Books in the Oxford World's Classics series

Veblen's landmark study of affluent American society exposes the 'pecuniary culture' and 'conspicuous consumption' that results when unessential goods are exploited at the expense of production of true value. This new edition examines Veblen's still pertinent arguments.

Shirley is Charlotte Bronte's only historical novel and her most topical one. The introduction to this new edition considers its autobiographical overtones as well as its social context, and includes revised notes and bibliography.

In a famous passage in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf asked 'why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age'. She went on to speculate about an imaginary Judith Shakespeare who might have been destined for a career as illustrious as that of her brother William, except that she had none of his chances. The truth is that many women wrote during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and this collection will serve to introduce modern readers tothe full variety of women's writing in this period - from poems, prose and fiction to prophecies, letters, tracts and philosophy. Here are examples of the work of twelve women writers, from aristocrats such as Mary Wroth, Anne Clifford and Margaret Cavendish to women of obscure background caught up in thereligious ferment of the mid seventeenth century like Hester Biddle, Pricscilla Cotton and Mary Cole. The collection includes three plays, and a generous selection of poetry, letters, diary, prose fiction, religious polemic, prophecy and science.

This excellent and accessible work includes many major texts in translation: Aristotle's Poetics, Longinus' On Sublimity, Horace's Art of Poetry, Tacitus' Dialogues, and extracts from Plato and Plutarch.

Juvenal, writing between AD 110 and 130, was one of the two great satirists of ancient Rome (the other being Horace). His powerful and witty attacks on the vices of the big city have been admired and used by many English writers including Dr Johnson. Niall Rudd's translation aims to reproduce Juvenal's livliness and energy whilst maintaining the poet's general stylistic and metrical effect.

Maupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (1885) is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man making it to the top in fin-de-siecle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the French colonization of North Africa. This new translation is complemented by fullest introduction and notes of any edition.

Armadale tells the devastating story of the independent, murderous, and adulterous Lydia Gwilt. This traditional melodrama also considers the modern theme of the role of women in society.

Poised between the fading world of chivalric romance and a new psychological realism, Madame de Lafayette's novel of passion and self-deception marks a turning point in the history of the novel. When it first appeared - anonymously - in 1678 in the heyday of French classicism, it aroused fierce controversy among critics and readers, in particular for the extraordinary confession which forms the climax of the story. Having long been considered a classic, it is now regarded as a landmark in the history of women's writing.In this entirely new translation, The Princesse de Cl`eves is accompanied by two shorter works also attributed to Mme de Lafayette, The Princesse de Montpensier and The Comtesse de Tende; the Introduction and ample notes take account of the latest critical and scholarly work.

First published in 1816 in the aftermath of Waterloo, The Antiquary deals with the problem of how to understand the past in order to enable the future. It displays Scott's matchless skill at painting the social panorama and in creating vivid characters,from the beggar Edie Ochiltree to the Antiquary himself. The text is based on Scott's own final, authorized version, the 'Magnum Opus' edition of 1829.

Elfride Swancourt is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a remote sea-swept parish in Corwall based on St Juliot, where Hardy began A Pair of Blue Eyes during the beginning of his courtship of his first wife, Emma. Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride has little experience of the world beyond, and becomes entangled with two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals, and Elfride faces an agonizing choice.Written at a crucial time in Hardy's life, A Pair of Blue Eyes expresses more directly than any of his novels the events and social forces that made him the writer he was. Elfride's dilemma mirrors the difficult decision Hardy himself had to make with this novel: to pursue the profession of architecture, where he was established, or literature, where he had yet to make his name. This updated edition contains a new introduction, bibliography, and chronology.

"The sweetness of her glance, or rather my evil star already in its ascendant and drawing me to my ruin, did not allow me to hesitate for a moment."So begins the story of Manon Lescaut, a tale of passion and betrayal, of delinquency and misalliance, which moves from early eighteenth-century Paris--with its theatres, assemblies, and gaming-houses-via prison and deportation to a tragic denouement in the treeless wastes of Louisiana. It is one of the great love stories, and also one of the most enigmatic: how reliable a witness is Des Grieux, Manon's lover, whose tale he narrates? Is Manon a thief and a whore, the image of love itself, or a thoroughly modern woman? Prevost is careful to leave the ambiguities unresolved, and to lay bare the disorders of passion.This new translation includes the vignette and eight illustrations that were approved by Prevost and first published in the edition of 1753.

First published in 1869, Culture and Anarchy debates questions about the nature of culture and society. Arnold asks what good culture can do and how it can best be disseminated. This edition reproduces the first book version and enables readers to appreciate its historical context and its continued importance.

This volume contains the four plays by Thomas Middleton which have most impressed the modern world: "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside" is the most complex amd effective of the city comedies; "Women Beware Women" and "The Changeling" (with William Rowley) are two of the most powerful Jacobean tragedies outside of Shakespeare -- studies in lust, power, violence, and self-delusive psychology; "A Game at Chess" was the single most popular play of the whole Shakespearean era, a satirical expos'e of Jesuit plotting and Anglo-Spanish politics which played tp pacifist houses at the Globe until King James and his ministers banned it. The best-value collection available with the most officially up-to-date introduction; all the play texts are newly edited with richly informative annotation.

This anthology brings together a generous selection of scientific and literary material to explore the exchanges and interactions between them. It shows how scientists and creative writers alike fed from a common imagination in their language, style, metaphors and imagery. It includes writing by Michael Faraday, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Hardy, Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and many others.

Cornelius Tacitus, Rome's greatest historian, was inspired to take up his pen when the assassination of Domitian ended `fifteen years of enforced silence'. Agricola is the biography of his late father-in-law and an account of Roman Britain. Germania gives insight into Rome's most dangerous enemies, the Germans, and is the only surviving specimen from the ancient world of an ethnographic study. Each in its way has had immense influence on ourperception of Rome and the northern `barbarians' and the edition reflects recent research in Roman-British and Roman-German history.

Wit, dandy, literary anarchist, self-publicist, and homosexual martyr: Wilde achieved fame and notoriety at a time when mass culture and communication promoted the 'new' in every area of British life. This book examines the rich interplay between Wilde's society and his writings and shows the remarkable recontextualizing of Wilde and his work in film, stage, and the media in the century following his death.

Kipling portrays school as the first stage of a much larger game, a pattern-maker for the experiences of life. Implied throughout the stories is the question 'What happened to these fifteen-year-old boys, and how did the lessons they learned at school apply to the world of warfare and imperial government?'

Of all the great classical love poets, Propertius is surely one of those with most immediate appeal for the twentieth century reader. His poetry centres on a helpless infatuation for the sinister figure of his mistress, Cynthia, and it is analysed with a tormented but witty grandeur in all its changing moods - from ecstasy to suicidal despair.

This anthology brings together a variety of literature from the period 1660 to 1700, illustrating politics and nation, theatre, town and country, love and friendship, and religion and philosophy. It includes Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe in their entirety and a substantial group of lyrics by Rochester, as well as work by diarists, satirists, dramatists, poets and autobiographers.

An international children's classic, The Wind in the Willows grew from the author's letters to his young son, yet it is concerned almost exclusively with adult themes. This new edition explores a profoundly English book with a world following; a book for adults adopted by children; a timeless masterpiece and a vital portrait of an age.

These three works exemplify the Roman historian Sallust's condemnation of the excesses of the late Republic. In the conspiracy of Catiline and the war against Jugurtha he sees moral and political corruption and the tragedy of civil strife. This new translation captures Sallust's distinctive style and considers his work as history and literature.

The first of Maupassant's six novels, A Life (Une Vie) (1883) is the story of Jeanne de Lamare, the only daughter of wealthy Norman aristocrats whose life is beset by treachery and disillusion.