Books in the Oxford World's Classics series

The Water-Babies is an extraordinary children's book that combines fantasy, satire, social comment, and evolutionary theory to create a fairy tale like no other. This attractive new edition reprints the original complete text and illustrations with a lively introduction and notes that reveal the full richness of Kingsley's exuberant story.

Frank Gresham needs to marry for money if he is to save his impoverished family estate. But he loves the doctor's penniless niece, and faces a terrible dilemma. Dr Thorne knows a secret that would resolve the difficulty, but pride and moral scruples prevent its telling. Trollope develops his story with customary subtlety and comic skill.

Three extraordinary characters caught in a web of fatal obsession are at the centre of Hugo's novel. The grotesque hunchback Quasimodo, bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, owes his life to the austere archdeacon, Claude Frollo, who in turn is bound by a hopeless passion to the gypsy dancer Esmeralda. She, meanwhile, is bewitched by a handsome, empty-headed officer, but by an unthinking act of kindness wins Quasimodo's selfless devotion. Behind the central figures moves a pageant of picturesque characters, ranging from the cruel, superstitious king, Louis XI, to the underworld of beggars and petty criminals. These disreputable truands' night-time assault on the cathedral is one of the most spectacular set-pieces of Romantic literature. Hugo vividly depicts medieval Paris, where all life is dominated by the massive cathedral. His passionate enthusiasm for Gothic architecture is set within the context of an epic view of mankind's history, to which he attaches even more importance than to the novel's compelling story. Alban Krailsheimer's new translation is a fresh approach to this monumental classic by France's most celebrated Romantic.

This edition offers a new translation of a selection of the Buddha's most important sayings reflecting the full variety of material: biography of the Buddha, narrative, myth, short sayings, philosophical discourse, instruction on morality, meditation, and the spiritual life. It provides an excellent introduction to Buddhist scripture.

This unique anthology includes generous selections from the six nineteenth-century French poets most often read in the English-speaking world today: Lamartine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarme. Modern translations are printed opposite the original French verse, and the edition also contains over a thousand lines of poetry never previously translated into English.

The Woman in White (1859-60) is the first and greatest "Sensation Novel." Walter Hartright's mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue. This new critical edition is the first to use the original manuscript of the novel. John Sutherland examines Collins's contribution to Victorian fiction, traces his practices as a creator of plot, and provides a chronology of the novel's complicated events.

When the aristocratic Lady Isabel abandons her husband and children for her wicked seducer, more is at stake than moral retribution. This edition returns for the first time to the racy, slang-ridden narrative of the first edition, rather than the subsequent stylistically 'improved' versions hitherto reproduced by modern editors.

As well as being the author of the greatest of all children's plays, Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie also wrote sophisticated social comedy and political satire. The Admirable Crichton and What Every Woman Knows are shrewd and entertaining contributions to the politics of class and gender, while Mary Rose is one of the best ghost stories written for the stage.

For much of his life Pascal (1623-62) worked on a magnum opus which was never published in its intended form. Instead, he left a mass of fragments, some of them meant as notes for the Apologie. These were to become known as the Pens¿, and they occupy a crucial place in Western philosophy and religious writing. This translation is the only one based on the Pens¿ as Pascal left them. It includes the principal dossiersclassified by Pascal, as well as the essential portion of the important Writings on Grace.

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.

In his Essay, John Locke sets out his theory of knowledge and how we acquire it. He shows how all our ideas are grounded in human experience and analyses the extent of our knowledge of ourselves and the world. This new abridgement uses P. H. Nidditch's authoritative text to make an accessible edition of Locke's masterpiece.

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.

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.

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.

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.