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Love's Labour's Lost, now recognized as one of the most delightful and stageworthy of Shakespeare's comedies, came into its own both on the stage and in critical esteem only during the 1930s and 1940s--after nearly three hundred years of neglect by the theater and misuse by critics. In this new critical edition, Hibbard pays particular attention to this process of rehabilitation. Based on the quarto of 1598, and drawing on recent scholarly analysis, he proposes that the quarto goes back, probably by way of a "lost" quarto, to an authorial manuscript that represents the play in a state prior to "fair copy." He offers numerous original readings of difficult and disputed passages, and a helpful commentary to the play's scintillating language.

This selection, chosen from the Oxford Authors critical edition, includes Wordsworth's finest verse, and a large sample of The Prelude, his extraordinary autobiographical poem in blank verse and the first truly great achievement of a new era in English poetry.

Thomas Hobbes' timeless account of the human condition, first developed in The Elements of Law (1640), which comprises Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, is a direct product of the intellectual and political strife of the seventeenth century. His analysis of the war between the individual and the group lays out the essential strands of his moral and political philosophy later made famous in Leviathan. This first ever complete paperback edition of Human Nature and De Corpore Politico is also supplemented by chapters from Hobbes' later work De Corpore and "The Three Lives," never before published together in English.

George Duchner died in 1837 at a tragically early age, and his three works for the stage remained virtually unknown for half a century. Today all three, especially Danton''s Death, his great play about the French Revolution are performed regularly. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small Ohio town at the end of the 19th century. At the centre is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's solitary figures. The book has influenced such major American writers as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Updike. This new edition corrects errors in earlier editions and takes into account major criticism and textualscholarship of the last several decades.

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 1749, as shocking as they are funny today.Expelled from Mr Allworthy''s country estate for his wild temper and sexual conquests, the good-hearted foundling Tom Jones loses his money, joins the army, and pursues his beloved across Britain to London, where he becomes a kept lover and confronts the possibility of incest. Tom Jones is rightly regardedas Fielding''s greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. This carefully modernized edition is based on Fielding''s emended fourth edition text and offers the most thorough notes, maps, and bibliography. The introduction uses the latest scholarship to examine how Tom Jones exemplifies the role of the novel in the emerging eighteenth-century public sphere. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a vivid psychological account of a young man's experience of fighting in the American Civil War, based on Crane's reading of popular descriptions of battle. The other stories collected in this volume draw on Crane's subsequent experience of war reporting and include `The Open Boat, `The Monster' and `The Blue Hotel'. This edition is the most generously annotated available of Crane's work, focusing on his place as anexperimental writer, his modernist legacy and his social as well as literary revisionism.

This superb new translation of Nietzsche's mature masterpiece, Beyond Good and Evil, offers the most comprehensively annotated text, complemented by a lucid introduction by one of the most eminent of Nietzsche scholars, Robert C. Holub.

The companion volume to Plutarch's Greek Lives published in Oxford World's Classics in 1998, Roman Lives is a newly translated selection from Plutarch's rich, elegant and learned Lives, valued throughout the ages for their historical value and their charm. The lives included are those of Marcus Cato, Aemilius Paullus, The Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Julius Caesar and Anthony. Closely annotated with bibliographies, maps and an index,this is the ideal edition for all students of classical history.

Stoic philosopher and tutor to the young emperor Nero, Seneca wrote moral essays - exercises in practical philosophy - on how to live in a troubled world. Strikingly applicable today, his thoughts on happiness and other subjects are here combined in a clear, modern translation with an introduction on Seneca's life and philosophy.

A bestseller in 1859, Self-Help became one of Victorian Britain's most important statements on the allied virtues of hard work, thrift, and perseverance. Smiles's book is the precursor of today's motivational and self-improvement literature and encapsulated the aspirational Victorian desire for social advancement.

Wilkie Collins's intriguing story about a blind girl, Lucilla Finch, and the identical twins who both fall in love with her, has the exciting complications of his better-known novels, but it also overturns conventional expectations. Using a background of myth and fairy-tale to expand the boundaries of nineteenth-century realist fiction, Collins not only takes a blind person as his central character but also explores the idea of blindness and its implications. His sensitive presentation of the difficulties, disappointments, and occasional delights which follow the recovery of sight by someone blind since infancy is still one of the best accounts in fiction of a problem which continues to intrigue philosophers, psychologists, and the general public, as it has done since it was first discussed by Locke and Berkeley in the eighteenth century.

Berkeley's idealism started a revolution in philosophy. As one of the great empiricist thinkers he not only influenced British philosophers from Hume to Russell and the logical positivists in the twentieth century, he also set the scene for the continental idealism of Hegel and even the philosophy of Marx.This edition of Berkeley's two key works has an introduction which examines and in part defends his arguments for idealism, as well as offering a detailed analytical contents list, extensive philosophical notes and an index.

Set in London at the time of the Gordon Riots, Barnaby Rudge interweaves a murder mystery with the story of Lord George Gordon's dangerous appeal to old religious prejudices. The brilliant descriptions of the destruction of Newgate prison by the rioters contain some of Dickens's most vivid writing. This edition uses the forthcoming Clarendon text and includes all the original illustrations, plus illuminating introduction and notes.

The Nether World (1889) is generally regarded as the finest of Gissing's early novels. A fast moving story of highly dramatic, sometimes violent scenes, it depicts life amongst the artisans, factory-girls, and slum-dwellers of Clerkenwell in the 1870s. But this is not just a novel of documentary realism. It is one man's mordant vision - shaped by bitter personal experience of poverty - of the quality of life endured by a variety of characters in the netherworld. With Zolaesque intensity and relentlessness, Gissing lays bare the economic forces which determine the aspirations and expectations of those born to a life of labour.This is a tale of intrigue, as rapacious schemers try to wrest a fortune out of a mysterious old man who has returned to their midst, and of thwarted love. There is no sentimentality. This is a world in which the strong exercise power against their own kind, scheming and struggling for survival, a world from which, Gissing bleakly maintains, there can be no escape.

After a two-year absence a husband returns to find his wife wearing the scarlet 'A' for Adulteress on her breast. Determined to find her lover, he embarks on a destructive path of revenge. This edition uses the most authoritative text, with a wide-ranging critical introduction.

Zola's most acerbic social satire, Pot Luck is set in a newly constructed block of flats in the Rue de Choiseul, Paris. Although it seems a place of prosperity and harmony, it is riddled with snobbery and hypocrisy. Systematically exposing the contradictions that pervade bourgeois life, Zola reveals a multitude of adulteries and betrayals, and depicts a veritable `melting pot' of moral and sexual degeneracy. This new translation captures the directness and robustness of Zola's language, and restores the omissions of earlier abridged versions.

Henry Jones, an unprepossessing London insurance clerk, knows that his uncle has disinherited him. The old man's will, made out at the last minute in favour of Henry's charming cousin Isabel Brodrick, lies neatly folded in a well-thumbed volume of sermons in his book-room; Henry saw him put it there before he died. Unfortunately nobody else knows where the will is, and Henry stands to lose everything by making the knowledge public. Cousin Henry, first published in 1879, is one of the most unusual and intriguing of Trollope's shorter novels and its unlikely hero is a timid coward consumed by guilt. But Trollope's handling of his character and dilemma is masterly in its insight and compassion; he knew he had nothing quite like it elsewhere in his fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Edith Wharton's satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century both appalled and fascinated its first reviewers. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, as she pursues her schemes and social ambitions in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion.

One of the earliest American novels, Wieland (1798) is a thrilling tale of suspense and intrigue set in rural Pennyslvania in the 1760s. Based on an actual case of a New York farmer who murdered his family, the novel employs Gothic devices and sensational elements such as spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and religious fanaticism. The plot turns on the charming but diabolical intruder Carwin, who exercises his power over the narrator, Clara Wieland, and her family, destroying the order and authority of the small community in which they live. Underlying the mystery and horror, however, is a profound examination of the human mind's capacity for rational judgement. The text also explores some of the most important issues vital to the survival of democracy in the new American republic. Brown further considers power and manipulation in his unfinished sequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, which traces Carwin's career as a disciple of the utopist Ludloe.

Pliny's letters provide a fascinating insight into Roman life in the period 97 to 112 AD. They document politics, social life, religion, the educational system, the treatment of slaves and include a vivid description of the eruption of Vesuvius. This is a lively and sympathetic new translation.

This is a superb new translation of the great Augustan poet Horace's Odes and Epodes - brilliantly crafted and diverse poems of politics, friendship, love, and wine. The edition is supplemented by a lucid introduction, extensive notes, and glossary of names.

Verlaine ranks alongside Baudelaire, Mallarm¿and Rimbaud as one of the most outstanding poets of late nineteenth-century France. Remarkable not only for his delicacy and exquisitely crafted verse, Verlaine is also the poet of strong emotions and appetites, with an unrivalled gift for the sheer music of poetry, and an inventive approach to its technique. This parallel-text bilingual edition provides the most comprehensive selection of his poetry yet, offeringsome 170 poems in lively and fresh translations and providing a lucid introduction which illuminates Verlaine's poetic form within the context of French Impressionism and the poetry of sensation.