Norton Critical

As often as possible, the annotations to the text have been made by referring to James's other writings.

A map of Strether's Paris and a virtually unknown photograph of James, which originally appeared with the serial of The Ambassadors, have been added to this Second Edition, and the original frontispieces to the New York Edition of the novel have been reproduced in their proper sequence for the first time.

"The Author on the Novel" contains James's notebook entries on the inspiration for The Ambassadors as well as the long, remarkable preliminary statement that the author drew up before writing his novel. The selection of James's letters on The Ambassadors has also been expanded for the Second Edition.

"Criticism" is comprised of fourteen essays that represent more than seventy years of analysis of The Ambassadors, by H. M. Alden, Percy Lubbock, E. M. Forster, F. O. Matthiessen, F. R. Leavis, Joseph Warren Beach, Joan Bennett, Leon Edel, Ian Watt, Sallie Sears, Nicola Bradbury, Maud Ellmann, Millicent Bell, and Philip Fisher.

A Chronology and an expanded Selected Bibliography are also included.

Jonson on His Work collects statements by the author on plays and on poetry taken from some of the plays, from Discoveries, and from Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden.

Contemporary Readers on Jonson includes tributes and poems about the author and his work. A new section--"Backgrounds and Sources"--includes selections from texts that helped shaped the dramatist's vision.

Criticism includes twelve essays--nine of them new to the Second Edition--by Jonas A. Barish, Robert C. Evans, Anne Barton, John Dryden, Robert Watson, Edward B. Partridge, Ian Donaldson, Richard Harp, D. J. Gordon, Stephen Orgel, John Mulryan, and Leah S. Marcus.

"Contexts" is thematically organized and includes a rich and varied selection of materials, both public and private, focusing on Hawthorne's inspirations for the novel. Included are letters, excerpts from journals, published accounts of Brook Farm and the growth of antebellum social reform, Hawthorne's letters to Sophia Peabody and Louisa Hawthorne about his first days at Brook Farm, and later letters describing his growing reservations about and decision to leave the utopian community. The Blithedale Romance raises interesting questions about the role of women, the popularity of mesmerism, and the growth of cities in mid-nineteenth-century America. Margaret Fuller, Charles Baudelaire, and Hawthorne, among others, provide invaluable insight.

"Criticism" begins with major contemporary reviews by Herman Melville, William B. Pike, George S. Hillard, James T. Fields, Henry Fothergill Chorley, and others that suggest The Blithedale Romance's initial reception. "Selections from Classic Studies" reprints key excerpts from influential essays published through the 1970s, including those by Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Irving Howe, and James McIntosh.

"Recent Criticism" collects a striking range of scholarly interpretation by Nina Baym, Joel Pfister, Gillian Brown, Richard H. Brodhead, Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Robert S. Levine, and Richard H. Millington.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

An unusually rich "Contexts" section is thematically organized into four parts--"Women in Early America: Intellect, Education, Sexuality," "Reading in Early America," "The American Sentimental," and "Selections from Rowson's Writings"--and includes works from Rowson's time to our own. Ten illustrations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are reproduced to further enrich the reading experience.

"Criticism" collects thirteen insightful assessments of Charlotte Temple spanning four centuries and addressing its central issues. Contributors include Matthew Carey, Samuel L. Knapp, Larzer Ziff, Jane P. Tompkins, Gareth Evans, Julia A. Stern, and Marion Rust, among others.

A Chronology of Susanna Rowson's life and works and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

When A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was published in 1889, Mark Twain was undergoing a series of personal and professional crises. Thus what began as a literary burlesque of British chivalry and culture grew into a disturbing satire of modern technology and social thought. The story of Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century American who is accidentally returned to sixth-century England, is a powerful analysis of such issues as monarchy versus democracy and free will versus determinism, but it is also one of Twain's finest comic novels, still fresh and funny after more than 100 years. In his Introduction M. Thomas Inge shows how A Connecticut Yankee develops from comedy to tragedy and so into a novel that remains a major literary and cultural text for new generations of readers. This edition reproduces a number of the original drawings by Dan Beard, of whom Twain said 'he not only illustrates the text but he illustrates my thoughts.'.

Set in his fictional Wessex countryside in southwest England, Far from the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy's breakthrough work. Though it was first published anonymously in 1874, the quick and tremendous success of Far from the Madding Crowd persuaded Hardy to give up his first profession, architecture, to concentrate on writing fiction. The story of the ill-fated passions of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors offers a spectacle of country life brimming with an energy and charm not customarily associated with Hardy. ("When Farmer Oak smiled, " the novel begins, "the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears. . . .")
----The text is based on the authoritative Wessex Edition of 1912, revised and corrected by Hardy himself.
----This edition is the companion volume to the Mobil Masterpiece Theatre WGBH television presentation broadcast on PBS. It stars Paloma Baeza as Bathsheba Everdene, Nathaniel Parker as Gabriel Oak, Nigel Terry as Mr. Boldwood, and Jonathan Firth as Frank Troy. Adapted by Philomena
McDonagh, Far from the Madding Crowd is directed by Nick Renton.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesignedthe series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

Eighty poems by Herbert have been selected from The Temple, and two early poems from Isaak Walton's Lives are also included. Crashaw is represented by sixteen poems from Steps to the Temple, Delights of the Muses, and Carmen Deo Nostro; Marvell, by eighteen selections from Miscellaneous Poems; Vaughan, by forty-five poems from Silex Scintillans, Parts I and II; and Traherne, by twelve poems from the Dobell Folio, The Third Century, and the Burney Manuscript.

All of the texts have been freshly edited, and spelling has been modernized. Textual Notes specify the procedures followed and give reasons for certain new readings. The poems are fully annotated in order to clarify unfamiliar allusions and images.

A broad range of critical viewpoints is represented in essays by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Anthony Low, L. C. Knights, E. B. Greenwood, Joseph H. Summers, Douglas Bush, Helen C. White, Austin Warren, Richard Strier, Frank Kermode, William Empson, M. C. Bradbrook, M. G. Lloyd Thomas, Edward S. Le Comte, Karina Williamson, Dennis Davidson, Robert Ellrodt, E. C. Pettet, S. Sandbank, Arthur Clements, H. M. Margoliouth, and Stanley Stewart.

An Annotated Bibliography covers historical and cultural background, the lives and works of the individual poets, and several important aspects of religious belief especially relevant to the poems.

The text is thoroughly annotated, and the editor has added a "Glossary of Eastern and Nautical Terms."

"Backgrounds" includes the complete text of "Tuan Jim."

"Sources" is a special section edited for this Norton Critical Edition by Dr. Norman Sherry of the University of Liverpool, presenting his discoveries about the real-life counterpart of Lord Jim, the incidents described in the novel, and life in the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth century. Dr. Sherry is the author of Conrad's Eastern World.

Among the perspectives presented in "Criticism" are those of Hugh Clifford, Albert J. Guerard, Ian Watt, Fredric Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said, Philip M. Weinstein, Paul B. Armstrong, Marianne DeKoven, and Daphana Erdinast-Vulcan.

This Norton Critical Edition of Gaskell's first novel is based on the 1854 Fifth Edition, the last edition corrected by the author.

"Contexts" includes letters related to Mary Barton's publication as well as Gaskell's reaction to her harshest critics. Ten contemporary reviews reflect the dual nature of the novel's critical reception: one group valuing its eye-opening moral energy and concern for the suffering of the working classes and the other group taking Gaskell to task for the deceptive implications of her perceived flawed reasoning. A section featuring fifteen illustrations from the novel offers readers the opportunity to explore narrative emphases.

"Criticism" collects seventeen major interpretations of the novel's central themes. Contributors include Kathleen Tillotson, Richard D. Altick, John Lucas, Catherine Gallagher, Hilary Schor, Deborah Epstein, Susan Zlotnick, Jonathan H. Grossman, and Liam Corley, among others.

A Chronology of Gaskell's life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

"Contexts" collects related documents on criminal transport, contemporary accounts of lives of crime, and colonial laws as they applied to servants, slaves, and runaways.

"Criticism" includes eleven interpretations by Juliet McMaster, Everett Zimmerman, Maximillian E. Novak, Henry Knight Miller, Ian A. Bell, Carol Kay, Paula B. Backscheider, John Rietz, Ann Louise Kibbie, John Richetti, and Ellen Pollak.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

It is canonical as a cultural text, rather than a purely literary one, as this Norton Critical Edition reflects. An extensive "Contexts" section includes maps, photographs, and documents showing how and why Alger used the backdrop of New York City to highlight problems of urban poverty, immigration, and child labor in mid-nineteenth century America. "Criticism" is thematically organized around contemporary reviews and responses, the heated public debate about whether Alger should be available in American public libraries, parodies of and related responses to Alger, and four recent critical essays by Mary Wroth Walsh, Glenn Hendler, Michael Moon, and Hildegard Hoeller.

Silas Lapham is a rough-hewn entrepreneur who has made his fortune in mineral paint. Socially ambitious for their daughters, Lapham and his wife encourage the suit of Tom Corey, son of an aristocratic Boston family, whose own parents are appalled by his consorting with vulgar upstarts. But which Lapham girl does Tom really love: the pretty blonde Irene or her bookish sister Penelope? As the romantic confusion is sorted out, Lapham suffers calamities that threaten both his financial and personal integrity. His rise is ultimately a moral one. The first major American novel to centre on a businessman, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) explores the capitalist ethos of the American Gilded Age. It is also a brilliant novel of manners that shows the comic confrontation of old wealth and new riches.