Set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid, The Monk is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest. The great struggle between maintaining monastic vows and fulfilling personal ambitions leads its main character, the monk Ambrosio, to temptation and the breaking of his vows, then to sexual obsession and rape, and finally to murder …
This new, fully-annotated translation by a leading expert on Hesiodic poems combines accuracy with readability and includes an introduction and explanatory notes on these two works by one of the oldest known Greek poets. The Theogony contains a systematic genealogy and account of the struggles of the gods, and the Works and Days offers a compendium of moral …
Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript (Oxford World’s Classics)
The greatest English version of the stories of King Arthur, Le Morte D’Arthur was completed in 1469-70 by Sir Thomas Malory, “knight prisoner.” This edition is the first designed for the general reader to be based on the “Winchester manuscript” which represents what Malory wrote more closely than the version printed by William Caxton. Extensively annotated, this …
The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology (Oxford World’s Classics)
Crossley-Holland–the widely acclaimed translator of Old English texts–introduces the Anglo-Saxons through their chronicles, laws, letters, charters, and poetry, with many of the greatest surviving poems printed in their entirety.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, …
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731 AD) is Bede’s most famous work. As well as providing the authoritative Colgrave translation of the Ecclesiastical History, this edition includes a new translation of the Greater Chronicle, in which Bede examines the Roman Empire and contemporary Europe. His Letter to Egbert gives his final reflections on the English Church …
More popular in their day than Don Quxixote, Cervantes’s Exemplary Stories (1613) surprise, challenge and delight. Ranging from the picaresque to the satirical, the Exemplary Stories defy the conventions of heroic chivalric literature through a combination of comic irony, moral ambiguity, realism, and sheer mirth. This new translation captures the full vigor of Cervantes’s wit and make …
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text (Oxford World’s Classics)
Shelley’s enduringly popular and rich gothic tale, Frankenstein, confronts some of the most feared innovations of evolutionism and science–topics such as degeneracy, hereditary disease, and humankind’s ability to act as creator of the modern world. This new edition, based on the harder and wittier 1818 version of the text, draws on new research and examines the novel …
In his own day the dominant personality of the Western Church, Augustine of Hippo today stands as perhaps the greatest thinker of Christian antiquity, and his Confessions is one of the great works of Western literature. In this intensely personal narrative, Augustine relates his rare ascent from a humble Algerian farm to the edge of the corridors …
Roman Lives: A Selection of Eight Roman Lives (Oxford World’s Classics)
‘I treat the narrative of the Lives as a kind of mirror…The experience is like nothing so much as spending time in their company and living with them: I receive and welcome each of them in turn as my guest.’In the eight lives of this collection Plutarch introduces the reader to the major figures and periods of classical …
These biographies of the great quattrocento artists have long been considered among the most important of contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art. Vasari, who invented the term “Renaissance,” was the first to outline the influential theory of Renaissance art that traces a progression through Giotto, Brunelleschi, and finally the titanic figures of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and …