Книги жанра Oxford University Press
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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'What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?' Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostly visitor foretells three apparitions who will thaw Scrooge's frozen heart. «A Christmas Carol» has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. This edition reprints the story alongside Dickens's four other Christmas Books: «The Chimes», «The Cricket on the Hearth», «The Battle of Life», and «The Haunted Man». All five stories show Dickens at his unpredictable best, jumbling together comedy and melodrama, genial romance and urgent social satire, in pursuit of his aim 'to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land'.
Название: Crime and Punishment
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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»Crime and Punishment» is the story of a murder committed on principle, of a killer who wishes by his action to set himself outside and above society. A novel of fearful tension, physical, and psychological, it is pervaded by Dostoevsky's sinister evocation of St Petersburg, yet in the life of its gloomy tenements and drink-shops provides moments of wild humour. «Crime and Punishment» was marked by Dostoevsky's own harrowing experiences. He had himself undergone interrogation and trial, and was condemned to death, a sentence commuted to penal servitude. In prison he was particularly impressed by one hardened murderer who seemed to have attained a spiritual equilibrium beyond good and evil: yet witnessing the misery of other convicts also engendered in Dostoevsky a belief in the Christian idea of salvation through suffering.
Название: The Karamazov Brothers
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, «The Karamazov Brothers» (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons — the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha — are all at some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disatrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the authors most cherisehd causes and beliefs are presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy, and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong are no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West considered it «the allegory for the world's maturity», but with children to the fore. This new translation does full justice to Doestoevsky's genius, particularly in the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every mode of human expression.
Название: The Idiot
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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Into a compellingly real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Myshkin. The tensions subsequently unleashed by the hero's innocence, truthfulness, and humility betray the inadequacy of his moral idealism and disclose the spiritual emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate him. Myshkin's mission ends in idiocy and darkness, but it is the world that is rotten, not he. Written under appalling personal circumstances when Dostoevsky was travelling in Europe, «The Idiot» not only reveals the author's acute artistic sense and penetrating psychological insight, but also affords his most incisive indictment of Russia's struggling to emulate contemporary Europe and sinking under the weight of Western materialism. This new translation by Alan Myers is meticulously faithful to the original and has a critical introduction by W. J. Leatherbarrow.
Название: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2010
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`You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of «The Adventures of Tom Sawyer», but that ain't no matter.' So begins, in characteristic fashion, one of the greatest American novels. Narrated by a poor, illiterate white boy living in America's deep South before the Civil War, «Adventures of Huckleberry Finn» is the story of Huck's escape from his brutal father and the relationship that grows between him and Jim, the slave who is fleeing from an even more brutal oppression. As they journey down the Mississippi their adventures address some of the most profound human conundrums: the prejudices of class, age, and colour are pitted against the qualities of hope, courage, and moral character. Enormously influential in the development of American literature, «Huckleberry Finn» remains a controversial novel at the centre of impassioned critical debate. This edition discusses all the current issues and the evolution of Mark Twain's penetrating genius.
Название: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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'Tom was a glittering hero once more — the pet of the old, and the envy of the young...There were some that believed he would be President yet, if he escaped hanging.' In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark ogaincombines social satire and dime-novel sensation with a rhapsody on boyhood and on America's pre-industrial past. Tom Sawyer is resilient, enterprising, and vainglorious. In a series of adventures along the banks of the Mississippi, he usually manages to come out on top. From petty triumphs over his friends and over his long-suffering Aunt Polly, to his intervention in a murder trial, Tom engages readers of all ages. He has long been a defining figure in the American cultural imagination. Alongside the charm and the excitement, Twain raises serious questions about community, race, and the past. Above all, the book invites discussion of the way in which childhood is invoked to counter the uncomfortable truths of the adult world.
Название: Orlando: A Biography
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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Virginia Woolf's exuberant `biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the `life' that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life. In this novel, Virginia Woolf plays loose and fast: Orlando uncovers a literary and sexual revolution overnight.
Название: The Brontes (Authors in Context)
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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The extraordinary creativity of the Brontë sisters, who between them wrote some of the most enduring fiction in the English language, continues to fascinate and intrigue modern readers. The tragedy of their early deaths adds poignancy to their novels, and in the popular imagination they have become mythic figures. And yet, as Patricia Ingham shows, they were fully engaged with the world around them, and their writing, from the juvenilia to «Jane Eyre» and «Wuthering Heights», reflects the preoccupations of the age in which they lived. Their novels, which so shocked their contemporaries, address the burning issues of the day: class, gender, race, religion, and mental disorders. As well as examining these connections, Patricia Ingham also shows how film and other media have reinterpreted the novels for the twenty-first century. The book includes a chronology of the Brontës, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index.
Название: The Dead Secret
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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Porthgenna Tower on the remote western Cornish coast. Moments before her death, Mrs Treverton dictates a secret to her maid, never to be passed to her husband as she had instructed. Fifteen years later, when Mrs Treverton's daughter, Rosamond, returns to Porthgenna with her blind husband, Leonard, she is intrigued by the strange and seemingly disturbed Mrs Jazeph's warning not to enter the Myrtle Room in the ruined north wing. Strong-minded and ingenious, Rosamond's determined detective work uncovers shocking and unsettling truths beyond all expectation. A mystery of unrelenting suspense and psychologically penetrating characters, «The Dead Secret» explores the relationship between a fallen woman, her illegitimate daughter, and buried secrets in a superb blend of romance and Gothic drama. Wilkie Collins's fifth novel, «The Dead Secret» anticipates the themes of his next novel, «The Woman in White» in its treatment of mental illness, disguise and deception, and the dispossession of lost identity. Yet a series of comic figures offsets the tension, from the dyspeptic Mr Phippen to the perpetually smiling governess, Miss Sturch. Displaying the talent and energy which made Collins the most popular novelist of the 1860s, «The Dead Secret» represents a crucial phase in Collins's rise as a mystery writer, and was his first full-length novel written specifically for serialization.
Название: Barry Lyndon
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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Set in the second half of the eighteenth century, «Barry Lyndon» is the fictional autobiography of an adventurer and rogue whom the reader is led to distrust from the very beginning. Born into the petty Irish gentry, and outmanoeuvred in his first love-affair, a ruined Barry joins the British army. After service in Germany he deserts and, after a brief spell as a spy, pursues the career of a gambler in the dissolute clubs and courts of Europe. In a determined effort to enter fashionable society he marries a titled heiress but finds he has met his match. First published in 1844, «Barry Lyndon» is Thackeray's earliest substantial novel and in some ways his most original, reflecting his views of the true art of fiction: to represent a subject, however unpleasant, with accuracy and wit, and not to moralize. The text is that of George Sainsbury's 1908 Oxford edition which restores passages cut when the novel was revised in 1856.
Название: Vanity Fair: A Novel Without A Hero
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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On a broad and colourful canvas, extending from urban and rural England to Waterloo and the continental haunts of exiles, Thackeray gives us one of the greatest social-satirical novels in the language-one of the most entertaining and profound, and, in the person of Becky Sharp, we have one of literature's most resourceful, attractive, and amoral characters. Essentially a commentary on hypocrisy and those ethical principles to which society pays lip-service, «Vanity Fair» (1847-8) invites us to consider which is to blame: the opportunist or the society that makes opportunism necessary. This edition, which reproduces the text of the Oxford Thackeray enhanced by John Sutherland's lively introduction and notes, includes all of Thackeray's own illustrations.
Название: Don Quixote de la Mancha
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2010
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»Don Quixote», first published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is one of the world's greatest comic novels. Inspired by tales of chivalry, Don Quixote of La Mancha embarks on a series of adventures with his faithful servant Sancho Panza by his side. The novel has acquired mythic status and its influence on modern fiction is profound.
Название: John Donne — The Major Works
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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This authoritative edition was formerly published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Donne's poetry and prose — all the major poems, complemented by rarely published letters and extracts from Donne's sermons — to give the essence of his work and thinking. John Donne (1572-1631) is today celebrated as one of the greatest of the metaphysical poets, whose verse was daringly original and whose use of imagery and conceits marked a new, intellectual approach to poetry. His Satires, Elegies, and Songs and Sonnets, which contain his most famous love poems, were complemented by his religious writing, both verse and prose. He was one of the most renowned preachers of his day, and this volume does equal justice to the full range of his work. In addition to nearly all his English poetry this volume includes over 130 extracts from Donne's sermons, as well as the full text of his last sermon, 'Death's Duel'. A distinguishing feature of the selection is that the works are arranged in the chronological order of their composition.
Название: The Vicomte de Bragelonne
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2009
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It is May 1660 and the fate of nations is at stake. Mazarin plots, Louis XIV is in love, and Raoul de Bragelonne, son of Athos, is intent on serving France and winning the heart of Louise de la Valliere. D'Artagnan, meanwhile, is perplexed by a mysterious stranger, and soon he learns that his old comrades already have great projects in hand. Athos seeks the restoration of Charles II, while Aramis, with Porthos in tow, has a secret plan involving a masked prisoner and the fortification of the island of Belle-Ile. D'Artagnan finds a thread leading him to the French court, the banks of the Tyne, the beaches of Holland, and the dunes of Brittany. «The Vicomte de Bragelonne» opens an epic adventure which continues with «Louise de la Valliere» and reaches its climax in «The Man in the Iron Mask». This new edition of the classic translation is fully annotated, and an introduction sets Dumas's saga in its historical and cultural context.
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2009
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This selection of 21 stories represents the best of James's work, and includes three stories which are not in the Collected Edition.
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2009
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- A must for all Jane Austen fans, this is a quiz book designed to test the readers' knowledge of their favourite books, compiled by literary detective John Sutherland, well-known for his series of literary puzzle books and Deirdre Le Faye, editor of Jane Austen's Letters — Ideal for reading groups, schoolchildren, participants in the BBC Big Read, viewers of classic novel TV adaptations, quiz-lovers — The questions are graduated in a series of four tests, moving from straightforward factual questions (e.g. 'How many children does Mrs Bennet have?') to more difficult ones requiring close reading, to interpretation and speculation, suitable for readers at all levels — The questions are ingenious and fun, and the answers (at the back), in Sutherland's inimitable style, are fascinating. Completing the book guarantees a hugely improved knowledge and appreciation of Austen. — Amusing marking system ('100: write your own book...Under 10: watch TV instead) How well do you really know your favourite author? Ace literary detective turned quizmaster John Sutherland and Austen buff Deirdre Le Faye challenge the reader to find out. Starting with easy, factual questions that test how well you remember a novel and its characters, the quiz progresses to a level of greater difficulty, demanding close reading and interpretative deduction. What really motivates the characters, and what is going on beneath the surface of the story? Designed to amuse and divert, the questions and answers take the reader on an imaginative journey into the world of Jane Austen, where hypothesis and speculation produce fascinating and unexpected insights. Whether you are an expert or enthusiast, «So You Think You Know Jane Austen?» guarantees you will know her much better after reading it.
Название: Sister Carrie
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2009
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`When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse'. The tale of Carrie Meeber's rise to stardom in the theatre and George Hurstwood's slow decline captures the twin poles of exuberance and exhaustion in modern city life as never before. The premier example of American naturalism, Dreiser's remarkable first novel has deeply influenced such key writers as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, and Joyce Carol Oates. This edition uses the 1900 text, which is regarded as the author's final version.
Название: Eirik the Red and other Icelandic Sagas
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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The remote and inhospitable landscape of Iceland made it a perfect breeding-ground for heroes. The first Norsemen to colonize it in 860 found that the fight for survival demanded high courage and tough self reliance; it also nurtured a stern sense of duty and an uncompromising view of destiny. The Icelandic sagas relate the adventurous lives of individuals and families between 930 and 1030, which began as oral tales but were skilfully documented in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and are now regarded as written literature.
Название: First Love and Other Stories
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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This collection brings together six of Turgenev's best-known `long' short stories, in which he turns his skills of psychological observation and black comedy to subjects as diverse as the tyranny of serfdom, love, and revenge on the Russian steppes. These stories all display the elegance and clarity of Turgenev's finest writing.
Название: The Black Tulip
Жанр: Oxford University Press
Год: 2008
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Alexandre Dumas's novels are notable for their suspense and excitement, their foul deeds, hairsbreadth escapes, and glorious victories. In The Black Tulip (1850), the shortest of Dumas's most famous tales, the real hero is no Musketeer, but a flower. The novel — a deceptively simple story — is set in Holland in 1672, and weaves the historical events surrounding the brutal murder of John de Witte and his brother Cornelius into a tale of romantic love. The novel is also a timeless political allegory in which Dumas, drawing on the violence and crimes of history, makes his case against tyranny and puts all his energies into creating a symbol of justice and tolerance: the fateful tulipa negra. This new edition reprints the first, classic English translation. David Coward sets the novel in the context of its author's life, the turbulent history of the Dutch Republic, and the amazing `tulipmania' of the seventeenth century which brought wealth to some and ruin to many.
