Edited, Introduced and Annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex.The Wordsworth Classics’ Shakespeare’s Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare’s works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal.Variously melancholy, lyrical, joyous and farcical, Twelfth Night has long been a popular comedy with Shakespearian audiences. The main plot revolves around mistaken identities and unrequited love. Both Olivia and Orsino are attracted to Viola, who is disguised as a young man; and Viola’s brother, Sebastian, finds that he is loved not only by Antonio but also by Olivia.Meanwhile, in the comic sub-plot, Sir Toby Belch and his companions outwit the vain Malvolio, who is ludicrously humiliated. While offering broad comedy, Twelfth Night teasingly probes gender-roles and sexual ambiguities.

Lawrence’s finest, most mature novel initially met with disgust and incomprehension. In the love affairs of two sisters, Ursula with Rupert, and Gudrun with Gerald, crities could only see a sorry tale of sexual depravity and philosophical obscurity.Women in Love is, however, a profound response to a whole cultural crisis. The ‘progress’ of the modern industrialised world had led to the carnage of the First World War. What, then, did it mean to call ourselves ‘human’? On what grounds could we place ourselves above and beyond the animal world? What are the definitive forms of our relationships — love, marriage, family, friendship — really worth? And how might they be otherwise?Without directly referring to the war, Women in Love explores these questions with restless energy. As a sequel to The Rainbow, the novel develops experimental techniques which made Lawrence one of the most important writers of the Modernist movement.

Книга «The Odyssey». Издательство: Wordsworth. Год выпуска: 2022. Серия: Classics. Переплет: Мягкий переплет. Количество страниц: 488. Автор: Homer. Стандарт: 10. Возрастная категория: отсутствует. Страна производитель: Соединенное королевство.

Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka’s world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a relentless atmosphere of disorientation. Superficially about bureaucracy, it is in the last resort a description of the absurdity of ‘normal’ human nature.Still more enigmatic is The Castle. Is it an allegory of a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? The search by a central European Jew for acceptance into a dominant culture? A spiritual quest for grace or salvation? An individual’s struggle between his sense of independence and his need for approval? Is it all of these things? And K? Is he opportunist, victim, or an outsider battling against elusive authority?Finally, in his fables, Kafka deals in dark and quirkily humorous terms with the insoluble dilemmas of a world which offers no reassurance, and no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties.

Книга «The Wonderful Wizard of Oz & Glinda of Oz». Издательство: Wordsworth. Год выпуска: 2018. Серия: Classics. Переплет: Мягкий переплет. Количество страниц: 144. Автор: Baum Lyman Frank. Стандарт: 10. Возрастная категория: отсутствует. Страна производитель: Соединенное королевство.

With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the novel with which I). II. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it became a world-wide best-seller when Penguin Books successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them publishing an unexpurgated edition. The famous ‘Lady Chatterley trial’ heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades and signalled the defeat of Establishment prudery.Yet Lawrence himself was hardly a libcrationist and the conservatism of many aspects of his novel would later lay it open to attacks from the political avant-garde and from feminists. The story of how the wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley responds when her husband returns from the war paralysed from the waist down, and of the tender love which then develops between her and her husband’s gamekeeper, is complex and open to a variety of conflicting interpretations.This edition of the novel offers an occasion for a new generation of readers to discover what all the fuss was about; to appraise Lawrence’s bitter indictment of modern industrial society, and to ask themselves what lessons there might be for the 21st century in his intense exploration of the complicated relations between love and sex.

In 1943, there was an urgent need for Animal Farm. The Soviet Union had become Britain’s ally in the war against Nazi Germany, and criticism of Stalin’s brutal regime was either censored or discouraged. In any case, many intellectuals on the left still celebrated the Soviet Union, claiming that the terrors of its show trials, summary executions and secret police were either exaggerated or necessary. But, to Orwell, Stalin was always a “disgusting murderer” and he wanted to remind people of this fact in a powerful and memorable way.But how to do it? A political essay would never reach a wide enough audience; a traditional novel would take too long to write. Orwell hit on the inspired idea of combining the moralism of the traditional ‘beast fable’ with the satire of Gulliver’s Travels. A group of farmyard animals, led by the pigs, overthrow their human masters. Their revolution is inspired by high ideals: the farm will be run in the interests of its animals with no more slaughtering, plenty of food for all and comfort in retirement. But when Napoleon the pig takes command, he quickly corrupts their principles, creating a new tyranny worse than the old.Orwell wrote Animal Farm in the middle of the Second World War, but at first no publishers wanted to touch it. It was finally published in August 1945, once the war was over. This little book quickly became a seminal text in the emerging ‘cold war’ (a phrase that Orwell himself coined). It also became a site of that conflict itself, suffering various attempts to subvert or change its meaning.Today, Animal Farm remains a powerful fable about the nature of tyranny and corruption which applies for all ages.

Jules Verne (1828-1905) possessed that rare storyteller`s gift of being able to present the far-fetched and the downright unbelievable in such a way as effortlessly to inspire his reader`s allegiance and trust. This volume contains two of his best-loved yarns, chosen from among the sixty-four titles of «Les Voyages extraordinaires», Verne`s pioneering contribution to the canon of modern Science Fiction. «Around the World in Eighty Days» (1873) relates the hair-raising journey made as a wager by the Victorian gentleman Phileas Fogg, who succeeds — but only just! — in circling the globe within eighty days. The dour Fogg`s obsession with his timetable is complemented by the dynamism and versatility of his French manservant, Passepartout, whose talent for getting into scrapes brings colour and suspense to the race against time. «Five Weeks in a Ballaon» (1863) was Verne`s first novel. It documents an apocryphal jaunt across the continent of Africa in a hydrogen balloon designed by the omniscient, imperturbable and ever capable Dr Fergusson, the prototype of the Vernian cerebral adventurer.Издание на английском языке.

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Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения.Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab’s quest to avenge the whale that «reaped» his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic.But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab’s appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each.Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education: in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his ‘mighty theme’ — not only the whale but all things sublime — Melville breathes in the world’s great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.

The Wordsworth Classics’ Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare’s works. The Textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while Mixing the material a careful reappraisal.Hamlet is not only one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays but also the most fascinatingly problematic tragedy in world literature. First performed around 1600, this is a gripping and exuberant drama of revenge, rich in contrasts and conflicts. Its violence alternates with introspection, its melancholy with humour, and its subtlety with spectacle. The Prince. Hamlet himself, is depicted as a complex, divided, introspective character. His reflections on death, morality and the very status of human beings make him ‘the first modern man’.Countless srat>e productions and numerous adaptations for the cinema and television have demonstrated the continuing cultural relevance of this vivid, enigmatic, profound and engrossing drama.

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Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, Professor of English Literature, University of Sussex. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is one of the greatest tragic dramas the world has known. Macbeth himself, a brave warrior, is fatally impelled by supernatural forces, by his proud wife, and by his own burgeoning ambition. As he embarks on his murderous course to gain and retain the crown of Scotland, we see the appalling emotional and psychological effects on both Lady Macbeth and himself. The cruel ironies of their destiny are conveyed in poetry of unsurpassed power. In the theatre, this tragedy remains perennially engrossing.

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