Series: Oxford World's Classics

Discourses on Livy (1531) is as essential to an understanding of Machiavelli as his famous treatise, The Prince. Equally controversial, it reveals his fundamental preference for a republican state. Comparing the practice of the ancient Romans with that of his contemporaries provided Machiavelli with a consistent point of view in all his works. Machiavelli's close analysis of Livy's history of...

'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...

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...

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...

'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...

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...

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...

"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...

Devils, also known in English as The Possessed and The Demons, was first published in 1871-72. The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, it is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray which follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small provincial town. Dostoevsky compares infectious radicalism to...

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...

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...

"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...

Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured nihilist who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook Russian society. Indeed, the image of humanity liberated by science from age-old conformities and prejudices is one...

The definitive English version of the stories of King Arthur, Le Morte Darthur was completed in 1469-70 by Sir Thomas Malory, knight-prisoner. In a resonant prose style, Malory charts the tragic disintegration of the fellowship of the Round Table, destroyed from within by warring factions. Recounting the life of King Arthur, the knightly exploits of Sir Lancelot du Lake, Sir...

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...

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 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:...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

Look, my lord! See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions! The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction. It inaugurated a literary genre that will be forever associated with the effects that Walpole pioneered. Professing to be a translation of a mysterious Italian tale from the...

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...

‘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...

'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...

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...

The greatest historian that ever lived Such was Macaulay's verdict on Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC) and his history of the The Peloponnesian War, the momentous struggle between Athens and Sparta as rival powers and political systems that lasted for twenty-seven years from 431 to 404 BC. This conflict involved virtually the whole of the Greek world and ended in the...

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...

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...

'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...

“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...

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...

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,...

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...

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 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...

‘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...

'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...

"I shall do one thing in this life - one thing for certain - that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die." Gabriel Oak is only one of three suitors for the hand of the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene. He must compete with the dashing young soldier Sergeant Troy and respectable, middle-aged...

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...

'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 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...

'All his powers were in decline; the only thing growing stronger in him was the conviction that all this could not last much longer, that his demise was imminent.' The Buddenbrooks (1900) was Thomas Mann's first major success. It draws on his own family history and on his vivid memories of growing up in the commercial town of Lübeck in...

"I never can resist a touch of the dramatic." The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is now best remembered for its concluding story in which the great detective appears to plunge to his death into the waters at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, locked in a struggle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty. However, the collection also brings the reader back...

I am not an angel nor a genie nor a ghost...I am Erik! A mysterious Phantom haunts the depths of the Paris Opera House where he has fallen passionately in love with the beautiful singer Christine Daaé. Under his guidance, her singing rises to new heights and she is triumphantly acclaimed. But Christine is also loved by Raoul de Chagny,...

In this vigorous and fast-moving novel of post-Napoleonic France, Julien Sorel's plans to reach the higher echelons of society through the priesthood are deflected by his realisation that the attainment of happiness is of greater consequence than the pursuit of ambition. Subtitled A Chronicle of 1830, Stendhal's depiction of a nation of smug hypocrites scandalised contemporary readers, who recognised themselves...

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere human beasts who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalised by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to...

The profoundest book there is, born from the innermost richness of truth, an inexhaustible well into which no bucket descends without coming up with gold and goodness. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) was Nietzsche's own favourite among all his books and has proved to be his most popular, having sold millions of copies in many different languages. In it, he addresses...

`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...

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...

"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 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...

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...