Series: Oxford World's Classics

`My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings.' For half a century from its publication in 1901 Up from Slavery was the best known book written by an African American. The life of ex-slave Booker T Washington embodied the legendary rise of the American self-made man, and his autobiography gave prominence for...

'people get out of prison, and when they get out, and their name is Edmond Dantès, they take their revenge!' Falsely accused of treason, the young sailor Edmond Dantès is arrested on his wedding day and imprisoned in the island fortress of the Château d'If. Having endured years of incarceration, he stages a daring and dramatic escape and sets out...

Arms and the man I sing of Troy... So begins one of the greatest works of literature in any language. Written by the Roman poet Virgil more than two thousand years ago, the story of Aeneas' seven-year journey from the ruins of Troy to Italy, where he becomes the founding ancestor of Rome, is a narrative on an epic scale:...

The story goes that a sow who had delivered a whole litter of piglets loudly accosted a lioness. "How many children do you breed?" asked the sow. "I breed only one", said the lioness, "but it is very well bred!" The fables of Aesop have become one of the most enduring traditions of European culture, ever since they were first...

But I don't want to go among mad people, Alice remarked. Oh, you can't help that, said the Cat. We're all mad here. The Alice books are two of the most translated, most quoted, and best-known books in the world, but what exactly are they? Apparently delightful, innocent fantasies for children, they are also complex textures of mathematical, linguistic, and...

In 1872, the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This event provided Tolstoy with the inspiration he needed to compose what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written. In writing Anna Karenina, he moved away from the vast historical sweep of War and Peace to portray, with extraordinary...

Love... it means too much to me, far more than you can understand. At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties— to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that bind the society...

As the bicentenary of the French Revolution draws near, Dickens' historical novel serves as a timely reminder of nineteenth-century reactions to that great upheaval. Set between 1757 and 1793, A Tale of Two Cities views the causes and effects of the Revolution from an essentially private point of view, showing how private experience relates to public history. Dickens' characters are...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry...

One death, in exchange for thousands of lives - it's simple arithmetic! This is a new translation of Dostoevsky's epic masterpiece, Crime and Punishment (1866) by Nicolas Pasternak Slater, with editorial material by the UK's leading Dostoevsky expert, Dr Sarah J. Young. The impoverished student Raskolnikov decides to free himself from debt by killing an old moneylender, an act he...

One afternoon in the autumn of 1851, a solitary horseman, followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico. He had lost his way. Death Comes for the Archbishop is the story of two missionary priests, travelling through the American Southwest in the aftermath of the Mexican American wars. Father Jean-Marie Latour...

"He thought it expedient and necessary that he should commence knight-errant, and wander through the world, with his horse and arms, in quest of adventures." Don Quixote de la Mancha, first published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is one of the world's greatest comic novels. Inspired by tales of chivalry, Don Quixote of La Mancha embarks on a...

It was butcher work...the horrid screeching as the stake drove home; the plunging of writhing form, and lips of bloody foam. Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic shocker introduced Count Dracula to the world, an ancient creature bent on bringing his contagion to London, the very heart of the British Empire. Only a handful of men and women stand between Dracula and...

I wonder what will become of her! So speculate the friends and neighbours of Emma Woodhouse, the lovely, lively, wilful, and fallible heroine of Jane Austen's fourth published novel. Confident that she knows best, Emma schemes to find a suitable husband for her pliant friend Harriet, only to discover that she understands the feelings of others as little as she...

Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s imperial Russia, Pushkin's novel in verse follows the emotions and destiny of three men - Onegin the bored fop, Lensky the minor elegiast, and a stylized Pushkin himself - and the fates and affections of three women - Tatyana...

'You are to understand, Mr Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret...' Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband, the blacksmith, with few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past—the escaped convict Magwitch,...

Thus, gentle Reader, I have given thee a faithful History of my Travels for Sixteen Years, and above Seven Months; wherein I have not been so studious of Ornament as of Truth. In these words, Gulliver represents himself as a reliable reporter of the fantastic adventures he has just set down; but how far can we rely on a narrator...

What is honour? A word. What is in that word 'honour'? What is that 'honour'? Air. A history play that combines a coming-of-age narrative with a tale of power, rebellion, friendship, and betrayal, Henry IV Part I has been a perennial favourite from Shakespeare's time to the present. What has ensured its popularity is above all the towering figure of...

"Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt!" Throughout the hardships of her childhood—spent with a severe aunt and abusive cousin, and later at the austere Lowood charity school—Jane Eyre clings to a sense of self-worth, despite her treatment from those close to her. At the age of eighteen, sick of her narrow existence, she seeks work as...

Little Women has remained enduringly popular since its publication in 1868, becoming the inspiration for a whole genre of family stories. Set in a small New England community, it tells of the March family: Marmee looks after daughters in the absence of her husband, who is serving as an army chaplain in the Civil War, and Meg, Jo, Beth, and...

The theme of the Metamorphoses is change and transformation, as illustrated in Graeco-Roman myth and legend. On this ostensibly unifying thread, Ovid strings together a vast and kaleidoscopic sequence of brilliant narratives, in which the often paradoxical and always arbitrary fates of his human and divine characters reflect the never-ending flux and reflux of the universe itself. About the series:...

'No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.' Northanger Abbey is a comedy about reading and misreading—of books and the world—and about different kinds of peril, both imagined and real. In it, Austen's youngest heroine, Catherine Morland, must navigate financial disadvantage, social constraint, and sometimes quite ruthless manipulation....

Reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, the whole murky affair which goes by the name of thought, all the privileges and showpieces of man: what a high price has been paid for them! How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all "good things!" On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about the history of ethics...

'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.' Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. More than seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and...

'I made him know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav'd his Life...I likewise taught him to say Master.' Robinson Crusoe's seafaring adventures are abruptly ended when he is shipwrecked, the solitary survivor on a deserted island. He gradually creates a life for himself, building a house, cultivating the land, and making a companion from the...

Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, with its intricate plot of enchantment and betrayal, is probably the most skilfully told story in the whole of the English Arthurian cycle. Originating from the north-west midlands of England, it is based on two separate and very ancient Celtic motifs: the Beheading and the Exchange of Winnings, brought together by the anonymous 14th-century...

In his celebrated masterpiece, Symposium, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC at which the guests—including the comic poet Aristophanes and, of course, Plato's mentor Socrates—each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of dazzling speeches culminates in Socrates' famous account of the views of Diotima, a prophetess who taught him that love is...

I have heard the supreme mystery, yoga, from Krishna, from the lord of yoga himself. Thus ends the Bhagavad Gita, the most famous episode from the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. In its eighteen short chapters, Krishna's teaching leads the warrior Arjuna from perplexity to understanding and correct action, in the process raising and developing many key themes from the...

Whoever best acquits himself, and tells The most amusing and instructive tale, Shall have a dinner, paid for by us all... In Chaucer's most ambitious poem, The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), a group of pilgrims assembles in an inn just outside London and agree to entertain each other on the way to Canterbury by telling stories. The pilgrims come from...

The Communist Manifesto is one of the most influential pieces of political propaganda ever written. It is a summary of the whole Marxist vision of history and is the foundation document of the Marxist movement. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were aged 29 and 27 respectively when The Communist Manifesto was published on the eve of the 1848 revolutions. The...

Herodotus is not only known as the father of history, as Cicero called him, but also the father of ethnography. As well as charting the historical background to the Persian Wars, his curiosity also prompts frequent digression on the cultures of the peoples he introduces. While much of the information he gives has proved to be astonishingly accurate, he also...

Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound! The mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to Dartmoor in the most famous of all Arthur Conan Doyle's books. Is Sir Charles the latest victim of the ancestral Curse of the Baskervilles, which summons a demonic hound to stalk the moor and exact vengeance...

Into a compellingly real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Myshkin. The tensions subsequently unleashed by the hero's innocence, truthfulness, and humility betray the inadequacy of his moral idealism and disclose the spiritual emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate him. Myshkin's mission ends in idiocy and darkness, but it is the world...

He was deaf to the murmurs of conscience, and resolved to satisfy his desires at any price. The Monk (1796) is a sensational story of temptation and depravity, a masterpiece of Gothic fiction and the first horror novel in English literature. The respected monk Ambrosio, the Abbot of a Capuchin monastery in Madrid, is overwhelmed with desire for a young...

Happiness, then, is the best, noblest, and most pleasant thing in the world. In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's guiding question is: what is the best thing for a human being? His answer is happiness, but he means not something we feel, but rather a specially good kind of life. Happiness is made up of activities in which we use the...

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siècle London, the novel traces...

As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream. So begins one of the best-loved and most widely read books in English literature. The Pilgrim's Progress is a timeless narrative celebrated for...

The Politics is one of the most influential texts in the history of political thought, and it raises issues which still confront anyone who wants to think seriously about the ways in which human societies are organised and governed. The work of one of the world's greatest philosophers, it draws on Aristotle's own extensive knowledge of the political and constitutional...

'Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.' With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester must wear a scarlet 'A' upon her breast, the sin of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name, her husband begins his search for her lover, determined to...

‘How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in't!’ Performed variously as escapist fantasy, celebratory fiction, and political allegory, The Tempest is one of the plays in which Shakespeare's genius as a poetic dramatist found its fullest expression. Significantly, it was placed first when published in the First Folio of 1623, and is now generally seen...

Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K. for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. A successful professional man wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for an offence which is never explained. The mysterious court which conducts his trial is outwardly co-operative, but capable of horrific violence. Faced with this ambiguous authority,...

'To find citizens ruled by good and wholesome laws, that is an exceeding rare, and hard thing.' Thomas More's Utopia presents an account of an idealised fictional society that has fascinated readers since its first publication in Latin in 1516. It is a scathing critique of More's contemporaries and a hopeful portrait of a better world; a ridiculous satire of...

A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best loved of Shakespeare's plays. It brings together aristocrats, workers, and fairies in a wood outside Athens, and from there the enchantment begins. Simple and engaging on the surface, it is nonetheless a highly original and sophisticated work, remarkable for both its literary and theatrical mastery. It is one of the very few...

In its towering central characters, vast geographical and historical sweep, and its variety of style and mood, Anthony and Cleopatra is perhaps the most ambitious of Shakespeare's designs. Yet the degree and nature of its success remain surprisingly contentious, and performances of the play have seldom matched the extravagant expectations of its admirers. Michael Neill's wide-ranging introduction evaluates the play...

Beowulf is the longest and finest literary work to have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon times, and one of the world's greatest epic poems. Set in the half-legendary, half-historical Scandinavian past, it tells the story of the hero Beowulf, who comes to the aid of the Danish king Hrothgar by killing first the terrifying, demonic monster Grendel, and then...

A man ... is so in the way in the house! A vivid and affectionate portrait of a provincial town in early Victorian England, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford describes a community dominated by its independent and refined women. Undaunted by poverty, but dismayed by changes brought by the railway and by new commercial practices, the ladies of Cranford respond to disruption...

"I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield," wrote Dickens of what is the most personal, certainly one of the most popular, of all his novels. Dickens wrote the book after the completion of a fragment of autobiography recalling his employment as a child in a London warehouse, and in the first-person...

The Dhammapada, the Pali version of one of the most popular texts of the Buddhist canon, ranks among the classics of the world's great religious literature. Like all religious texts in Pali, The Dhammapada belongs to the Therevâda school of the Buddhist tradition, adherents of which are now found primarily in Kampuchea, Laos, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. The Dhammapada, or...

Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a profound exploration of human society and governance. Rousseau delves into the intricate dynamics of political thought and the essence of collective agreement through his seminal works. The Discourse on Political Economy provides insights into the role of government in protecting liberty and exploring economic structures within society....

“I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne.” James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names, and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for...

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902, it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the...

Hard Times is Dickens's shortest novel, and arguably his greatest triumph. A useful appendix of the author's working notes, together with an enlightening introduction and full explanatory notes, will ensure that this edition becomes the obvious choice for anyone studying the novel. Paul Schlike is Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years...

Henry V, the climax of Shakespeare's sequence of English history plays, is an inspiring, often comic celebration of a young warrior-king. But it is also a study of the costly exhilarations of war, and of the penalties as well as the glories of human greatness. Introducing this brilliantly innovative edition, Gary Taylor shows how Shakespeare shaped his historical material, examines...

Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul? Jude Fawley, poor and working-class, longs to study at the University of Christminster, but he is rebuffed and trapped in a loveless marriage. He falls in love with his unconventional cousin Sue Bridehead, and their refusal to marry when free to do so...

Kim (1901) is one of Kipling's masterpieces. Through the story of the young orphan Kimball O'Hara and his vocation in the Secret Service, Kipling presents a vivid picture of India—its teeming populations, religions, superstitions, and the life of the bazaars and the road. About the Series: For over 100 years, Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of...

The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, form an unholy alliance and turn seduction into a game - a game which they...

He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind. Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is not just one of the greatest philosophical texts in the English language; it is one of the most important works in the history of Western political thought. Almost every major tradition in the centuries after Hobbes—...

‘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...

To the white men in the waterside business and to the captain of ships, he was just Jim—nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced. Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman—'as unflinching as a hero in a book'—who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice...

'Would this misery go on forever? Was there no escape? And yet she was every bit as good as all those other women who led happy lives!' When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary, she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is a dull...

'Twelve Year a Whore, fives times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent' So the title page of this extraordinary novel describes the career of the woman known as Moll Flanders, whose real name we never discover. And...

"For there she was." Mrs Dalloway follows a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class woman in London, in June 1923, as she prepares for a party. Clarissa's thoughts and actions are interwoven with the trauma and bereavement of Septimus Smith, a poor young man suffering from shell-shock, in a contrasting narrative that provides poignant insights into...

Sparkling with the witty dialogue between Beatrice and Benedict, Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare's most enjoyable and theatrically successful comedies. This edition offers a newly edited text and an exceptionally helpful and critically aware introduction. Paying particular attention to analysis of the play's minor characters, Sheldon P. Zitner discusses Shakespeare's transformation of his source material. He rethinks...

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains... And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. My Antonia (1918) depicts the pioneering period of European settlement on...

"I was born in Tuckahoe I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant." Thus begins the...

Three extraordinary characters caught in a web of fatal obsession are at the centre of Hugo's novel. The grotesque hunchback Quasimodo, bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, owes his life to the austere archdeacon, Claude Frollo, who in turn is bound by a hopeless passion to the gypsy dancer Esmeralda. She, meanwhile, is bewitched by a handsome, empty-headed officer, but by an unthinking...

The new Oxford World's Classics edition of Oliver Twist is based on the authoritative Clarendon edition, which uses Dickens's revised text of 1846. It includes his preface of 1841 in which he defended himself against hostile criticism, and includes all 24 original illustrations by George Cruikshank. Stephen Gill's groundbreaking introduction gives a fascinating new account of the novel. He also...

For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Willa Cather's second novel, O Pioneers! (1913) tells the story of Alexandra Bergson and her determination to save her immigrant family's Nebraska farm. Clear-headed...

Agamemnon Libation Bearers Eumenides Aeschylus' Oresteia is the only trilogy to survive from Greek tragedy, and the religious and moral ideas it enacts afterwards influenced a great dramatic genre, as well as giving its three plays their lasting significance. In this family history, Fate and the gods decree that each generation will repeat the crimes and endure the suffering of...

Following his father's death, John Harmon returns to London to claim his inheritance, but he finds he is eligible only if he marries Bella Wilfur. To observe her character, he assumes another identity and secures work with his father's foreman, Mr Boffin, who is also Bella's guardian. Disguise and concealment play an important role in the novel, and individual identity...

'You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don't shriek...you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.' Shirley is Charlotte Brontë's only historical novel and her most topical one. Written at a time of social unrest, it is set during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, when economic...

'She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air: "Tess- say it is not true! No, it is not true!"' Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is...

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...

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the series of short stories that made the fortunes of The Strand Magazine, in which they were first published, and won immense popularity for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. The detective is...

The victor belongs to the spoils. F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), is a devastating portrait of a generation of wealthy young Americans who struggle to find meaning and happiness in their lives. The sophisticated but emotionally fragile Anthony Patch enjoys an initially idyllic marriage to the beautiful Gloria Gilbert. But their intense romance turns sour...

K. kept feeling that he had lost himself, or was further away in a strange land than anyone had ever been before. A remote village covered almost permanently in snow and dominated by a castle and its staff of dictatorial, sexually predatory bureaucrats - this is the setting for Kafka's story about a man seeking both acceptance in the village...

The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare's most farcical plays, with not one but two sets of twins sliding past each other into mistakes, violence, and madness. An early romantic comedy, it is often considered an immature play but also a piece of dramatic experimentation. This New Oxford Shakespeare edition examines links between Shakespeare's play and its literary sources...

The Decameron (c.1351) was written in the wake of the Black Death, a shattering epidemic which had shaken Florence's confident entrepreneurial society to its core. In a country villa outside the city, ten young noble men and women who have escaped the plague decide to tell each other stories. Boccaccio's skill as a dramatist is masterfully displayed in this virtuoso...

Described variously as the greatest poem of the European Middle Ages and, because of the author's evangelical purpose, the fifth Gospel, The Divine Comedy is central to the culture of the west. The poem is a spiritual autobiography in the form of a journey - the poet travels from the dark circles of the Inferno, up the mountain of Purgatory,...

King Lear, widely considered Shakespeare's most deeply moving, passionately expressed, and intellectually ambitious play, has almost always been edited from the revised version printed in the First Folio of 1623, with additions from the quarto of 1608. Now for the first time, this new volume presents the full, scholarly edition to be based firmly on the quarto, now recognised as...