The Bell Jar
A new edition of the classic novel, featuring a foreword by the original Harper & Row editor who reveals the untold story of the book's first publication. Originally published under a pseudonym in England in 1963, shortly after Plath committed suicide, the book was published for the first time under Plath's real name by Harper & Row in 1971, despite the protests of the Plath family. This extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful-and slowly going under. Largely autobiographical, the novel reveals much about the sources of Plath's own tragedy.
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The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful -- but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother, and with the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies.
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The Bloody Chamber
From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves, the author has created a collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.
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The Bluest Eye
THE BLUEST EYE chronicles the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in 1940s Ohio: Pauline, Cholly, Sam and Pecola. Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged blond white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty as the novel moves toward a savage but poignant resolution.
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The Cambridge Companinion to British Romanticism
Until now there has been no concerted attempt to represent to students of Romanticism the full range of conflicting forces responsible for its dynamic literature. The eleven original essays that make up this volume make a significant contribution to our understanding of the period, providing readers with clear and coherent access to the historical roots, intellectual ferment and cultural range of British Romanticism. It includes a chronology of major publications and events, and an extensive guide to further reading.
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The Canterbury Tales 2ed.
This Norton Critical Edition includes the most admired of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Each is presented in the original language, with normalized spelling and substantial annotations for modern readers. Among the new added to the Second Edition are the much-requested "Merchant’s Tale" and the "Tale of Sir Thopas." "Sources and Backgrounds" are included for the General Prologue and for most of the tales, enabling students to understand The Canterbury Tales in light of relevant medieval ideas and attitudes and inviting comparison between Chaucer’s work and his sources. "Criticism" includes nine essays, four of them new to this edition, by leading Chaucerians, among them F. R. H. DuBoulay, E. Talbot Donaldson, Barbara Nolani, and Lee Patterson. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
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The Color Purple
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The Comedies
The Roman dramatist Terence (c. 186-159 BC) adapted many of his comedies from Greek sources, rendering them suitable for audiences of his own time by introducing subtler characterization and more complex plots. In his romantic play, "The Girl from Andros" Terence portrays a love affair saved by a startling discovery. "The Self-Tormentor" focuses on a man's remorse after sending his son to war, and "The Eunuch" depicts a case of mistaken identity. "Phormio" is as rich in intrigue as a French farce, while "The Mother-in-Law" shows two families striving to save a marriage and "The Brothers" contrasts strict and lenient upbringings. With their tight plots and spare dialogue, Terence gave his plays a sense of humanity that became a model in the Renaissance and greatly influenced Moliere.
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The Complete Odes and Epodes
Horace (65-8 bc) was one of the greatest poets of the Golden or Augustan age of Latin literature, a master of precision and irony who brilliantly transformed early Greek iambic and lyric poetry into sophisticated Latin verse of outstanding beauty. Offering allusive and exquisitely crafted insights into the brief joys of the present and the uncertain nature of the future, his Odes and Epodes explore such diverse themes as the virtues of pastoral life, the joys of wine, friendship and love, and the poet's personal anguish following Brutus' defeat at the battle of Phillipi. Ranging from subtle and tender hymns to the gods to bawdy celebrations of human passions, they remain among the most influential of all poems, inspiring poets from the Roman era to the European Renaissance, the Enlightenment and beyond.
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The Dragon Can't Dance
Carnival takes on social and political importance in this recognized classic. The people of the shantytown Calvary Hill, usually invisible to the rest of society, join the throng and flaunt their neighborhood personas in masquerade during Carnival. Aldrick, the dashing "king of the Hill," becomes a glorious, dancing dragon; his lovely Sylvia, a princess; Fisheye, rebel idealist, a fierce steel band contestant; and Philo, Calypso songwriter, a star. Then a business sponsors Fisheye's band, Philo gets a hit song, and Sylvia leaves the Hill with a prosperous older man. For Aldrick, it will take one more masquerade this time, involving guns and hostages before the illusion of power becomes reality."
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The Fiction of Robert Antoni
The Fiction of Robert Antoni: Writing in the Estuary is the first full-length study of the work of this important Trinidadian/ Bahamian Caribbean writer. When his first novel, Divina Trace, appeared in 1992, one critic compared it to a collaboration between James Joyce and Gabriel García Márquez. But Antoni's fiction is startlingly original. Each of his subsequent books is quite different from the one before, but all have their common origin in generations of experience in the West Indies, much of which was passed down to Antoni through a rich family tradition of storytelling. The novels are marked as well by Antoni's almost unique ability to navigate both the headwaters and tributaries of Caribbean folk tale and the limitless oceans of modernist and postmodernist texts. Taken together, Antoni's work postulates and embodies a Caribbean sensibility that is estuarial: almost every paragraph displays the multiple tributaries that form Caribbean culture, as well as the impulse to mix, mingle and reach out to the wider world, like a river flowing into the sea.
Patteson places Antoni's work in the multiple contexts of Caribbean storytelling, twentieth-century literature and contemporary Caribbean fiction, then explores each of his innovative and complex texts. In these diverse narratives Patteson finds reflections on the nature of human consciousness and its relationship to language, culture and storytelling itself, as well as sharp insight into the region and its tormented history. This book confirms Antoni's relevance to the literature of the Caribbean and the world.
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The History of Rasselas
Rasselas and his companions escape the pleasures of the "happy valley" in order to make their "choice of life." By witnessing the misfortunes and miseries of others they come to understand the nature of happiness, and value it more highly. Their travels and enquiries raise important practical and philosophical questions concerning many aspects of the human condition, including the business of a poet, the stability of reason, the immortality of the soul, and how to find contentment. Johnson's adaptation of the popular oriental tale displays his usual wit and perceptiveness; skeptical and probing, his tale nevertheless suggests that wisdom and self-knowledge need not be entirely beyond reach. This sparkling new edition includes an authoritative introduction by Thomas Keymer relating the story to Johnson's life, thought, and writings; the rise of the novel genre; and the global context of the Seven Years War. Extensive annotations relate the novel to its literary, philosophical, and political contexts.
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The House on Mango Street
Here is Sandra Cisnero's greatly admired and best-selling novel of a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. Acclaimed by critics, beloved by children and their parents and grandparents, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, "The House on Mango Street" has entered the canon of coming-of-age classics even as it depicts a new American landscape. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, "The House on Mango Street" tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong - not to her run-down neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza's story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become. "The San Francisco Chronicle" has called "The House on Mango Street" "marvelous... spare yet luminous. The subtle power of Cisnero's storytelling is evident. She communicates all the rapture and rage of growing up in a modern world." It is an extraordinary achievement that will live on for years to come.
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The Human Stain
Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with a woman half his age. And it's not the secret of his alleged racism, which provoked the college witchhunt that cost him his job. Coleman's secret is deeper, and lies at the very core of who he is, and he has kept it hidden from everyone for fifty years. Set in 1998, with the backdrop of the impeachment of a president, "The Human Stain" shows us an America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions result in public denunciations and houndings, and where innocence is not always a good enough excuse.
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The Iliad
One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode of the Trojan War. At its center is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his conflict with his leader Agamemnon. Interwoven in the tragic sequence of events are powerfully moving descriptions of the ebb and flow of battle, the besieged city of Ilium, the feud between the gods, and the fate of mortals.
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The Kingdom of This World: A Novel
A few years after its liberation from the brutality of French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of even greater brutality under the reign of King Henri-Christophe, who was born a slave in Grenada but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. In prose of often dreamlike coloration and intensity, Alejo Carpentier records the destruction of the black regime--built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French while embodying the same hollow grandeur of false elegance, attained only through slave labor--in an orgy of voodoo, race hatred, madness, and erotomania.
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The Lonely Londoners
The Lonely Londoners from the brilliant, sharp, witty pen of Sam Selvon, this is a classic award-winning novel of immigrant life in London in the 1950s.
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The Measures Taken
Written during 1929 and 1930, years of far-reaching political and economic upheaveal in Germany and the period of Brecht's most sharply Communist works, these short plays show an abrupt rejection of most of the trappings of conventional theatre.
The Lehrstücke are spare and highly formalized pieces intended for performance by amateurs, on the principle that the moral and political lessons contained in them can best be taught by participation in an actual production. There is nothing in the drama of the twentieth century to match the precision of their language and the economy of their theatrical technique.
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The Merchant of Venice
This new edition of The Merchant of Venice is part of the established Cambridge School Shakespeare series and has been substantially updated with new and revised activities throughout. Remaining faithful to the series' active approach it treats the play as a script to be acted, explored and enjoyed. As well as the complete script of The Merchant of Venice, you will find a variety of classroom-tested activities, an eight-page colour section and an enlarged selection of notes including information on characters, performance, history and language.
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The Metamorphosis & Other stories
"Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relations to our age as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of."-- W. H. Auden
Packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.
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The Nine Lives of Livingstone Crandon
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The Norton Anthology of Poetry 5ed.
Offering over one thousand years of verse from the medieval period to the present, The Norton Anthology of Poetry is the classroom standard for the study of poetry in English.
The Fifth Edition retains the flexibility and breadth of selection that has defined this classic anthology, while improved and expanded editorial apparatus make it an even more useful teaching tool.
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