. Kidnapped by Edward Hugh Redgauntlet, a fanatical supporter of the Stewart cause, the young Darsie Latimer finds himself caught up in the plot to enthrone the exiled Prince Charles Edward Stewart. The novel follows Darsie’s adventures and those of the advocate Alan Fairford, who sets out to rescue him. These two young men from very different backgrounds are united by friendship and their optimistic belief in the settled Hanoverian establishment. First published in 1824, this is the last of Scott’s major Scottish novels, and perhaps his most complex statement about the relation between history and fiction. This edition uses the Magnum text of 1832.
Money
Authors: Zola Émile
Published: December 2020

‘The irresistible power of money, a lever that can lift the world. Love and money are the only things.’ Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, is a failed property speculator determined to make his way once more in Paris. Unscrupulous, seductive, and with unbounded ambition, he schemes and manipulates his way to power. Financial undertakings in the Middle East lead to the establishment of a powerful new bank and speculation on the stock market; Saccard meanwhile conducts his love life as energetically as he does his business, and his empire is seemingly unstoppable. Saccard, last encountered in The Kill (La Curée) in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, is a complex figure whose story intricately intertwines the worlds of politics, finance, and the press. The repercussions of his dealings on all levels of society resonate disturbingly with the financial scandals of more recent times. This is the first new translation for more than a hundred years, and the first unabridged translation in English. The edition includes a wide-ranging introduction and useful historical notes.
Daisy Miller and An International Episode
Authors: James Henry
Published: December 2020

An inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence’ ... Young Daisy Miller perplexes, amuses, and charms her stiff but susceptible fellow-American, Frederick Winterbourne. Is she innocent or corrupt? Has he lived too long in Europe to judge her properly? Amid the romantic scenery of Lake Geneva and Rome, their lively, precarious relationship develops to a climax in the Colosseum at midnight. The tale gave James his first popular success, yet some compatriots detected treachery in its portrayal of young American womanhood. James responded with ‘An International Episode’, which exposes a couple of English gentlemen to the charm and wit of American sisters in Newport, RI and then in London. Independently read, these short masterpieces probe the manners and morals of a newly emergent transatlantic world. Together they shed light on each other, demonstrating the range of James's own manners, from sharp satire and buoyant comedy to complex, perhaps even tragic, pathos.
Sylvia's Lovers
Authors: Gaskell Elizabeth
Published: December 2020

He’s spoilt my life,- he’s spoilt it for as long as iver I live on this earth.’ The compelling story of an ordinary girl’s tragic passion for a man who disappears, Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) is Elizabeth Gaskell’s last completed novel. Set in a fictional Whitby at the end of the eighteenth century, the novel is a modern revenge tragedy in which well-intentioned actions have unforeseen and terrible human consequences. Sylvia is loved by two men, her serious cousin Philip and the charismatic sailor Charley Kinraid. When one of them betrays her, her path in life seems fixed. Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars and the ever-present threat of press-gangs, the story darkens when Sylvia’s father is roused into vengeful violence. But this trouble proves only the precursor to a greater calamity that will radically alter Sylvia’s future. Gaskell’s novel, richly engaging with the legacy of the Brontë sisters, is her most extensive literary exploration of the tragic depths of unregarded, unhistoric, but vividly imagined lives.
Daniel Deronda
Authors: Eliot George , Newton K. M.
Published: December 2020

She felt herself standing at the game of life with many eyes upon her, daring everything to win much.’ Gwendolen Harleth gambles her happiness when she marries a sadistic aristocrat for his money. Beautiful, neurotic, and self-centred, Gwendolen is trapped in an increasingly destructive relationship, and only her chance encounter with the idealistic Deronda seems to offer the hope of a brighter future. Deronda is searching for a vocation, and in embracing the Jewish cause he finds one that is both visionary and life-changing. Damaged by their pasts, and alienated from the society around them, they must both discover the values that will give their lives meaning. George Eliot’s powerful novel is set in a Britain whose ruling class is decadent and materialistic, its power likely to be threatened by a politically emergent Germany. The novel’s exploration of sexuality, guilt, and the will to power anticipates later developments in fiction, and its linking of the personal and the political in a context of social and economic crisis gives it especial relevance to the dominant issues of the twenty-first century.
Substitution of Deoxycholate with the Amphiphilic Polymer Amphipol A8-35 Improves the Stability of Large Protein Complexes during Native Electrophoresis
Authors: Kameo Shinsa , Aso Michiki , Furukawa Ryo , Matsumae Renon , Yokono Makio , Fujita Tomomichi , Tanaka Ayumi , Tanaka Ryouichi , Takabayashi Atsushi
Published: December 2020

Native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) is a powerful technique for protein complex separation that retains both their activity and structure. In photosynthetic research, native-PAGE is particularly useful given that photosynthetic complexes are generally large in size, ranging from 200 kD to 1 MD or more. Recently, it has been reported that the addition of amphipol A8-35 to solubilized protein samples improved protein complex stability. In a previous study, we found that amphipol A8-35 could substitute sodium deoxycholate (DOC), a conventional electrophoretic carrier, in clear-native (CN)-PAGE. In this study, we present the optimization of amphipol-based CN-PAGE. We found that the ratio of amphipol A8-35 to α-dodecyl maltoside, a detergent commonly used to solubilize photosynthetic complexes, was critical for resolving photosynthetic machinery in CN-PAGE. In addition, LHCII dissociation from PSII–LHCII was effectively prevented by amphipol-based CN-PAGE compared with that of DOC-based CN-PAGE. Our data strongly suggest that majority of the PSII–LHCII in vivo forms C2S2M2 at least in Arabidopsis and Physcomitrella. The other forms might appear owing to the dissociation of LHCII from PSII during sample preparation and electrophoresis, which could be prevented by the addition of amphipol A8-35 after solubilization from thylakoid membranes. These results suggest that amphipol-based CN-PAGE may be a better alternative to DOC-based CN-PAGE for the study of labile protein complexes.