Human, All Too Human (1878) marks the point where Nietzsche abandons German romanticism for the French Enlightenment. At a moment of crisis in his life (no longer a friend of Richard Wagner, forced to leave academic life through ill health), he sets out his views in a scintillating and bewildering series of aphorisms which contain the seeds of his later philosophy (e.g. the will to power, the need to transcend conventional Christian morality). The result is one of the cornerstones of his life's work. It well deserves its subtitle ‘A Book for Free Spirits’, and its original dedication to Voltaire, whose project of radical enlightenment here finds a new champion.
Beyond Good and Evil (1886) is a scathing and powerful critique of philosophy, religion and science. Here Nietzsche presents us with problems and challenges that are as troubling as they are inspiring, while at the same time outlining the virtues, ideas, and practices which will characterise the philosophy of the future. Relentless, energetic, tirelessly probing, he both determines that philosophy's agenda and is himself the embodiment of the type of thought he wants to foster.
David Hume (1711–1776) was the most important philosopher ever to write in English, as well as a master stylist. This volume contains his major philosophical works. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), published while Hume was still in his twenties, consists of three books on the understanding, the passions, and morals. It applies the experimental method of reasoning to human nature in a revolution that was intended to make Hume the Newton of the moral sciences. Disappointed with the Treatise’s failure to bring about such a revolution, Hume later recast Book I as An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1751), and Book III as An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, which he regarded as ‘incomparably the best’ of all his works. Both Enquiries went through several editions in his lifetime.
Hume’s works, controversial in his day, remain deeply and widely influential in ours, especially for his contributions to our understanding of the nature of morality, political and economic theory, philosophy of religion, and philosophical naturalism.
This volume also includes Hume’s anonymous Abstract of Books I and II of the Treatise, and the short autobiographical essay, ‘My Own Life’, which he wrote just before his death.
A new version of John Payne's Victorian translation, with an Introduction by Cormac O Cuilleanain.
1348. The Black Death is sweeping through Europe. In Florence, plague has carried off one hundred thousand people. In their Tuscan villas, seven young women and three young men tell tales to recreate the world they have lost, weaving a rich tapestry of comedy, tragedy, ribaldry and farce.
Boccaccio's Decameron recasts the storytelling heritage of the ancient and medieval worlds into perennial forms that inspired writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to our own day. Boccaccio makes the incredible believable, with detail so sharp we can look straight into the lives of people who lived six hundred years ago. His Decameron hovers between the fading glories of an aristocratic past - the Crusades, the Angevins, the courts of France, the legendary East - and the colourful squalor of contemporary life, where wives deceive husbands, friars and monks pursue fleshly ends, and natural instincts fight for satisfaction.
Here are love and jealousy, passion and pride - and a shrewd calculation of profit and loss which heralds the rise of a dynamic merchant class. These stories show us early capitalism during a moment of crisis and revelation.
Lawrence's reputation as a novelist has often meant that his achievements in poetry have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was still writing poetry when he died in 1930.
It therefore allows the reader to trace the development of Lawrence as a poet and appreciate the remarkable originality and distinctiveness of his achievement. Not all the poems reprinted here are masterpieces but there is more than enough quality to confirm Lawrence's status as one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century.
With an Introduction by Mark G. Spencer, Brock University, Ontario, Canada. This edition includes both Volumes One and Two.
Few writers have had a more demonstrable impact on the development of the modern world than has Karl Marx (1818-1883). Born in Trier into a middle-class Jewish family in 1818, by the time of his death in London in 1883, Marx claimed a growing international reputation. Of central importance then and later was his book Das Kapital, or, as it is known to English readers, simply Capital. Volume One of Capital was published in Paris in 1867. This was the only volume published during Marx’s lifetime and the only to have come directly from his pen. Volume Two, published in 1884, was based on notes Marx left, but written by his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Readers from the nineteenth century to the present have been captivated by the unmistakable power and urgency of this classic of world literature. Marx’s critique of the capitalist system is rife with big themes: his theory of ‘surplus value’, his discussion of the exploitation of the working class, and his forecast of class conflict on a grand scale. Marx wrote with purpose. As he famously put it, ‘Philosophers have previously tried to explain the world, our task is to change it.’
During his life, Geoffrey Chaucer (born c.1340) was courtier, diplomat, revenue collector, administrator, negotiator, overseer of building projects, landowner and knight of the shire. He was servant, retainer, husband, friend and father. Whilst he was doing and ‘being’ all of these things, he was writing. Not only did he write in English - for princes, friends, family and, presumably, for his own pleasure – but his knowledge of French and Italian enabled him to engage with the works of notable French poets such as Eustache Deschamps, and also with the Italian works of Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio, an understanding which he used to enrich and develop his own language.
It was Boccaccio’s Decameron which inspired Chaucer, in the 1390s, to begin work on The Canterbury Tales, which was still unfinished at his death in October 1400. It tells the story of a group of 30 pilgrims who meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames opposite the city of London, and travel together to visit the then famous shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury cathedral. The tavern host, who accompanies them, suggests that they amuse one another along the way by telling stories. There will be a prize for this: the best storyteller will get a free meal in the tavern on their return. The stories told by the pilgrims range from bawdy comedies through saints’ lives and moral tracts to courtly romances, but are always delivered with a generous helping of Chaucer’s own sly wit and ironic humour. Although based on the stereotypes of ‘estates satire’, his pilgrims appear as individuals who can be recognised by their audience. Chaucer succeeds in his aim of producing an overview of his times and their culture, for posterity, in the manner of Italian, proto-Renaissance, writers. In the decades after his death, Chaucer was recognised and elevated by a new generation of writers to a position of prominence in the emerging canon of English writing, from which he ultimately became known as ‘the Father of English Literature’.
Sigmund Freud’s controversial ideas have penetrated Western culture more deeply than those of any other psychologist. The ‘Freudian slip’, the ‘Oedipus complex’, ‘childhood sexuality’, ‘libido’, ‘narcissism’ ‘penis envy’, the ‘castration complex’, the ‘id’, the ‘ego’ and the ‘superego’, ‘denial’, ‘repression’, ‘identification’, ‘projection’, ‘acting out’, the ‘pleasure principle’, the ‘reality principle’, ‘defence-mechanism’ – are all taken for granted in our everyday vocabulary. Psychoanalysis was never just a method of treatment, rather a vision of the human condition which has continued to fascinate and provoke long after the death of its originator.
Its central hypothesis, that we live in conflict with ourselves and seek to resolve matters by turning away from reality, did not emerge from experimental science but from self-examination and the unique opportunities for observation presented by the psychoanalytic technique – in particular, from the confessions produced by ‘free-association’ in Freud's consulting room. Written during the turmoil of the First World War, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis was distilled from a series of lectures given at Vienna University, but had to wait for the war to end before being made available to the English speaking world.
The exploits of Sweeney Todd, ‘The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’, have been recounted many times in plays, films and musicals, but the origins of the character largely were forgotten for many years. The String of Pearls - the original tale of Sweeney Todd, a classic of British horror - was first published as a weekly serial in 1846-7 by Edward Lloyd, the King of the Penny Dreadfuls. One of the earliest detective stories, it became an important source for Bram Stoker's Dracula, but it was after over 150 years of obscurity that it appeared first in book form in the Wordsworth edition published in 2005.
The one great mystery that has surrounded the book is who the author was - or was it possibly the work of more than one man? In his new introduction to this fully revised second edition, Dick Collins, by means of detailed research of contemporary records, has established finally the identity of the creator of this legendary figure.
So here is the original story of the terrifying owner of that famous London barber-shop, and the secret recipe for Mrs Lovett's delicious pies…
'I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with horror which at all times assails me yet'.
With its strange, imaginative blend of horror, science fiction, romance and lyrical prose, Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow is a classic masterpiece of weird fiction. This series of vaguely connected stories is linked by the presence of a monstrous and suppressed book which brings fright, madness and spectral tragedy to all those who read it. An air of futility and doom pervade these pages like a sweet insidious poison. Dare you read it?
This collection has been called the most important book in American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns. H. P. Lovecraft, creator of the famed Cthulu mythos, whose own fiction was greatly influenced by this book stated that The King in Yellow 'achieves notable heights of cosmic fear'.
‘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.
COUNT LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910) is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, commonly regarded as amongst the greatest novels ever written. He also, however, wrote many masterly short stories, and this volume contains four of the longest and best in distinguished translations that have stood the test of time.
In the early story Family Happiness, Tolstoy explores courtship and marriage from the point of view of a young wife. In The Kreutzer Sonata he gives us a terrifying study of marital breakdown, in The Devil a powerful depiction of the power of sexual temptation, and, in perhaps the finest of all, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he portrays the long agony of a man gradually coming to terms with his own mortality.
This volume also includes an Introduction and Notes written specially for this Wordsworth edition by Dr Tim Cook, formely lecturer in literature at the Universities of Kingston and Ulster. Previous work contributed by Dr Cook for Wordsworth includes an introduction and notes to Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby.
The Aeneid is Virgil's Masterpiece. His epic poem recounts the story of Rome's legendary origins from the ashes of Troy and proclaims her destiny of world dominion. This optimistic vision is accompanied by an undertow of sadness at the price that must be paid in human suffering to secure Rome's future greatness. The tension between the public voice of celebration and the tragic private voice is given full expression both in the doomed love of Dido and Aeneas, and in the fateful clash between the Trojan leader and the Italian hero, Turnus.
Hailed by T.S. Eliot as 'the classic of all Europe', Virgil's Aeneid has enjoyed a unique and enduring influence on European literature, art and politics for the past two thousand years.
Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb was written to be an 'introduction to the study of Shakespeare', but are much more entertaining than that. All of Shakespeare's best-loved plays, comic and tragic, are retold in a clear and robust style, and their literary quality has made them popular and sought-after ever since their first publication in 1807.
This edition contains the delightful pen-and-ink drawings of Arthur Rackham.
`When you have experienced Sons and Lovers you have lived through the agonies of the young Lawrence striving to win free from his old life'.
Richard Aldington
This novel is Lawrence's semi-autobiographical masterpiece in which he explores emotional conflicts through the protagonist, Paul Morel, and his suffocating relationships with a demanding mother and two very different lovers.
Lawrence's novels are perhaps the most powerful exploration in the genre in English of family, class, sexuality and relationships in youth and early adulthood
From its first publication in 1816 Rob Roy has been recognised as containing some of Scott's finest writing and most engaging, fully realised characters. The outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor was already a legendary, disputed figure by the time Scott wrote - a heroic Scottish Robin Hood to some, an over-glamorised, unprincipled predator to others.
Scott approaches Rob Roy indirectly, through the adventures of his fictional hero, Frank Osbaldistone, amid the political turmoil of England and Scotland in 1715. With characteristic care Scott reconstructs the period and settings so as to place Rob Roy and the Scotland he inhabits amid conflicting moral, economic and historical forces.
This edition features, besides a new critical introduction and extensive explanatory notes, an essay outlining clearly the novel's historical context and a glossary of Scottish words and phrases used by Scott's colourful, vernacular characters.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a classic representation of the impoverished and politically powerless underclass of British society in Edwardian England, ruthlessly exploited by the institutionalized corruption of their employers and the civic and religious authorities.
Epic in scale, the novel charts the ruinous effects of the laissez-faire mercantilist ethics on the men, women, and children of the working classes, and through its emblematic characters, argues for a socialist politics as the only hope for a civilized and humane life for all. It is a timeless work whose political message is as relevant today as it was in Tressell's time. For this it has long been honoured by the Trade Union movement and thinkers across the political spectrum.
Homer's great epic describes the many adventures of Odysseus, Greek warrior, as he strives over many years to return to his home island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. His colourful adventures, his endurance, his love for his wife and son have the same power to move and inspire readers today as they did in Archaic Greece, 2800 years ago.
This poem has been translated many times over the years, but Chapman's sinewy, gorgeous rendering (1616) stands in a class of its own. Chapman believed himself inspired by the spirit of Homer himself, and matches the breadth and power of the original with a complex and stunning idiom of his own. John Keats expressed his admiration for the resulting work in the famous sonnet, 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer': 'Much have I travelled in the realms of gold...'
This new Wordsworth edition of Chapman’s Homer contains accessible annotation, and a detailed introduction that places his masterpiece in the context of his own day, and discusses its influences on later poets.
When fifteen-year-old orphan John Trenchard is banished by his Aunt Jane, he goes to live at the local inn with the mysterious Elzevir Block, whose son has been killed by Customs Officers. Unofficially adopted by Block, John comes to learn the reasons for the noises in the graveyard at night, of 'Blackbeard' Mohune's lost treasure and Elzevir Block's secret.
This dashing tale of eighteenth-century Dorset smugglers will be enjoyed by all who love stories of derring-do written in the tradition of Treasure Island.
None of the great Victorian novels is more vivid and readable than The Mayor of Casterbridge. Set in the heart of Hardy's Wessex, the 'partly real, partly dream country' he founded on his native Dorset, it charts the rise and self-induced downfall of a single 'man of character'.
The fast-moving and ingeniously contrived narrative is Shakespearian in its tragic force, and features some of the author's most striking episodes and brilliant passages of description.
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