Product Description: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero is a novel by English author William Makepeace Thackeray.

Settlers and drifters--including tall, silent James McCraw; Harriet Kersey, a strong, passionate woman; and Matt Iberra, a wild half-breed hiding a deep secret--carve out their destinies in the rough desert south of Fort Davis. Original.

Product Description: The Value of the Humanities provides a critical account of the principal arguments used to defend the value of the Humanities. The claims considered are: that the Humanities study the meaning-making practices of culture, and bring to their work a distinctive understanding of what constitutes knowledge and understanding; that, though useful to society in many ways, they remain laudably at odds with, or at a remove from, instrumental use value; that they contribute to human happiness; that they are a force for democracy; and that they are a good in themselves, to be valued "for their own sake...read more

Product Description: Helen Small enrolled at Akron University in 1938. While in line to enroll, she was introduced by a mutual friend to a tall, dark and handsome football and basketball star. Neither of these two graduated college because of family finances and the war, but a beautiful romance was born...read more

Product Description: The third in Trollope's six-volume Palliser series, The Eustace Diamonds boasts an extraordinary heroine in Lizzie Eustace, a lying schemer in the mould of Thackeray's Becky Sharp. A pompous Under-Secretary of State, an exploitative and acquisitive American and her unhappy "niece," a shady radical peer, and a brutal aristocrat are only some of the characters in this, one of Trollope's most engaging novels: part sensation fiction, part detective story, part political satire, and part ironic romance...read more

Product Description: George Eliot, the pen named used by Mary Anne Evans, wrote popular works that epitomized the settings and ideology of contemporary Victorian England. She was brought up in the Church of England, where she developed strong moral convictions that carried over into her fiction; she often presented stories of social outsiders and small-town persecution...read more

Product Description: The Long Life invites the reader to range widely from the writings of Plato through to recent philosophical work by Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams, and others, and from Shakespeare's King Lear through works by Thomas Mann, Balzac, Dickens, Beckett, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, to more recent writing by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and J...read more

Product Description: First published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859, "The Lifted Veil" is now one of George Eliot's most widely read and critically discussed short stories. A dark fantasy drawing on contemporary scientific interest in the physiology of the brain, mesmerism, phrenology, and experiments in revification, it is Eliot's anatomy of her own moral philosophy...read more

Product Description: Coming to PBS in March 2009-a MasterpieceTM Classic production of Charles Dickens's Little DorritCharles Dickens 's great satire on poverty, riches, and imprisonment, Little Dorrit is the story of Arthur Clennam, a man whose kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother's seamstress, assures him nothing but trouble...read more

New essays by prestigious thinkers such as Edward Said, Bruce Robbins, Jacqueline Rose, and Stefan Collini on the public role of writers and intellectuals.

Product Description: This book presents fourteen new essays by leading British and American writers on literature, science, and psychoanalysis. Written in honour of Gillian Beer, the collection pays homage to her major contribution to the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies, with particular emphasis on the evolutionary sciences in nineteenth-century Britain, on psychoanalysis from Freud through to the late 1930s, and on the cultural contexts of science in the first half of the twentieth century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Love's Madness is an important new contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, it presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, femininity, and narrative convention...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Young, rich and intelligent, Gallia Hamesthwaite embraces the dictates of reason and shuns the impulses of passion. She must choose between sensible rational marriage and sensual romantic love; but in pursuing the pleasure of a logical life, she must also endure the pain of emotional sacrifice...read more

Product Description: All Sorts and Conditions of Men By Walter Besant