The Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother - 1984 itself: these terms and concepts have moved from the world of fiction into our everyday lives. They are central to our thinking about freedom and its suppression; yet they were newly created by George Orwell in 1949 as he conjured his dystopian vision of a world where totalitarian power is absolute. In this novel, continuously popular since its first publication, readers can explore the dark and extraordinary world he brought so fully to life.
In 1943, there was an urgent need for Animal Farm. The Soviet Union had become Britain's ally in the war against Nazi Germany, and criticism of Stalin's brutal regime was either censored or discouraged. In any case, many intellectuals on the left still celebrated the Soviet Union, claiming that the terrors of its show trials, summary executions and secret police were either exaggerated or necessary. But, to Orwell, Stalin was always a "disgusting murderer" and he wanted to remind people of this fact in a powerful and memorable way. But how to do it? A political essay would never reach a wide enough audience; a traditional novel would take too long to write. Orwell hit on the inspired idea of combining the moralism of the traditional 'beast fable' with the satire of Gulliver's Travels. A group of farmyard animals, led by the pigs, overthrow their human masters. Their revolution is inspired by high ideals: the farm will be run in the interests of its animals with no more slaughtering, plenty of food for all and comfort in retirement. But when Napoleon the pig takes command, he quickly corrupts their principles, creating a new tyranny worse than the old. Orwell wrote Animal Farm in the middle of the Second World War, but at first no publishers wanted to touch it. It was finally published in August 1945, once the war was over. This little book quickly became a seminal text in the emerging 'cold war' (a phrase that Orwell himself coined). It also became a site of that conflict itself, suffering various attempts to subvert or change its meaning. Today, Animal Farm remains a powerful fable about the nature of tyranny and corruption which applies for all ages. Our edition also includes the following essays: Shooting an Elephant; Charles Dickens; Inside the Whale; The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda; Literature and Totalitarianism; Fascism and Democracy; Patriots and Revolutionaries; Catastrophic Gradualism; Some Thoughts on the Common Toad; Why I Write; Writers and Leviathan
The thing came abruptly and unannounced; a demon, rat-like, scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life - a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity.’
Only the expansive imagination of H.P. Lovecraft could conceive the delicious and spine-tingling horrors you will find within the pages of this unique collection. In addition to such classics as 'The Picture in the House', 'The Music of Erich Zann' and 'The Rats in the Walls', this volume contains some fascinating rarities: examples of Lovecraft's earliest weird fiction and material unpublished during his lifetime.
This volume brings together Virginia Woolf's last two novels, The Years (1937) which traces the lives of members of a dispersed middle-class family between 1880 and 1937, and Between the Acts (1941), an account of a village pageant in the summer preceding the Second World War which successfully interweaves comedy, satire and disturbing observation.
Rewriting the traditional family saga and the pageant, these unsettling novels provide extraordinary critiques of Englishness and English identity while pursuing compelling existentialist and psychological themes such as the nature of time, memory, personal relationships and sexual desire. Their tightly constructed narratives enable the reader to experience the fragmented lives of their characters and the difficulties that they have in communicating with each other and even understanding themselves. Read together, these novels illuminate each other in ways that will engage both the student and the general reader.
This astonishing series of aphorisms, put into the mouth of the Persian sage Zarathustra, or Zoroaster,
contains the kernel of Nietzsche’s thought. ‘God is dead’, he tells us. Christianity is decadent, leading
mankind into a slave morality concerned not with this life, but with the next. Nietzsche emphasises the
Übermensch, or Superman, whose will to power makes him the creator of a new heroic mentality. The
intensely felt ideas are expressed in prose-poetry of indefinable beauty.
Though misused by the German National Socialist party as a spurious justification of their creed, the book
also had a profound influence on early twentieth-century writers such as Shaw, Mann, Gide, Lawrence and Sartre.
‘They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a stalking thing with a beautiful head made of wax.’
From the dark, mind-expanding imagination of H P Lovecraft, Wordsworth presents a third volume of tales penned by the greatest horror writer of the 20th Century. Here are some of Lovecraft’s weirdest flesh-creeping masterpieces, including Pickman's Model, The Shunned House, his famous serial Herbert West – Reanimator, and several classic tales from the Cthulhu Mythos, in which mankind is subjected to the unimaginable terrors known only to those who have read from the forbidden Necronomicon.
Also included in this compelling collection are the complete Randolph Carter stories, chronicling his adventures in this world and the realm of his dreams, where he faces perils beyond comprehension.
Frances Burnett Hodgson's novel The Secret Garden is both intriguing and uplifting. It is regarded as one of the best children’s books written in the twentieth century.
Mary Lennox, a sickly ten year old girl, adrift in the world after both her mother and father die is sent to Yorkshire to live with an uncle whom she has never met, at his isolated house, Misselthwaite Manor. Initially Mary is seen as a rude, aggressive and selfish child. She dislikes her new home and the people living in it. But now the scene is set for her transformation and the introduction of the author's engaging theme of rejuvenation and renewal. In exploring the grounds Mary finds the key to the locked garden which is neglected and overrun with weeds. She sets her mind to bringing it back to life. In doing so, Mary finds a purpose and an excitement in her lonely existence. However, apart from the garden, there are other secrets to be revealed at Misselthwaite Manor such as the strange cries in the night and the identity of Colin, a disabled boy, whom she discovers in the hidden bedroom.
The Little Prince is a modern fable, and for readers far and wide both the title and the work have exerted a pull far in excess of the book's brevity. Written and published first by Antoine de St-Exupéry in 1943, only a year before his plane disappeared on a reconnaissance flight, it is one of the world's most widely translated books, enjoyed by adults and children alike. In the meeting of the narrator who has ditched his plane in the Sahara desert, and the little prince, who has dropped there through time and space from his tiny asteroid, comes an intersection of two worlds, the one governed by the laws of nature, and the other determined only by the limits of imagination. The world of the imagination wins hands down, with the concerns of the adult world often shown to be lamentably silly as seen through the eyes of the little prince. While adult readers can find deep meanings in his various encounters, they can also be charmed back to childhood by this wise but innocent infant.
This popular translation contains the author’s own delightful illustrations, bringing to visual life the small being at the tale’s heart, and a world of fantasy far removed from any quotidian reality. It is also a sort of love story, in which two frail beings, the downed pilot and the wandering infant-prince who has left behind all he knows, share their short time together isolated from humanity and finding sustenance in each other. This is a book which creates a unique relationship with each reader, whether child or adult.
The narrator of The War of the Worlds is quick to discover that what appeared to be a falling star was, in fact, a metallic cylinder landing from Mars. Six million people begin to flee London in panic as tentacled invaders emerge and overpower the city. With their heat-ray, killing machines, black gas, and a taste for fresh human blood, is there anything that can be done to stop the Martians?
In The War in the Air, naive but resourceful Bert Smallways is thrilled by speed and fascinated by the new flying machines. His curiosity sweeps him away by accident into a German plan to conquer America, beginning with the destruction of New York. The ease of movement in aerial warfare means that nothing and nobody is safe as Total War erupts, civilisation crumbles, and Bert's hopes of getting back to London to marry his love seem impossibly distant.
'Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own!' declares Doctor Moreau to hapless narrator Edward Prendick.
Moreau's highly controversial methods and ambitions conflict with the religious, moral and scientific norms of his day and Wells later called The Island of Doctor Moreau 'a youthful exercise in blasphemy'. Today his vivid depictions of the Beast People still strike modern readers with an uncanny glimpse of the animal in the human, while the behaviour of humans leave us wondering who is the most monstrous after all.
This volume unites four of Wells' liveliest and most engaging tales of the strange evolution and behaviour of animals - including human beings. The Island of Doctor Moreau is followed by three fantastic yet chillingly plausible short stories of human-animal encounters. The Empire of the Ants is a darkly humorous account of intelligent Amazonian ants threatening to displace humans as ‘the lords of the future and masters of the earth’. In The Sea Raiders, the south coast of England is terrorized by an unwelcome visit from deep-sea predator Haploteuthis ferox, while Æpyornis Island provides a marooned egg collector with an unusual companion.
At the end of the nineteenth century a stranger arrives in the Sussex countryside and mayhem ensues; in the sleepy county of Kent a miracle food brings biological chaos that engulfs and threatens the entire planet. H. G. Wells's fertile and mercurial imagination never brought us more bizarre and unsettling stories than those revealed in The Invisible Man (1897) and The Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth (1904). These are stories of extraordinary physical transformations and are at once extremely funny and richly imaginative. At the same time, Wells poses some very probing questions about the ethical dimensions to science and the human capacity for both pity and cruelty. Brought together for the first time in this new Wordsworth edition, The Invisible Man and The Food of the Gods are two of Wells's most entertaining and thought-provoking works.
Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka’s world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a relentless atmosphere of disorientation. Superficially about bureaucracy, it is in the last resort a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature.
Still more enigmatic is The Castle. Is it an allegory of a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? The search by a central European Jew for acceptance into a dominant culture? A spiritual quest for grace or salvation? An individual's struggle between his sense of independence and his need for approval? Is it all of these things? And K? Is he opportunist, victim, or an outsider battling against elusive authority?
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a huge cyclone transports the orphan Dorothy and her little dog Toto from Kansas to the Land of Oz, and she fears that she will never see Aunt Em and Uncle Henry ever again. But she meets the Munchkins, and they tell her to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City where the Wonderful Wizard of Oz will grant any wish. On the way, she meets the brainless Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. The four friends set off to seek their heart's desires, and in a series of actionpacked adventures they encounter a deadly poppy field, fierce animals, flying monkeys, a wicked witch, a good witch, and the Mighty Oz himself.
In Glinda of Oz, the last of the original ‘Oz’ books, Dorothy and Princess Ozma seek the help of Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, when they find themselves in peril on the Magic Isle of the Skeezers
With an Introduction by Professor Stuart Sim.
John Bunyan was variously a tinker, soldier, Baptist minister, prisoner and writer of outstanding narrative genius which reached its apotheosis in this, his greatest work. It is an allegory of the Christian life of true brilliance and is presented as a dream which describes the pilgrimage of the hero - Christian - from the City of Destruction via the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty, the Valley of the Shadow of Death and Vanity Fair over the River of the Water of Life and into the Celestial City.
The Pilgrim's Progress has been translated into 108 languages, was a favourite of Dr Johnson and was praised by Coleridge as one of the few books which might be read repeatedly and each time with a new and different pleasure.
Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a wealthy and polished man. He proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries.
The action of the story is chaotic and unremittingly violent, but the accomplished handling of a complex structure, the evocative descriptions of the lonely moorland setting and the poetic grandeur of vision combine to make this unique novel a masterpiece of English literature.
This Side of Paradise tells the story of Amory Blaine, the only child of wealthy parents, whose journey from adolescence to adulthood follows him from prep school through to Princeton University, where his literary talents flourish, in contrast to his academic failure. A sequence of love affairs with beautiful young women are fatally damaged by the collapse of his family's fortune, and the novel ends with him poised to face the challenge of making his own way in the world. Composed in an unconventional narrative mode, the novel is a rich fusion of satiric and romance idioms, and found a captivated audience on its publication in1920. It made Fitzgerald rich and famous overnight.
The Beautiful and Damned is a bleaker version of the corrosive power of wealth and its privileges, one of Fitzgerald's abiding subjects. Anthony Patch, is heir to a huge fortune, whose marriage to the beautiful and indolent Gloria is increasingly shadowed by Anthony's fall into alcoholism. Though he wins a lawsuit to gain his inheritance of millions of dollars, it is a pyrrhic victory, for he is now a physically and morally broken man.
Tom Sawyer, a shrewd and adventurous boy, is as much at home in the respectable world of his Aunt Polly as in the self-reliant and parentless world of his friend Huck Finn. The two enjoy a series of adventures, accidentally witnessing a murder, establishing the innocence of the man wrongly accused, as well as being hunted by Injun Joe, the true murderer, eventually escaping and finding the treasure that Joe had buried.
Huckleberry Finn recounts the further adventures of Huck, who runs away from a drunken and brutal father, and meets up with the escaped slave Jim. They float down the Mississippi on a raft, participating in the lives of the characters they meet, witnessing corruption, moral decay and intellectual impoverishment.
Sharing so much in background and character, these two stories, the best of Twain, indisputably belong together in one volume. Though originally written as adventure stories for young people, the vivid writing provides a profound commentary on provincial American life in the mid-nineteenth century and the institution of slavery.
With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Preston, University of Nottingham. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) and George Cruickshank.
The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), with its combination of the sentimental, the grotesque and the socially concerned, and its story of pursuit and courage, which sets the downtrodden and the plucky against the malevolent and the villainous, was an immediate popular success.
Little Nell quickly became one of Dickens' most celebrated characters, who so captured the imagination of his readers that while the novel was being serialised, many of them wrote to him about her fate.
Dickens was conscious of the ‘many friends’ the novel had won for him, and ‘the many hearts it turned to me when they were full of private sorrow’, and it remains one of the most familiar and well-loved of his works.
The Little Prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman's discovery, in the desert, of a small boy from another planet - the Little Prince of the title - and his stories of intergalactic travel, while on the other hand it is a thought-provoking allegory of the human condition.
First published in 1943, the year before the author's death in action, this translation contains Saint-Exupery's delightful illustrations.
These lively, varied and thought-provoking science-fiction stories (from the era of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells) are linked by their imposing central character, the pugnaciously adventurous and outrageous Professor Challenger. The Lost World (forebear of Jurassic Park) vividly depicts a perilous region in which the explorers confront creatures from the prehistoric era. The Poison Belt presents an eerie doomsday scenario, while 'The Disintegration Machine' satirically comments on scientific cynicism. In 'When the World Screamed', the planet responds violently to an experimental incursion. The strangest item is The Land of Mist, which seeks to reconcile science with spiritualism. This memorable collection provides imaginative entertainment, entrancing escapism and bold provocation.
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