In this classically simple tale of the disastrous impact of outside life on a secluded community in Dorset, now in a new edition, Hardy narrates the rivalry for the hand of Grace Melbury between a simple and loyal woodlander and an exotic and sophisticated outsider. Betrayal, adultery, disillusion, and moral compromise are all worked out in a setting evoked as both beautiful and treacherous. The Woodlanders, with its thematic portrayal of the role of social class, gender, and evolutionary survival, as well as its insights into the capacities and limitations of language, exhibits Hardy's acute awareness of his era's most troubling dilemmas.
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.
In these 'scientific romances' H. G. Wells sees the present reflected in the future and the future in the present. His aim is to provoke rather than predict. The Sleeper falls into a trance, waking up two centuries later as the richest man in a world of new technologies, power-greedy leaders, sensual elites, and brutalised industrial slaves. Arriving in the year 802,701, the Time-Traveller finds that humanity has evolved into two drastically different species; going farther still, he witnesses the ultimate fate of the solar system. The Chronic Argonauts, the original version of The Time Machine, pits a scientist with daring views of time and space against superstitious villagers. In all three works Wells laces vivid adventure stories with the latest ideas in biology and physics.
Almayer’s Folly was Conrad’s outstanding debut novel: as well as exploring the culture of a part of the world previously unknown to English fiction, it showed immense sophistication in its handling of narrative, time-shifts and point of view. Hailed as ‘a writer of genius’ by contemporary reviewers, Conrad returned to the same riverine settlement in Borneo in his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands. Set some 15 years earlier, this prequel to Almayer’s Folly tells how Lingard lost his monopoly of trade in Sambir, and follows the dangerous rivalry of his protegés Willems and Almayer. In The Rescue, the narrative moves even further back in time and shows the young, idealistic Lingard torn between his loyalties to his Sulawesi allies and his unexpected attraction to Edith Travers, with explosive consequences. Throughout this sequence of novels, the fascinating figure of Captain Lingard comes steadily into the foreground.
Wordsworth Classics makes the Lingard Trilogy available, for the first time, in a single volume.
'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.
It is more than a century since the ascetic, gaunt and enigmatic detective, Sherlock Holmes, made his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet. From 1891, beginning with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the now legendary and pioneering Strand Magazine began serialising Arthur Conan Doyle's matchless tales of detection, featuring the incomparable sleuth patiently assisted by his doggedly loyal and lovably pedantic friend and companion, Dr Watson.
The stories are illustrated by the remarkable Sydney Paget from whom our images of Sherlock Holmes and his world derive and who first equipped Holmes with his famous deerstalker hat. The literary cult of Sherlock Holmes shows no sign of fading with time as each new generation comes to love and revere the penetrating mind and ruthless logic which were the undoing of so many Victorian master criminals.
Edgar Poe was born the son of itinerant actors on January 19th, 1809 in Boston, Massachusets. Abandoned by his father and the later death of his mother, he was taken into the foster care of John Allan, a Virginia tobacco farmer. Now styled as Edgar Allan Poe, he distinguished himself at the University of Virginia but was equally adept at collecting debts from his assiduous gambling. His stepfather's disapproval shattered their fragile relationship and Poe left home to seek his fortune.
In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia but despite his prolific activities - journalism, poetry, lecturing, short stories, publishing, criticism and experimentation with fictional genres, including the detective novel which he virtually invented with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) - he received scant recognition for his efforts until the publication of The Raven in 1845. The poem's instant popularity gave him a new visibility in literary circles, but his personal situation remained desperate: poverty, illness, drink, and the physical decline and ultimate death of Virginia in 1847 led to his untimely and premature decline. In 1849 he was found sick, injured and semi-conscious in a Baltimore tavern. Taken to hospital, he lingered on for four days, but never recovered and on October 7th Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of 40.
He was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters - a genius who, thanks to his dire reputation, was tragically misunderstood during his lifetime. It was not until Baudelaire enthusiastically translated his work that he found a wider audience in Europe, and became not only an enormous influence on modern French literature but also on the acclaimed work of writers such as Dostoevsky, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne.
Wilde's works are suffused with his aestheticism, brilliant craftsmanship, legendary wit and, ultimately, his tragic muse. He wrote tender fairy stories for children employing all his grace, artistry and wit, of which the best-known is The Happy Prince. Counterpoints to this were his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which shocked and outraged many readers of his day, and his stories for adults which exhibited his fascination with the relations between serene art and decadent life. Wilde took London by storm with his plays, particularly his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest.
His essays - in particular De Profundis- and his Ballad of Reading Gaol, both written after his release from prison, strikingly break the bounds of his usual expressive range. His other essays and poems are all included in this comprehensive collection of the works of one of the most exciting writers of the late nineteenth century.
Jane Austen is without question, one of England's most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature's most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were first published.
Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions in Mansfield Park; her delightfully paced comedy of manners and the machinations of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility; the quiet strength of Anne Elliot in Persuasion succeeding in a world designed to subjugate her very existence; and Emma - 'a heroine whom no one but myself will like' teased Austen - yet another irresistible character on fire with imagination and foresight. Indeed not unlike her renowned creator.
Jane Austen is as sure-footed in her steps through society's whirlpools of convention and prosaic mores as she is in her sometimes restrained but ever precise and enduring prose.
Herbert George Wells, known as ‘Bertie’ or ‘H. G.’ was born on 21 September 1866 in Atlas House, on the High Street of what was then the Kentish market town of Bromley. His father Joseph, a former gardener, kept a shop and played professional cricket; after his father broke his leg when Wells was ten, Wells’s mother Sarah returned to domestic service at the country house Uppark, near Midhurst, in Sussex.
Wells’s elder brothers had both been apprenticed to drapers, a trade that Sarah Wells considered to be highly respectable. Wells was apprenticed to drapers in Windsor and Southsea but was much keener to continue to be educated, and he persuaded his mother to let him become a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School. Wells’s exam results at Midhurst were so strong that he won a scholarship aimed at increasing the number of science teachers in Britain at the Normal School (now Imperial College London), under ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, the biologist T. H. Huxley. Wells drew extensively on his experiences as a student for his 1900 novel Love and Mr. Lewisham. Ill-fed, poor and increasingly discontented by both the quality of the teaching he received and the social organization of the world, Wells became more and more interested in politics and in imaginative literature, especially Plato, Blake and Carlyle. He also began writing, providing articles and ‘The Chronic Argonauts’, a time travel story, for the college magazine the Science Schools Journal.
Wilkie Collins is a master of mystery, and The Woman in White is his first excursion into the genre. When the hero, Walter Hartright, on a moonlit night in north London, encounters a solitary, terrified and beautiful woman dressed in white, he feels impelled to solve the mystery of her distress.
The intricate plot is peopled with a finely characterised cast, from the peevish invalid Mr Fairlie to the corpulent villain Count Fosco and the enigmatic woman herself.
This anthology of tales by Rudyard Kipling contains some of the most memorable and popular examples of the genre of which he is an undisputed master. The Man Who would be King (later adapted as a spectacular film) is a vivid narrative of exotic adventure and disaster.
The other tales include the ironic, horrific, poignant and haunting. Here Kipling displays his descriptive panache and realistic boldness. Shrewd, audacious, abrasive and challenging, he remains absorbingly readable.
In this notorious late novel, Lawrence’s pagan imaginings burgeon. Kate Leslie, an Irish widow touring Mexico, becomes gradually involved with a charismatic leader, and she enters a sexual relationship with his dark henchman.
As the two men conspire to revive the old Aztec religion and seize power, Kate is increasingly implicated in their ‘blood consciousness’, phallic propaganda and right-wing violence.
The Plumed Serpent abounds in the ‘politically incorrect’: Lawrence retains his power to shock. As a publisher once said, ‘Anything to do with D. H. L. is rather dangerous.’
In the early years of the 18th century, Scotland is torn by religious and political strife. Hogg's sinner, justified by his Calvinist conviction that his own salvation is pre-ordained, is suspected of involvement in a series of bizarre and hideous crimes. A century later his memoirs reveal the extraordinary, macabre truth. The tale is chilling for its astute psychological accuracy as it illustrates, with power and economy, the dire effect of self-righteous bigotry on a fanatical character.
In the first half of his new introduction David Blair provides a detailed explanation of the historical and religious contexts of Hogg's novel. In the second half he probes the book's brilliant, complex en
The Return of the Native is widely recognised as the most representative of Hardy's Wessex novels. He evokes the dismal presence and menacing beauty of Egdon Heath - reaching out to touch the lives and fate of all who dwell on it. The central figure is Clym Yeobright, the returning ‘native’ and the story tells of his love for the beautiful but capricious Eustacia Vye.
As the narrative unfolds and character after character is driven to self-destruction the presence of the Heath becomes all-embracing, while Clym becomes a travelling preacher in an attempt to assuage his guilt.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel depicts nothing less than the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-nineteenth century. But these clashes are dramatized through personal struggles. John Barton has to reconcile his personal conscience with his socialist duty, risking his life and liberty in the process. His daughter Mary is caught between two lovers, from opposing classes – worker and manufacturer. And at the heart of the narrative lies a murder which implicates them all.
Mary Barton was published in 1848, at a time of great social ferment in Europe, and it reflects its revolutionary moment through an English lens. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel about the world in which she lived – Manchester at the height of the industrial revolution. As the wife of a Unitarian minister she was solidly middle-class;but she also had close contact with the working classes around her, sympathised with them, and represented their extreme distresses in her fiction. She is radical in taking on their dialect, imagining the realities of their lives, and placing a working woman at the centre of her fiction. If to our eyes her vision remains limited, it was an honest vision, for which she was much criticised in her own time, by her own class.
Parade’s End is the great British war novel and Ford Madox Ford’s major achievement as a novelist. Originally published as four linked novels between 1924 and 1928, it follows the story of Christopher Tietjens, as his life is shattered by his wife’s infidelities and overturned by the mud, blood and destruction of the First World War. Tietjens, with his old-fashioned Tory values, is already out of step with the corrupt political culture of Edwardian England: his experiences at the Front and his developing relationship with the suffragette Valentine Wannop force him into a radical reconfiguring of his values as he participates in the post-war period of national re-construction. Parade’s End is both a subtly perceptive psychological novel and a richly descriptive chronicle of ‘the public events of a decade’. Through Tietjens, his beautiful (and unforgettably cruel) wife, Sylvia, and the principled Valentine, Ford draws us into the world of the English upper class as it goes through a period of crisis and transformation.
Richard III is one of the finest of Shakespeare’s historical dramas. Although it has a huge cast, Richard himself, gleefully wicked, charismatically Machiavellian, always dominates the play: a role to gratify such leading actors as David Garrick, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Sher, Ian McKellen and Al Pacino.
Since, in real life, political Machiavellianism is never out of date, Richard III remains perennially topical. Numerous revivals on stage and screen have demonstrated the enduring cogency of this drama about the lethally corrupting quest for power.
The House of Mirth tells the story of Lily Bart, aged 29, beautiful, impoverished and in need of a rich husband to safeguard her place in the social elite, and to support her expensive habits - her clothes, her charities and her gambling. Unwilling to marry without both love and money, Lily becomes vulnerable to the kind of gossip and slander which attach to a girl who has been on the marriage market for too long.
Wharton charts the course of Lily's life, providing, along the way, a wider picture of a society in transition, a rapidly changing New York where the old certainties of manners, morals and family have disappeared and the individual has become an expendable commodity.
Ten produkt jest zapowiedzią. Realizacja Twojego zamówienia ulegnie przez to wydłużeniu do czasu premiery tej pozycji. Czy chcesz dodać ten produkt do koszyka?
