Oxford world's classics

No holiday season is complete without Charles Dickens's timeless tale of redemption starring the tightfisted Mr. Scrooge, the long-suffering Bob Cratchit, kindhearted Tiny Tim, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.

No book had more influence on twentieth-century attitudes to the English language in Britain than Henry Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It rapidly became the standard work of reference for the correct use of English in terms of choice of words, grammar, and style. Much loved for his firm opinions, passion, and dry humour, Fowler has stood the test of time and is still considered the best arbiter of good practice. Now one of today's leading...

"Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well is the story of its heroine, Helen, more so than the story of Bertram, for whose love she yearns. Helen wins Bertram as her husband despite his lack of interest and higher social standing, but she finds little happiness in the victory as he shuns, deserts, and attempts to betray her. The play suggests some sympathy for Bertram. As a ward to the French king, he must remain at court while his friends go off to...

Presents three plays by the master playwright featuring complex characters coping with society's challenges.

"Tolstoy produced many drafts of Anna Karenina. Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, he was anything but casual in his use of language. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, "was to bend language to his will, as an instrument of his aesthetic and moral convictions." In her magnificent new translation, Schwartz embraces Tolstoy's unusual style - she is the first English language translator ever to do so. Previous translations...

First published in 1757, the treatise "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", by the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, provides a distinct transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. Burke's treatise was the first fully realized exposition that separated the definition of the sublime from the beautiful. His work received much attention from other philosophers upon its publication and influenced thinkers...

"In Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet a popular cultural phenomenon is born. We meet two of the most famous characters in modern literary history: the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, an army doctor home on sick leave, for the first time. Through Watson we learn a little about the eccentric figure who is his new room-mate at 221B Baker Street, before they encounter their first case: an American visitor to the city has been...

A verse novel which provides a panoramic view of the early Victorian age in London. The dominant presence in the work however, is the narrator Aurora Leigh, as she develops her ideas on art, love, God, the "Woman Question," and society.

"Charles Dickens's first historical novel-set during the anti-Catholic riots of 1780-is an unparalleled portrayal of the terror of a rampaging mob, seen through the eyes of the individuals swept up in the chaos. Those individuals include Emma, a Catholic, and Edward, a Protestant, whose forbidden love weaves through the heart of the story; and the simpleminded Barnaby, one of the riot leaders, whose fate is tied to a mysterious murder and whose beloved...