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...

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...

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...

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...

'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...

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...

'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...

'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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

Since its publication in 1905, The House of Mirth has commanded attention for the sharpness of Wharton's observations and the power of her style. Its heroine, Lily Bart, is beautiful, poor, and unmarried at 29. In her search for a husband with money and position, she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms...

War, the bringer of tears... For 2,700 years, The Iliad has gripped listeners and readers with the story of Achilles' anger and Hector's death. This tragic episode during the siege of Troy, sparked by a quarrel between the leader of the Greek army and its mightiest warrior, Achilles, is played out between mortals and gods, with devastating human consequences. It...

The Jungle Books can be regarded as classic stories told by an adult to children. But they also constitute a complex literary work of art in which the whole of Kipling's philosophy of life is expressed in miniature. They are best known for the Mowgli stories; the tale of a baby abandoned and brought up by wolves, educated in the...

The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with the dramatic scene of Michael Henchard, an out-of-work hay-trusser, rashly declaring, 'The woman is no good to me. Who'll have her?' In a drunken stupor at a local fair, he impulsively sells his wife Susan and baby daughter. Eighteen years later, Susan and her daughter return to find he has risen to prominence as...

What was Shakespeare's attitude to Semitism? The introduction to this edition of The Merchant of Venice opens by addressing this vital issue raised by the play and goes on to study the sources, background, and date, including a discussion of Sigmund Freud's essay on 'The Three Caskets'. Professor Halio interprets the play's contradictions, inconsistencies, and complementarities, especially as these relate...

‘Was her life to be always like this? - always bringing some new source of inward strife?’ When the miller Mr Tulliver becomes entangled in lawsuits, he sets off a chain of events that will profoundly affect the lives of his family and bring into conflict his passionate daughter Maggie with her inflexible but adored brother Tom. As she grows...

Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer? A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narrators—a household servant, a detective, a...

Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, in the short story 'The Final Problem', but was tempted to bring him back to life ten years later, in the thirteen tales that comprise The Return of Sherlock Holmes. While the outcry that supposedly followed Holmes' death was mostly apocryphal (the claim that readers wore black armbands in mourning...

‘It was the garden that did it - and Mary and Dickon and the creatures - and the Magic.’ An orphaned girl, a grim moorland manor with hundreds of empty rooms, strange cries in the night, a walled garden, with its door locked and the key buried - and a boy who talks to animals. These are the ingredients of...

I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing. The Sorrows of Young Werther propelled Goethe to instant fame when it first appeared in 1774. Goethe drew on his own unhappy experiences to tell the story of Werther, a young man tormented by his love for Lotte, a...

'He looked up wistfully in my face, and gravely asked – "Mamma, why are you so wicked?"' The mysterious new tenant of Wildfell Hall has a dark secret. But as the captivated Gilbert Markham will discover, it is not the story circulating among local gossips. Living under an assumed name, Helen Graham is the estranged wife of a dissolute rake,...

Richard III is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays on the stage and has been adapted successfully for film. This new and innovative edition recognises the play's pre-eminence as a performance work: a perspective that informs every aspect of the editing. Challenging traditional practice, the text is based on the 1597 Quarto which, it is argued, brings us closest to...

The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday - but never jam to-day. Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There was first published in December 1871 (dated 1872). Although Carroll intended Looking-Glass to be a follow-up piece to the immediately successful Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), he created an entirely new fantasy world with a revised narrative...

Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, Blood and revenge are hammering in my head. In Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, the Roman general Titus incurs the wrath of the Queen of the Goths when he enslaves her and kills one of her sons. The shocking violence of her revenge and his retaliation earn Titus its reputation as...

Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. At the centre of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in...

'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...

Twelfth Night, or What You Will: The Oxford Shakespeare is one of the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in the modern theatre, and this edition places particular emphasis on its theatrical qualities throughout. Peopled with lovers misled either by disguises or their own natures, it combines lyrical melancholy with broad comedy. The introduction analyses its many views of love and...

"I am going to sink it." "You are not!" "I am," he coldly replied. "Do not take it on yourself to judge me, monsieur." French naturalist Dr Aronnax embarks on an expedition to hunt down a sea monster, but discovers instead the Nautilus, a self-contained world built by its enigmatic captain. Together, Nemo and Aronnax explore the underwater realms of...

'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.' Becky Sharp is sharp, calculating, and determined to succeed. Craving wealth and a position in society, she charms, hoodwinks, and manipulates everyone she meets, rising in the world as she attaches herself to a succession of rich men. Becky's fortunes are contrasted with those of...

"I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre." - George Eliot Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck's school in Villette. Strongly drawn to the fiery, autocratic schoolmaster...

'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...

'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...