Gathers selections from such British writers as John Milton, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, William Cowper, and Edmund Burke (view table of contents)

This play about a family of four psychologically disturbed people reveals aspects of the author's own life

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

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Product Description: Rare book

Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko (1688) is one of the most widely studied works of seventeenth-century literature, because of its powerful representation of slavery and complex portrayal of ways in which differing races and cultures - European, Black African, and Native American - observe and misinterpret each other. This edition presents a new edition of Oroonoko, with unprecedentedly full and informative commentary, along with complete texts of three major British seventeenth-century works concerned with race and colonialism: Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), Behn's Abdelazer (1676), and Thomas Southerne's tragedy Oroonoko (1696). It combines these with a rich anthology of European discussions of slavery, racial difference, and colonial conquest from the mid-sixteenth century to the time of Behn's death. Many are taken from important works that have not hitherto been easily available, and the collection offers an unrivaled resource for studying the culture that produced Britain's first major fictions of slavery.

Product Description: As its compiler Thomas Bentley writes, The Monument of Matrones (1582) is a 'domesticall librarie plentifullie stored and replenished'. This 1500-page book is one of a long line of books of secular prayer reaching from the Middle Ages through the sixteenth-century English compilations of prayer and meditations that grew out of the English Reformation...read more

Product Description: As its compiler Thomas Bentley writes, The Monument of Matrones (1582) is a 'domesticall librarie plentifullie stored and replenished'. This 1500-page book is one of a long line of books of secular prayer reaching from the Middle Ages through the sixteenth-century English compilations of prayer and meditations that grew out of the English Reformation...read more

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What was life like in Shakespeare's time - or, what did people then say it was like? This volume provides a picture of the age, with a selection of accounts of Elizabethan and Jacobean life taken from books, plays, poems, letters, diaries and pamphlets by and about Shakespeare's contemporaries. Extracts have been taken from a wide range of writers, including William Harrison and Fynes Moryson (providing descriptions of England), Nicholas Breton (on country life), Isabella Whitney and Thomas Dekker (on London life), Nashe (on struggling writers), Stubbs (with a Puritan's view of Elizabethan enjoyments), Harsnet and Burton (on witches and spirits), John Donne (meditations on prayer and death), King James I (on tobacco) and Shakespeare himself. Also included are accounts of theatre-going, May Day celebrations, Queen Elizabeth at court, the place of women, education, garden books and herbals, clothes, food, drink and religion. The extracts are organized thematically, each section having an introduction reflecting modern historical research. A miscellany of some of the best, wittiest and most unusual of 16th and 17th-century writing, this book aims to bring to life the variety, the energy and the often harsh reality of the society that produced England's greatest writer.

Product Description: Responding to the broadening of the canon in recent years, this accessible anthology balances a generous selection of familiar Renaissance figures with important texts by women writers. Includes important texts by women writers alongside more familiar Renaissance masters...read more

Book by Stephanie Hodgson-Wright