Oxford University Press

The Histories

Tacitus, 2008

`The story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during times of peace'. Edward Gibbon called «The Histories» an `immortal work, every sentence of which is pregnant with the deepest observations and the most lively images'. Its author, Cornelius Tacitus, widely acknowledged as the greatest of all Roman historians, describes with cynical power the murderous `Year of the Four Emperors' — AD 69 — when in just a few months the whole of the Roman Empire was torn apart by civil war. The ultimate triumph of Vespasian and his sons Titus and Domitian was only the prelude to further conflicts and disasters, with revolts among the Germans and Jews challenging the very foundations of Roman authority. W. H. Fyfe's classic translation has been substantially revised to accord with modern scholarship, and supplied with extensive historical and literary notes. The Introduction provides an essential guide to understanding the subtleties of Tacitus' writing, and sets the historical scene with a succinct account of the political and social background to the Imperial Roman state. Maps of the Roman Empire and a Glossary of Place Names complete this valuable edition. Подробнее

Major Works

Jonathan Swift, 2008

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique selection from the full range of Swift's fifty-year career — prose, poetry, and letters — to give the essence of his work and thinking. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is best known as the author of «Gulliver's Travels», which alone would have secured his place in the history of English literature. But in addition to this classic fictional satire, Swift wrote numerous works concerning politics, religion, and Ireland, some savage (such as «A Modest Proposal»), others humorous, and all suffused with his tremendous wit, inventiveness, and vigour. This anthology includes satirical works such as «A Tale of a Tub» and «The Battle of the Books», political pamphlets, pieces for the popular press, poems, and a generous selection from Swift's correspondence. Presented chronologically, the anthology offers a new and clearer awareness of the unity as well as the complexity of Swift's vision, and the powerful bonds between disparate pieces. Подробнее

A Dictionary of Statistics (Revised second edition)

Graham Upton, 2008

This wide-ranging, jargon-free dictionary contains over 2,000 entries on all aspects of statistics, including terms used in computing, mathematics, and probability. It also includes biographical information on over 200 key figures in the field and coverage of statistical journals and societies. While embracing the whole multi-disciplinary spectrum of this complex subject, information is presented in a clear and practical manner. This revised and updated edition features recommended web links for many entries, accessible via the «Dictionary of Statistics» website, which provide valuable extra information. Entries are generously illustrated with useful figures and diagrams, and include worked examples where applicable. Appendices include a historical calendar of important statistical events, lists of statistical and mathematical notation, and statistical tables. An invaluable dictionary for statistics students and professionals from a wide range of disciplines, including economics, politics, market research, medicine, psychology, pharmaceuticals, and mathematics. Also provides a clear introduction to the subject for the general reader. Подробнее

Study in Scarlet

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 2010

The very first Sherlock Holmes story, «A Study in Scarlet» was also the first of Conan Doyle's books to be published. His two creations, Holmes, the master of the science of detection and Watson, the great detective's faithful companion, are immediately in fine form. The mystery itself, its solution plucked unerringly by Holmes from the heart of Victorian London, proves to be the inevitable consequence of a tragedy of the American West. The story is harrowing in its alternating hope and despair, although Holmes himself was later to complain that the book `produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid'. Подробнее

Plays and Petersburg Tales: Petersburg Tales, Marriage, The Government Inspector

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, 2008

In these tales Gogol guides us through the elegant streets of St Petersburg, the city erected by force and ingenuity on the marshes of the Neva estuary. Something of the deception and violence of the city's creation seems to lurk beneath its harmonious facade, however, and it confounds its inhabitants with false dreams and absurd visions — `nothing is what it seems!' warns Gogol. St Petersburg is also the setting for «Marriage», Gogol's satire on courtship and cowardice. Finally, for «The Government Inspector», indisputably Russia's greatest comedy, we move to the provinces although even here St Petersburg's preoccupation with status and appearances makes its presence felt. Подробнее

The Collected Poems (with parallel Greek text)

C.P. Cavafy, 2008

'a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe' E. M. Forster E. M. Forster's description of C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) perfectly encapsulates the unique perspective Cavafy brought to bear on history and geography, sexuality and language in his poems. Cavafy writes about people on the periphery, whose religious, ethnic and cultural identities are blurred, and he was one of the pioneers in expressing a specifically homosexual sensibility. His poems present brief and vivid evocations of historical scenes and sensual moments, often infused with his distinctive sense of irony. They have established him as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. This volume presents the most authentic Greek text of the 154 authorized poems ever published, together with a new English translation that conveys the accent and rhythm of Cavafy's individual tone of voice. Подробнее

The Satyricon

Petronius, 2009

`The language is refined, the smile not grave, My honest tongue recounts how men behave'. «The Satyricon» is the most celebrated work of fiction to have survived from the ancient world. It can be described as the first realistic novel, the father of the picaresque genre, and recounts the sleazy progress of a pair of literature scholars as they wander through the cities of the southern Mediterranean. En route they encounter type-figures the author wickedly satirizes — a teacher in higher education, a libidinous priest, a vulgar freedman turned millionaire, a manic poet, a superstitious sea-captain and a femme fatale. The novel has fascinated the literary world of Europe ever since, evoking praise for its elegant and hilarious description of the underside of Roman society, but also condemnation for some of its lewder subjects. This new and lively translation by P.G. Walsh captures the gaiety of the original, and the edition is supplemented by his superb Introduction giving an account of the plot, the various scholarly interpretations and the later histtory of its literary influcence. There are also extensive and detailed notes which serve to illuminate the reading of a text rich in literary in-jokes and allusion. Подробнее

Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works

Alexander Pushkin, 2009

''The people are silent'' So ends Pushkin's great historical drama Boris Godunov, in which Boris's reign as Tsar witnesses civil strife and intrigue, brutality and misery. Its legacy is an uncertain future for the new Tsar whose inauguration is met with devastating silence by the people. Pushkin's dramatic work displays a scintillating variety of forms, from the historical to the metaphysical and folkloric. After Boris Godunov, they evolved into Pushkin's own unique, condensed transformations of Western European themes and traditions. The fearful amorality of A Scene from Faust is followed by the four Little Tragedies which confront greed, envy, lust, and blasphemy, while Rusalka is a tragedy of a different kind — a lyric fairytale of despair and transformation. James E. Falen's verse translations of Pushkin's dramas are here accompanied by an Introduction by Caryl Emerson on Russia's Top page most cosmopolitan playwright. Подробнее

The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories

Jack London, 2010

Of all Jack London's fictions none have been so popular as his dog stories. In addition to The Call of the Wild, the epic tale of a Californian dog's adventures during the Klondike gold rush, this edition includes White Fang, and five famous short stories — 'Batard', 'Moon-Face', 'Brown Wolf', 'That Top page Spot', and 'To Build a Fire. Подробнее

Dead Souls

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, 2010

'Rus! Russ!...Everything within you is open, desolate, and flat; your squat towns barely protrude above the level of your wide plains, marking them like little dots, like specks; here is nothing to entice and fascinate the onlooker's gaze. Yet whence this unfathomable, uncanny force that draws me to you?' Although Dead Souls (1842) was largely composed by Gogol during self-imposed exile in Italy in the late 1830s, his last work remains to this day the most essentially Russian of all the great novels in Russian literature. As we follow its hero Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant turned unscrupulous confidence man, about the Russian countryside in pursuit of his shady enterprise, there unfolds before us a gallery of characters worthy in comic range of Chaucer, Rabelais, Fielding and Sterne. With its rich and ebullient language, ironic twists and startling juxtapositions, Dead Souls stands as one of the most dazzling and poetic masterpieces of the nineteenth century. This brilliant new translation by Christopher English is complemented by Top page a superb introductory essay by the pre-eminent Gogol scholar, Robert Maguire. Подробнее

Dracula

Bram Stoker, 2008

Take the papers that are with this, the diaries of Harker and the rest, and read them, and then find the great Un-Dead, and cut off his head and burn his heart or drive a stake through it, so that the world may rest from him. Bram Stoker's classics vampire story has haunted and disturbed the modern imagination for a hundred years. Set in Transylvania, London, and Whitby, it pits the sinister but seductive Count Dracula against a team of Vampire-hunters armed only with typewriters, phonographs, and syringes. They must obstruct his plan to conquer London before the forces of madness and depravity overwhelm them all. Vividly presented in the form of diaries and letters, the narrative blends ancient superstitions with modern technologies, and pulsates with obsessive fears of foreignness and sexuality. Blood, information, and hypnotic energy circulate furiously among the characters until he tale reaches its violent climax. This new edition has an introduction and bibliography which draw on the latest scholarship, and Top page detailed notes which explain literary, geographical, and technological allusions in the novel. Подробнее

The Forsyte Saga

John Galsworthy, 2008

The three novels which make up The Forsyte Saga chronicle the ebbing social power of the commerical upper-middle class Forsyte family between 1886 and 1920. Soames Forsyte is the brilliantly portrayed central figure, a Victorian who outlives the age, and whose baffled passion for his beautiful but unresponsive wife Irene reverberates throughout the saga. Written with both compassion and ironic detachment, Galsworthy's masterly narrative examines not only the family's fortunes but also the wider developments within society, particularly the changing position of women in an intensely competitive male world. Above all, Galsworthy is concerned with the conflict at the heart of English culture between the soulless materialism of wealth Top page and property and the humane instincts of love, beauty, and art. Подробнее

The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

Leo Tolstoy, 2010

'To love him was not enough for me after the happiness I had felt in falling in love. I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.' Leo Tolstoy, known to the world for his famous novels, also created throughout his sixty-year career as a writer a significant body of works of shorter ficiton. These fictions, like his novels, tend toward a uniqueness in form, even as they explore a set of themes common in the longer works. The four novellas selected here stand closest to the novels, and represent Tolstoy at his creative best, exploring in a specific and focused way his characteristic themes: life understood as a journey of the discovery of identity and vocation, the meaning of one's life in the face of death, and the redemptive role of suffering and compassion. Family Happiness (1859) traces the psychology of failed married love yet is written against the tradition of the novel of romance, marriage and adultery. The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) recounts a husband's addictions, jealousy, sinister guilt and subsequent isolation, while The Cossacks (1863) focuses on the experiences of a young Russian on in the Caucusus whose quest for romantic love becomes one for the love of 'the whole of God's world'. Finally, the superbly crafted Hadji Murad (1905) juxtaposes the military and civilian worlds, and relates a tale of the human violation of the natural through a series of parallel episodes. Written over a period of almost fifty years, these works display Tolstoy's changing views on art and sexuality, women and marriage, nationalism and ethnicity, war and empire. All four novellas develop, each in its own unique way, the central Tolystoyan theme of love. This edition, which updates a classic Top page translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field. Подробнее

The Lost World

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 2008

''The ordinary laws of Nature are suspended. The various checks with influence the struggle for existence in the world at large are all neutralized or altered. Creatures survive which would otherwise disappear.'' Headed by the larger than life figure of Professor Challenger, a scientific expedition sets out to explore a plateau in South America that remains frozen in time from the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Seemingly impossible to penetrate, this lost word holds great danger for the four men, whether from fiendish ape-men or terrifying prehistoric creatures. Arthur Conan Doyle's Top page classic tale of adventure and discovery still excites the reader today, just as dinosaurs continue to grip the popular imagination. Подробнее

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens, 2009

The new Oxford World's Classics edition of Oliver Twist is based on the authoritative Clarendon edition, which uses Dickens's revised text of 1846. It includes his preface of 1841 in which he defended himself against hostile criticism, and includes all 24 original illustrations by George Cruikshank. Stephen Gill's groundbreaking Introduction gives a fascinating new account of the novel. He also provides appendices on Dickens and Cruikshank, on Top page Dickens's Preface and the Newgate Novel Controversy, on Oliver Twist and the New Poor Law and on thieves' slang. Подробнее

Othello

William Shakespeare, 2008

The Oxford Shakespeare General Editor: Stanley Wells The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers — A new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings — Extensive introduction gives full attention to the play's bold treatment of racial themes, gender, and social relations — Detailed performance history designed to meet the needs of theatre professionals — On-page commentary and notes explain language, word-play, and staging — Appendices on music in the play and a full translation of the Italian novella from which the story derives — Illustrated with production photographs and related art — Full index to introduction and commentary — Durable sewn binding for lasting use 'not simply a better text but a new conception of Shakespeare. This is a major Top page achievement of twentieth-century scholarship.' Подробнее

The Pickwick Papers

Charles Dickens, 2010

In 1836 the 23-year-old Dickens was invited by his publishers to write 'a monthly something' illustrated by sporting plates. Thus the Pickwick Club was Top page born: its supposed 'papers' soom outgrew their origins and became a brilliantly comic novel, still among Dicken's most popular works. Подробнее

The Russian Master and Other Stories

Anton Chekhov, 2008

A schoolteacher in a provincial town falls in love with and marries a young local woman. He thinks he's found a bliss only described in novels. But before long, his sharp points of bliss become blurred. The loss of ideals and poverty of actual experience are the themes of these stories. Chekhov's Russians, at the close of the 19th century are trapped in a prison of frustration, which he depicts with laconic power. Подробнее

The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett, 2008

After the death of her parents, the neglected and spoiled Mary Lennox is sent to her uncle's large and lonely house on the Yorkshire Moors. There she discovers a secret garden and with the help of her strange, animal-charming friend Dickon, not only restored the garden but in the process transforms herself from a sullen, unhappy child to an unselfish, happy one, and helps to cure her sick cousin and to rehabilitate his gloomy, grief-stricken father. Frances Hodgson Burnett's passionate belief in the redemptive forces of renewal is shown nowhere more clearly than in The Secret Garden, her most sensitive and popular children's novel. First published in 1911, it lies in the best tradition of the family story developed by such writers as E. Nesbit in Top page Britain and Louisa M.Alcott and Susan Coolidge in America. Подробнее

Selected Tales

Edgar Allan Poe, 2008

Since their first publication in the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe's extraordinary Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction and have also created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction. Yet, as well as being highly enjoyable, Poe's tales are works of very real intellectual exploration. Abandoning the criteria of characterization and plotting in favour of blurred boundaries between self and other, will and morality, identity and memory, Poe uses the Gothic to question the integrity of human existence. Indeed, Poe is less interested in solving puzzles or in moral retribution than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem 'mysterious' in the first place. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this new critical edition selects twenty-four tales and places the most popular — 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Masque of the Red Death', 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue; and 'The Purloined Letter' — alongside less well-known Top page travel narratives, metaphysical essays and political satires. Подробнее

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