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Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations

Oxford University Press — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:00:41 +0000

‘you are to understand, Mr. Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret…’

Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith, with few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past – the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella – and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great expectations but the mystery of his own heart.

A powerful and moving novel, Great Expectations is suffused with Dickens’s memories of the past and its grip on the present, and it raises disturbing questions about the extent to which individuals affect each other’s lives. This edition includes a lively introduction, Dickens’s working notes, the novel’s original ending, and an extract from an early theatrical adaptation. It reprints the definitive Clarendon text.

Listen to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst talking about the books’s origins

Charles Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle

Oxford University Press — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:00:24 +0000

On topics ranging from intelligent design and climate change to the politics of gender and race, the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin occupy a pivotal position in contemporary public debate. This volume brings together the key chapters of his most important and accessible books, including the Journal of Researches on the Beagle Voyage (1845), The Origin of Species (1859), and The Descent of Man (1871), along with the full text of his delightful autobiography. They are accompanied by generous selections of responses from Darwin’s nineteenth-century readers from across the world. More than anything, they give a keen sense of the controversial nature of Darwin’s ideas, and his position within Victorian debates about man’s place in nature.

The wide-ranging Introduction by James A. Secord, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, explores the global impact and origins of Darwin’s work and the reasons for its unparalleled significance today. To increase its usefulness for readers coming to Darwin for the first time, the selection also includes a map of the Beagle voyage, a detailed chronology of Darwin’s life, and a biographical appendix identifying every individual mentioned in the text.

Listen now to James A. Secord talk about Darwin’s place on the Beagle voyage

The early years of Anton Chekhov

Oxford University Press — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:00:08 +0000

Seventeen peerless examples of how much life you can put into a few pages of fiction if you have Chekhov’s economical mind, his eyes and ears, his feel for comedy and his sense of humanity. Chekhov is better known for his plays. But these are small masterpieces of their own, in a revelatory new translation.”

The Economist

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Anne Brontë: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Oxford University Press — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:23 +0000

The mysterious new tenant of Wildfell Hall has a dark secret. But as the captivated Gilbert Markham will discover, it is not the story circulating among local gossips.

Living under an assumed name, ‘Helen Graham’ is the estranged wife of a dissolute rake, desperate to protect her son from his destructive influence. Her diary entries reveal the shocking world of debauchery and cruelty from which she has fled.

Combining a sensational story of a man’s physical and moral decline through alcohol, a study of marital breakdown, a disquisition on the care and upbringing of children, and a hard-hitting critique of the position of women in Victorian society, this passionate tale of betrayal is set within a stern moral framework tempered by Anne Brontë’s optimistic belief in universal redemption.

Drawing on her first-hand experiences with her brother Branwell, Brontë’s novel scandalized contemporary readers. It still retains its power to shock.

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Jane Austen and making an impression

Oxford University Press — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:00:39 +0000

Pride and Prejudice has delighted generations of readers with its unforgettable cast of characters, carefully choreographed plot, and a hugely entertaining view of the world and its absurdities. With the arrival of eligible young men in their neighbourhood, the lives of Mr and Mrs Bennet and their five daughters are turned inside out and upside down.

Pride encounters prejudice, upward-mobility confronts social disdain, and quick-wittedness challenges sagacity, as misconceptions and hasty judgements lead to heartache and scandal, but eventually to true understanding, self-knowledge, and love.

In this supremely satisfying story, Jane Austen balances comedy with seriousness, and witty observation with profound insight. If Elizabeth Bennet returns again and again to her letter from Mr Darcy, readers of the novel are drawn even more irresistibly by its captivating wisdom.

Here, Fiona Stafford of Somerville College, Oxford, talks about the the role that the forming of judgments plays in the book.

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Oscar Wilde, a “Jester at the Court of English Literature”?

Oxford University Press — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:00:08 +0000

For the first time in one volume, this complete collection of all the short fiction Oscar Wilde published contains such social and literary parodies as “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” and “The Canterville Ghost”; such well-known fairy tales as “The Happy Prince”, “The Young King”, and “The Fisherman and his Soul”; an imaginary portrait of the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets entitled “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.”; and the parables Wilde referred to as “Poems in Prose”, including “The Artist”, “The House of Judgment”, and “The Teacher of Wisdom”.

In this extract from the audio guide to Wilde’s shorter fiction, John Sloan of Harris Manchester College, Oxford introduces some of the themes and concerns that preoccupied Wilde the short story writer.

This is an extract from the full audio guide to Wilde’s shorter fiction. Read more

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Michael Slater on Charles Dickens

Yale University Press — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:00:54 +0000

In this extract, Michael Slater describes the wildly popular public readings Dickens gave from his works towards the end of his life – veritable tours de force in which the novelist displayed his considerable acting talents. By this time, Dickens best-known works had become, as Michael Slater puts it, “part of the very fabric of English life”.

Hear how Dickens’ performances went down with his Victorian audiences:

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