Böcker i Wordsworth Classics-serien

Wessex Tales was the first collection of Hardy's short stories, and they reflect the experience of a novelist at the height of his powers.

Rich with biographical echoes, this novel reveals the emergence of the schematic ironies which characterise the author's later works

With an Introduction and Notes by Adam Roberts, Royal Holloway, University of London.The product of more than a decade's continuous work (1598-1611), Chapman's translation of Homer's great poem of war is amagnificent testimony to the power of The Iliad. In muscular, onward-rolling verse Chapman retells the story of Achilles, the great warrior, and his terrible wrath before the walls of besieged Troy, and the destruction it wreaks on both Greeks and Trojans.Chapman regarded the translation of this epic, and of Homer's Odyssey (also available in Wordsworth Editions) as his life's work, and dedicated himself to capturing the 'soul' of the poem.Swinburne praised the resulting translation for its 'romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur, its freshness, strength, and inexhaustible fire', qualities that reflect the grandeur, fire and brutality of the original poem. This new edition includes a critical introduction and extensive notes, rendering Chapman's extraordinary poetic masterpiece accessible to modern readers.

The novel is set in Wessex during the Napoleonic Wars. It interweaves a romantic love story of the rivalry of two brothers for the hand of the heroine Anne Garland. It also contains elements of sadness and even tragedy.

Explains about three generations of the Brangwen family of Nottinghamshire from the 1840s to the early years of the twentieth century. This framework is with the passional lives of author's characters as he explores the pressures that determine their lives, using a religious symbolism in which the 'rainbow' of the title is his unifying motif.

Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. This book contains vivid incident - pursuits through wild terrain, skirmishes - but reflects also on the interaction between colonists and native peoples. Through the character of Hawkeye, it questions practises of the American frontier and eclipse of cultures.

With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren, University of Kent at Canterbury. Translation by James Carroll Beckwirth (1899).Set in 1482, Victor Hugo's powerful novel of 'imagination, caprice and fantasy' is a meditation on love, fate, architecture and politics, as well as a compelling recreation of the medieval world at the dawn of the modern age.In a brilliant reworking of the tale of Beauty and the Beast, Hugo creates a host of unforgettable characters - amongst them, Quasimodo, the hunchback of the title, hopelessly in love with the gypsy girl Esmeralda, the satanic priest Claude Frollo, Clopin Trouillefou, king of the beggars, and Louis X1, King of France. Over the entire novel, both literally and symbolically, broods the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.Vivid characters and memorable set-piece action scenes combine to bring the past to life in this story of love, lust, betrayal, doom and redemption.

"The Turn of the Screw" is the classic ghost story for which James is most remembered. Set in a country house, it is a chilling tale of the supernatural. "The Aspern Papers" is a tale of Americans in Europe, cleverly evoking the drama of comedie humaine against the settings of a Venetian palace.

These two fascinating sets of stories, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes and His Last Bow, make a glorious farewell to the greatest detective of them all and his erstwhile companion, Dr Watson.

Describes the journey made as a wager by the Victorian gentleman Phileas Fogg, who succeeds - but only just - in circling the globe within eighty days. Fogg's obsession with his timetable is complemented by versatility of his French manservant, Passepartout, whose talent for getting into scrapes brings colour to the race against time.

Love and hate, loyalty and treachery, cruelty and self-sacrifice: all these contend in a tempestuous drama which has become an enduring classic of the world's literature.

Set in the heart of the Wessex, this book charts the rise and downfall of a single 'man of character'. It's moving and contrived narrative is Shakespearian in its force, and features some of the author's episodes and passages of description.

Follows lives of the beautiful but spoiled Gwendolene Harleth and selfless yet alienated Daniel Deronda, as they search for personal and vocational fulfilment and sympathetic relationship. Set in the degenerate English aristocratic society of the 1860s, this book charts their search for meaningful lives against a background of imperialism.

Transplanted to Europe from her native America, Isabel Archer has candour, beauty, intelligence, an independent spirit and a marked enthusiasm for life. An unexpected inheritance apparently gives her freedom, but despite her natural advantages she makes one error of judgement and the result is genuinely tragic.

Set in 1859 at the moment when the Russian autocratic state began to move hesitantly towards social and political reform, this novel explores the conflict between the liberal-minded fathers of Russian reformist sympathies and their free-thinking intellectual sons whose revolutionary ideology threatened the stability of the state.

Educated beyond her station, Grace Melbury returns to the woodland village of little Hintock and cannot marry her intended, Giles Winterborne. Her alternative choice proves disastrous.

Henry V is the most famous and influential of Shakespeare's history plays. Its powerful patriotic rhetoric has resounded down the ages.

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare's finest romantic comedies, variously lyrical, melancholy, satiric, comic and absurd.

Dr Sloper is disappointed in his dull daughter, Catherine, a mediocre replacement for his beautiful and intelligent wife who died soon after childbirth. Yet, as Sloper threatens, beguiles and dictates to his daughter, he discovers in Catherine a pale reflection of his own obdurate character.

Contains Woolf's second and third novels, Night and Day and Jacob's Room.

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel depicts the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-19th century. Mary Barton was published in 1848, at a time of great social ferment in Europe, and it reflects its revolutionary moment through an English lens.

With an Introduction and Notes by James Fowler, Senior Lecturer in French, University of Kent Candide (1759) is a bright, colourful literary firework display of a novella. With sparkling wit and biting humour, Voltaire hits several targets with fierce and comic satire: organised religion, the overweening pride of aristocrats, merchants' greed, colonial ambition and the hopeless complacency of Leibnizian philosophy that believes 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds'. Through this rites of passage story, with his central character, Candide, a nave and impressionable young man, Voltaire attacks the social ills of his day, which remarkably remain as pertinent now as ever.Zadig is a tale of love and detection. Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by this story when he created C. Auguste Dupin in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', a story which established the modern detective fiction genre. The Ingenu recounts how a young man raised by Huron Indians discover the ways of Europe. Nanine is a sharp three act comedy concerned with marital dilemmas. In all these works Voltaire manages to combine humour with trenchant satire in a highly entertaining fashion.

Brought together for the first time in this new Wordsworth edition, The Invisible Man and The Food of the Gods are two of Wells's most entertaining and thought-provoking works.

Mark Twain's voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land in June 1867 produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life.

This history play is lively in its interplay of political intrigue and boisterous comedy, subtle in the connections between high statecraft and low craftiness, exuberant in its range of vivid characters, and memorable in its thematic concern with honour, loyalty and the quest for power.

In the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a huge cyclone transports the orphan Dorothy and her little dog Toto from Kansas to the Land of Oz, and she fears that she will never see Aunt Em and Uncle Henry ever again. But she meets the Munchkins, and they tell her to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City where the Wonderful Wizard of Oz will grant any wish. On the way, she meets the brainless Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. The four friends set off to seek their heart's desires, and in a series of action packed adventures they encounter a deadly poppy field, fierce animals, flying monkeys, a wicked witch, a good witch, and the Mighty Oz himself.In Glinda of Oz, the last of the original 'Oz' books, Dorothy and Princess Ozma seek the help of Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, when they find themselves in peril on the Magic Isle of the Skeezers.

Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction by A. D. P. Briggs.As Fyodor Karamazov awaits an amorous encounter, he is violently done to death. The three sons of the old debauchee are forced to confront their own guilt or complicity. Who will own to parricide? The reckless and passionate Dmitri? The corrosive intellectual Ivan? Surely not the chaste novice monk Alyosha? The search reveals the divisions which rack the brothers, yet paradoxically unite them. Around the writhings of this one dysfunctional family Dostoevsky weaves a dense network of social, psychological and philosophical relationships.At the same time he shows - from the opening 'scandal' scene in the monastery to a personal appearance by an eccentric Devil - that his dramatic skills have lost nothing of their edge. The Karamazov Brothers, completed a few months before Dostoevsky's death in 1881, remains for many the high point of his genius as novelist and chronicler of the modern malaise.It cast a long shadow over D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and other giants of twentieth-century European literature.

Notes and Introduction by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury.With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering 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 liberationist and the conservativism 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 a complex one 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.

Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury.Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, is inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder.From that moment on, we share his conflicting feelings of self-loathing and pride, of contempt for and need of others, and of terrible despair and hope of redemption: and, in a remarkable transformation of the detective novel, we follow his agonised efforts to probe and confront both his own motives for, and the consequences of, his crime.The result is a tragic novel built out of a series of supremely dramatic scenes that illuminate the eternal conflicts at the heart of human existence: most especially our desire for self-expression and self-fulfilment, as against the constraints of morality and human laws; and our agonised awareness of the world's harsh injustices and of our own mortality, as against the mysteries of divine justice and immortality.

When the Cuthberts send to the orphanage for a boy to help them at their farm Green Gables, they are astonished when a talkative little girl steps off the train. Anne, an incurable romantic causes chaos at Green Gables and at the village, but her good nature endears her to the residents.