Books in the Broadview Editions series

The main plot of the Gothic novel, 'The Monk', concerns Ambrosio, an abbot of irreproachable holiness, who is seduced by a woman disguised as a novice, and who goes on to sell his soul to the Devil. An extravagant blend of sex, death, politics, Satanism and poetry.

Critically acclaimed as Kate Chopin's most influential work of fiction, The Awakening has assumed a place in the American literary canon. This new edition places the novel in the context of the cultural and regional influences that shape Chopin's narrative. With extensive contemporary readings that examine historical events, including the hurricanes that frequently disrupt life in Louisiana, this edition will contextualize The Awakening for a new generation of readers.

Tells the story, in letters, of the beautiful and virtuoso Clarissa Harlowe's pursuit and abduction by the rake Robert Lovelace. The epistolary structure creates layered and fully realized characters, as well as an intriguing uncertainty about the reliability of the various 'narrators'.

This collection of early works by Eliza Haywood includes the well-known novella Fantomina (1725) along with three other short, engaging Haywood works. Also includes an introduction that focuses on Haywood's life and career and on the status of prose fiction in the early eighteenth century, and appendices of contextual materials from the period.

One of the earliest novelistic efforts to articulate an American identity, and more specifically to investigate what that identity might promise for women. This second edition has been updated throughout and includes a greatly expanded selection of historical materials on castaway narratives and the cultural context of colonial America.

The story of the disgraced Hester Prynne (who must wear a scarlet ""A"" as the mark of her adultery), of her illegitimate child, Pearl, and of the righteous minister Arthur Dimmesdale. Set in mid-seventeenth- century Boston, this powerful tale of passion, puritanism, and revenge is one of the classics of American literature.

The appendices, which include contemporary reviews of the novel, historical documents on race and inheritance in Jamaica, and examples of other women of colour in early British prose fiction, will further inspire readers to rethink issues of race, gender, class, and empire from an African woman's perspective.

Presents the story of Mary Morstan, a beautiful young woman enlisting the help of Holmes to find her vanished father and solve the mystery of her receipt of a perfect pearl on the same date each year, it gradually uncovers a tale of treachery and human greed.

Salome is Oscar Wilde's most experimental - and controversial - play. None, however, could deny the importance of Wilde's creation. This edition uses the English translation by Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Appendices detail the play's sources and provide extensive materials on its contemporary reception and dramatic productions.

Woolf's 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is about the casualties of early twentieth-century life, and she explores the gendered forms of mental illness, and the social repercussions of feminism, homosexuality, and colonialism. This Broadview edition provides a reliable text at a very reasonable price. It contains textual notes but no appendices or introduction.

The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the greatest classics of English literature, but one of the least accessible to contemporary readers. This edition offers the original text together with a facing-page translation. James Winny provides a non-alliterative and sensitively literal rendering in modern English.

The editor locates the text both in relation to elements in the mainstream culture of the day (such as the aesthetes); and in relation to the gay subculture.

Set in seventeenth-century India, The Missionary focuses on the relationship between Hilarion, a Portuguese missionary to India, and Luxima, an Indian prophetess. Both are aristocratic, devoted to their religions, bound by vows of chastity, and begin the novel biased against other cultures. This Broadview Literary Texts edition also includes extensive primary source appendices.

Heart of Darkness tells the story of Marlow as he travels upriver in central Africa to find Kurtz, an ivory agent as consumed by the horror of human life as he is by physical illness.'

One of Bernard Shaw's early plays of social protest, Mrs Warren's Profession places the protagonist's decision to become a prostitute in the context of the appalling conditions for working class women in Victorian England.

In 1750 at the age of twenty-seven Sarah Scott published her first novel, a conventional romance. A year later she left her husband after only a few months of marriage and devoted herself thereafter to writing and to promoting such causes as the creation of secular and separatist female communities. This revolutionary concept was given flesh in Millenium Hall, first published in 1762 and generally thought to be the finest of her six novels. The text may be seen as the manifesto of the 'bluestocking' movement--the protean feminism that arose under eighteenth-century gentry capitalism (originating in 1750, largely under the impetus of Scott's sister Elizabeth Montagu), and that rejected a world which early feminists saw symbolized in the black silk stockings demanded by formal society. It is a comment on Western society as well as on the strengths of Scott's novel that the message of Millenium Hall continues to resonate strongly more than two centuries later.

Arguably the first work of science fiction in English, Francis Godwin's ""The Man in the Moone"" was published in 1638, pseudonymously and posthumously. This title includes a critical introduction that places the text in its scientific and historical contexts.

Published just after the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Eikon Basilike is a defence of the king's motivations and actions prior to and during the British civil wars. Nine chapters of Eikonoklastes, John Milton's response to Eikon Basilike, are also included in this edition.

The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was the theatrical sensation of the London stage in 1893. It established Pinero as the leading English dramatist of serious social issues, and created a star out of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the title role.

The critical introduction to this Broadview Edition gives particular emphasis to Wells's hostility towards religion as well as his thorough knowledge of the Darwinian thought of his time. Appendices provide passages from Darwin and Huxley related to Wells's early writing; in addition, excerpts from other writers illustrate late-nineteenth-century anxieties about social degeneration.

Wells was interested in the implications of evolutionary theory on the future of human beings at the biological, sociological, and cultural levels, and The Time Machine, short and readable, draws on many of the social and scientific debates of the time. The Broadview edition of this science fiction classic includes extensive materials on Wells's scientific and political influences.

The Spanish Tragedy became one of the most successful plays on the Elizabethan English stage and laid the foundation of the revenge tragedy, a genre that playwrights returned to throughout the early modern era and that endures today. This Broadview Edition includes a freshly edited text based on the 1592 edition, an extensive introduction, and extensive historical documents.