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The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself was the first work that influenced the nineteenth-century genre of slave narrative autobiographies. Written and published by Equiano, a former slave, it became a prototype for those that followed.
A novel originally published in 1751, in which the heroine is courted by several eligible suitors. However her flirtations alienate the right man and she finds herself struggling with the consequences of marrying the wrong man.
Charles Darwin's On The Origin of Species, in which he writes of his theories of evolution by natural selection, is one of the most important works of scientific study ever published.
This edition's appendices include other related writings by Wells; selected correspondence; contemporary reviews; excerpts from works that influenced the novel and from contemporary invasion narratives; and photographs of examples of Victorian military technology.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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