...there is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped. 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 nineteenth century. At the centre is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's 'grotesques' — solitary figures unable to communicate with others. George is their conduit for expression and solace from loneliness, but he has his own longings which eventually draw him away from home to seek a career in the city. He carries with him the dreams and unuttered words of remarkable characters such as Wing Biddlebaum, the disgraced former teacher, and the story-telling Doctor Parcival. The book has influenced many American writers, including ernest hemingway, William Faulkner, John Updike, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates. It reshaped the development of the modern short story, turning the genre away from an emphasis upon plot towards a capability for illuminating the emotional lives of ordinary people. This new edition corrects errors in earlier editions and takes into account major criticism and textual scholarship of the last several decades.

Philip Sidney was in his early twenties when he wrote his 'Old' Arcadia for the amusement of his younger sister, the Countess of Pembroke. The book, which he called a trifle, and that triflingly handled, reflects their youthful vitality. The Old Arcadia tells a romantic story in a manner comparable to that of Shakespeare's early comedies. It is divided into five Acts, and abounds in lively speeches, dialogues, and quasi-dramatic tableaux. Two young princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, disguise themselves as an Amazon and a shepherd to gain access to the Arcadian Princesses, who have been taken into semi-imprisonment by their father to avoid the dangers foretold by an oracle. As a vehicle for Sidney's prophetic ideas about English versification, the 'Old' Arcadia also includes over seventy poems in a wide variety of metres and genres. In clarity, symmetry, and coherence the 'Old' version is greatly superior both to the ambitious but unfinished 'New' Arcadia and the amalgamated, 'composite' version, a hybrid monster which Sidney himself never envisaged.

This entirely new translation includes Petrarch's short autobiographical prose works, The Letter to Posterity and The Ascent of Mount Ventoux, and a selection of twenty-seven poems from the Canzoniere, Petrarch's best-known work in Italian.

This remarkable collection of stories, first published in 1872, includes Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle, The Room in the Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The five stories are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions. The reader's doubtful anxiety mimics that of the protagonist, and each story thus creates that atmosphere of mystery which is the supernatural experience. This new annotated edition includes an introduction, notes on the text, and explanatory notes.

This new translation reproduces the original style and metrical effect of Juvenal's hexameters, while the Introduction and Notes provide literary and historical background to the sixteen satires.

Cecilia is an heiress, but she can only keep her fortune if her husband will consent to take her surname. Fanny Burney's unusual love story and deft social satire was much admired on its first publication in 1782 for its subtle interweaving of comedy, humanity, and social analysis. Controversial in its time, this eighteenth-century novel seems entirely fresh in relation to late twentieth-century concerns.

The Eclogues, ten short pastoral poems, were composed between approximately 42 and 39 BC, during the time of the 'Second' Triumvirate of Lepidus, Anthony, and Octavian. In them Virgil subtly blended an idealized Arcadia with contemporary history. To his Greek model — the Idylls of Theocritus — he added a strong element of Italian realism: places and people, real or disguised, and contemporary events are introduced. The Eclogues display all Virgil's art and charm and are among his most delightful achievements. Between approximately 39 and 29 BC, years of civil strife between Antony, and Octavian, Virgil was engaged upon the Georgics. Part agricultural manual, full of observations of animals and nature, they deal with the farmer's life and give it powerful allegorical meaning. These four books contain some of Virgil's finest descriptive writing and are generally held to be his greatest and most entertaining work, and C. Day Lewis's lyrical translations are classics in their own right.

This new translation of The Princesse de Cleves also includes two shorter works also attributed to Mme de Lafayette, The Princesse de Montpensier and The Comtesse de Tende.

The Romance of the Forest (1791) heralded an enormous surge in the popularity of Gothic novels, in a decade that included Ann Radcliffe's later works, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. Set in Roman Catholic Europe of violent passions and extreme oppression, the novel follows the fate of its heroine Adeline, who is mysteriously placed under the protection of a family fleeing Paris for debt. They take refuge in a ruined abbey in south-eastern France, where sinister relics of the past — a skeleton, a manuscript, and a rusty dagger — are discovered in concealed rooms. Adeline finds herself at the mercy of the abbey's proprietor, a libidinous Marquis whose attentions finally force her to contemplate escape to distant regions. Rich in allusions to aesthetic theory and to travel literature, The Romance of the Forest is also concerned with current philosophical debate and examines systems of thought central to the intellectual life of late eighteenth-century Europe.

«Based on Hawthorne's own experience of a Utopian socialist community outside Boston, «The Blithedale Romance» tells of the attempts of a like-minded group to begin reforming a dissipated America. However, rather than dropping bad habits and changing the world, Coverdale the prurient bachelor, Hollingsworth the furious philanthropist, Zenobia the voluptuous feminist, and Priscilla the vulnerable seamstress soon find themselves pursuing egotistical paths which must lead ultimately to tragedy. Evoking a bright rural idyll which fails to survive the ravages of lust and power, Hawthorne cynically undermines the fatuities of nineteenth-century American idealism.»

The Condition of the Working Class in England is the best known work of Engels, and still in many ways the best study of the working class in Victorian England. What Cobbett had done for agricultural poverty in his Rural Rides, Engels did — and more — in this work on the plight of industrial workers in England in the 1840s.

This is a reissue of the previous World's Classics edition in the new larger format, and with the series name changed to Oxford World's Classics.

The Greek lyric, elegiac, and iambic poets of the two centuries from 650 to 450 BC — Archilochus and Alcman, Sappho and Mimnermus, Anacreon, Simonides, and the rest — produced some of the finest poetry of antiquity, perfect in form, spontaneous in expression, reflecting all the joys and anxieties of their personal lives and of the societies in which they lived. This new poetic translation by a leading expert captures the nuances of meaning and the whole spirit of this poetry as never before. It is not merely a selection but covers all the surviving poems and intelligible fragments, apart from the works of Pindar and Bacchylides, and includes a number of pieces not previously translated. The Introduction gives a brief account of the poets, and explanatory Notes on the texts will be found at the end.

I sing of knights and ladies, of love and arms, of courtly chivalry, of courageous deeds. So begins Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532), the culmination of the chivalric legends of Charlemagne and the Saracen invasion of France. It is a brilliantly witty parody of the medieval romances, and a fitting monument to the court society of the Italian Renaissance which gave them birth. This unabridged prose translation faithfully captures the narrative entire and is a kaleidoscope of scenes and emotions of fact and fantasy.

This new translation is an accurate and stylish rendering of Zola's original, which was first published in 1880.

Three Tales offers an excellent introduction to the work of one of the world's greatest novelists. A Simple Heart is set in the Normandy of Flaubert's childhood, while Saint Julian and Herodias draw on medieval myth and the biblical story of John the Baptist for their inspiration. Each of the tales invites comparison with one or other of Flaubert's novels, but they also reveal a fresh and distinctive side to the writers's genius.

This pioneering work was a cause celebre when it appeared in London, transforming the shape and course of the late Victorian novel. Lynall, Schreiner's articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. From the haunting plains of South Africa's high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society's greatest fears: the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women's social and political independence.

Set against the background of a society driven by greed and ambition, this is the tragic story of a father financially and personally ruined by his obsessive love for his two daughters. Balzac presents a portrait of both affluence and squalor in post-Napoleonic Paris.

Set in early eighteenth-century Scotland, the novel recounts the corruption of a boy of strict Calvinist parentage by a mysterious stranger under whose influence he commits a series of murders. The stranger assures the boy that no sin can affect the salvation of an elect person. The reader, while recognizing the stranger as Satan, is prevented by the subtlety of the novel's structure from finally deciding whether, for all his vividness and wit, he is more than a figment of the boy's imagination. This edition reprints the text of the unexpurgated first edition of 1824, later 'corrected' in an attempt to placate the Calvinists.

Peter Sabor presents both the first critical edition and the first accurate, wholly unexpurgated text of the most famous erotic novel in English, better known as Fanny Hill.