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.

Set against the bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this short novel's powerful and engrossing drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated book. In its unyielding and shocking pessimism, its bleak demonstration of tragic waste, it is a masterpiece of psychological and emotional realism. In her introduction the distinguished critic Elaine Showalter discusses the background to the novel's composition and the reasons for its enduring success.

This fiercely comic tale stands in marked contrast to its genial predecessor, "The Pickwick Papers." Set against London's seedy back street slums, "Oliver Twist" is the saga of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust into a thieves' den, where some of Dickens's most depraved villains preside: the incorrigible Artful Dodger, the murderous bully Sikes, and the terrible Fagin, that treacherous ringleader whose grinning knavery threatens to send them all to the "ghostly gallows." Yet at the heart of this drama is the orphan Oliver, whose unsullied goodness leads him at last to salvation. In 1838 the publication of "Oliver Twist" firmly established the literary eminence of young Dickens. It was, according to Edgar Johnson, "a clarion peal announcing to the world that in Charles Dickens the rejected and forgotten and misused of the world had a champion."

Backgrounds and Contexts provides a useful "Glossary of Dialect Words" as well as four essays on the textual and publication history of the novel--including pieces by Simon Gatrell and Andrew Nash--all of which are newly included. Also included are six of Hardy's nonfiction writings on the dialect in the novel, the reading of fiction, and his correspondence, five of which are new to this edition.

Criticism provides a selection of contemporary reviews that suggest The Return of the Native's initial reception as well nine of the most influential modern essays on the novel, by Gillian Beer, D. H. Lawrence, Michael Wheeler, Rosemarie Morgan, Donald Davidson, John Peterson, Richard Swigg, Pamela Dalziel, and Jennifer Gribble.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Criticism includes significant statements on Tennyson as well as interpretations of the major poems. A special feature is Georg Roppen's essay on Tennyson and the theory of evolution. Other critical voices are those of A. C. Bradley, Harold Nicolson, Douglas Bush, Arthur J. Carr, T. S. Eliot, Paull F. Baum, John Killham, F. E. L. Priestley, Francis Golffing, and Robert W. Hill, Jr.

A Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Index are also included.