Series: Oxford World's Classics

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...

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...

"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...

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,...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

'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...

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. Always provocative, the Friedrich Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil (1886) is at once a sceptical psychologist and philosopher-seer, passionately unmasking European society with his piercing insights and uncanny prescience. This masterpiece of his maturity considers quintessential Nietzschean topics such as the origins and nature of Judeo-Christian...

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...

Study me reader, if you find delight in me...Come, O men, to see the miracles that such studies will disclose in nature. Most of what we know about Leonardo da Vinci, we know because of his notebooks. Some 6,000 sheets of notes and drawings survive, which represent perhaps one-fifth of what he actually produced. In them, he recorded everything that...

Julius Caesar 'Cry "havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war' Set against the backdrop of a nation breaking out into civil war, Julius Caesar raises questions of governance, power, tyranny, and enslavement. This New Oxford Shakespeare edition situates these questions within the historical framework of the play's early history in theatre and print, as well as within its long...

The pen would smoothly write the things it knew But when it came to love it split in two, A donkey stuck in mud is logic's fate - Love's nature only love can demonstrate. Rumi's Masnavi is widely recognised as the greatest Sufi poem ever written, and has been called 'the Koran in Persian'. The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Rumi composed...

"To be loved to madness - such was her great desire." Eustacia Vye criss-crosses the wild Egdon Heath, eager to experience life to the full in her quest for "music, poetry, passion, war". She marries Clym Yeobright, native of the heath, but his idealism frustrates her romantic ambitions. Her discontent draws others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness....

I am making up To the Lighthouse - the sea is to be heard all through it Inspired by the lost bliss of her childhood summers in Cornwall, Virginia Woolf produced one of the masterworks of English literature in To the Lighthouse. It concerns the Ramsay family and their summer guests on the Isle of Skye before and after the...

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...

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. The greatest 'state of the nation' novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through her portrait of a Midlands town, George Eliot addresses gender relations and class, self-knowledge and self-delusion, community...

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...

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...

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...

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...

‘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 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,...

'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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

Hamlet's combination of violence and introspection is unusual among Shakespeare's tragedies. It is also full of curious riddles and fascinating paradoxes, making it one of his most widely discussed plays. Professor Hibbard's illuminating and original introduction explains the process by which variant texts were fused together in the eighteenth century to create the most commonly used text of today. Drawing...

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...

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...

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...

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...

`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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

"It will be a strange sort of a book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy.... Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing,...

"What is your nation if I may ask," says the citizen. "Ireland," says Bloom. "I was born here. Ireland." Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom...

One ought to choose something very deliberately, and be faithful to that. Isabel Archer is a young, intelligent, and spirited American girl, determined to relish her first experience of Europe. She rejects two eligible suitors in her fervent commitment to liberty and independence, declaring that she will never marry. Thanks to the generosity of her devoted cousin Ralph, she is...

The Swann Way is the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. The work is a portal to Proust's novel and an introduction to its unforgettable first-person narrator-protagonist. Immersed in themes of time, memory, identity, art, sensation, love, and jealousy, the narrator embarks on the story...

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) proclaims that it is "A Trivial Play for Serious People." In fact, collected here alongside Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), Salome (1891, 1894), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1895), Earnest shows that the questions...

'Pray, pray be composed,' cried Elinor, 'and do not betray what you feel to every body present. Perhaps he has not observed you yet.' For Elinor Dashwood, sensible and sensitive, and her romantic, impetuous younger sister Marianne, the prospect of marrying the men they love appears remote. In a world ruled by money and self-interest, the Dashwood sisters have neither...

Romeo and Juliet opens with a haunting line: 'A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life'. This edition offers a clear and accessible introduction to Shakespeare's enduring tale of ill-fated lovers. Hannah August provides insightful analysis, focusing particularly on the dramatic function of the famous prologue and the significance of the play's ending. She explores ways of reading the play...

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall. Can one life be measured against another? Can a woman's body be measured against a man's life? Can consensual sex be measured against rape? Measure for Measure explores these questions through a series of substitutions: Angelo deputises for the Duke, who disguises himself to spy on his subjects; corrupt Angelo demands...

Can we doubt ... that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin challenged many of the most deeply held beliefs of the Western world. His insistence on the immense length of the past and on the abundance of life-forms,...

I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books...I want to kick up my heels & be off. Orlando tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman. The story spans encounters with queens, kings, novelists, playwrights, and poets, and explores a struggle...

'I spring from the pages into your arms' Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman stands as one of the most influential and innovative literary works of the last two hundred years. Widely credited as the originator of free verse in English, Whitman put forward a radical new language of the body, the nation, and same-sex love. After the book's initial...

'There's an east wind coming... such a wind as never blew on England yet.' Arthur Conan Doyle's His Last Bow features a selection of Sherlock Holmes stories written at a time of growing tensions in Europe. First published as a collection in 1917, against the backdrop of the First World War, the volume covers tales that deviate from the pattern...

It was at the time when I was wandering around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its mark on them... Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent,...

By the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened... Frankenstein is the most celebrated horror story ever written....

We that are true lovers run into strange capers. Four centuries after its publication in the Folio, As You Like It's capacity to entertain and instruct remains evergreen. This edition provides a friendly yet authoritative introduction to the play, upholding it as a crowning expression of the Elizabethan Renaissance while underscoring its appeal to twenty-first century readers as Shakespeare's most...

'His rise testifies to the decline of a whole society.' Jean-Paul Sartre Maupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (1885), is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man, Georges Duroy, christened 'Bel-Ami' by his female admirers, making it to the top in fin-de-siècle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the...

War is merely the continuation of policy by other means. On War is one of the most important books ever written on the subject of war. Clausewitz, a Prussian officer who fought against the French during the Napoleonic Wars, sought to understand and analyse the phenomenon of war so that future leaders could conduct and win conflicts more effectively. He...