The chapters constituting this book are different in subject and method, striking testimony to the range of Paulson’s interests and the versatility of his critical powers. In his prolific career he has produced extensive analysis of art, poetry, fiction, and aesthetics produced in England between 1650 and 1830. Paulson’s unique contribution has to do with his understanding of “seeing” and “reading” as closely related enterprises, and “popular” forms in art and literature as intimately conn...

Introduction and Notes by Robert FolkenflikRich in playful double entendres, digressions, formal oddities, and typographical experiments, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in England in a series of volumes from 1759 to 1767. An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, Tristram Shandy is the most protean and playful English novel of the ei...

While the marquis de Sade was drafting The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, another libertine marquis in a nearby cell was also writing a novel—one equally outrageous, full of sex and slander, and more revealing for what it had to say about the conditions of writers and writing itself. Yet Sade's neighbor, the marquis de Pelleport, is almost completely unknown today, and his novel, Les Bohémiens, has nearly vanished. Only a half dozen copies are available in libraries t...

While the marquis de Sade was drafting The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, another libertine marquis in a nearby cell was also writing a novel—one equally outrageous, full of sex and slander, and more revealing for what it had to say about the conditions of writers and writing itself. Yet Sade's neighbor, the marquis de Pelleport, is almost completely unknown today, and his novel, Les Bohémiens, has nearly vanished. Only a half dozen copies are available in libraries t...

Tracing an awe-inspiring oceanic route from Boston, around Cape Horn, to the California coast, Two Years Before the Mast is both a riveting story of adventure and the most eloquent, insightful account we have of life at sea in the early nineteenth century. Richard Henry Dana is only nineteen when he abandons the patrician world of Boston and Harvard for an arduous voyage among real sailors, amid genuine danger. The result is an astonishing read, replete with vivid descriptions of storms, w...

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live?This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, events in the app...

A brilliant modern translation by Christine Donougher of Victor Hugo's thrilling masterpiece, with an introduction by Robert Tombs.This is the best translation of the novel available in English, as recommended by David Bellos in The Novel of the Century.Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become...

“HUXLEY'S MASTERPIECE AND PERHAPS THE MOST ENJOYABLE BOOK ABOUT SPIRITUALITY EVER WRITTEN. .” — Washington Post Book WorldAldous Huxley's "brilliant" (Los Angeles Times) and gripping account of one of the strangest cases of demonic possession in history, hailed as the "peak achievement of Huxley’s career" by the New York TimesIn 1632 an entire convent in the small French village of Loudun was apparently possessed by the devil. After a sensational ...

The Story of Civilization, Volume IX: A history of civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756, with special emphasis on the conflict between religion and philosophy. This is the ninth volume of the classic, Pulitzer Prize-winning series.

Paul Hazard’s magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the process by which new developmentsin the sciences, arts, philosophy, and philology came to undermine the stable foundations of t...

In August 1785, Paris buzzed with a scandal that had everything—an eminent churchman, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. Its centrepiece was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled, and the tangle of fraud, folly, blindness and self-delusion it provoked. The humiliation the affair brought on the royal family contributed to their appalling deaths in the Revolution just four years later.In this unusual, witty and often surprising version...

Perhaps I may as well begin this book by telling how I came to write it at all. Lady Corbet, my mistress (I suppose I ought to say mine "honored" mistress, but I sha'n't: I am going to have the comfort of speaking my mind in these pages, if nowhere else). But to begin again, in a more orderly fashion. Lady Corbet, with whom I am living as waiting-gentlewoman, companion, and general butt for ill-humors,—there I go again,—well, Lady Corbet took it in her head to give me the use of this cabin...