Mary Ann Shadd’s pamphlet A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West is, as the title promises, a settler guide designed to inform prospective immigrants of conditions in their proposed new home. But whereas most such works were addressed to potential white emigrants to North America from Britain or continental Europe, Shadd’s aimed to entice black Americans to emigrate to Canada.The introduction and background materials included in the volume situate Shadd’s pamphlet ...

It is widely known that Charles Dickens gave public readings of his works, and that those readings were enormously popular. Far less well known are the stories themselves; these were not, as is the modern fashion, taken verbatim from the published novels. Instead, Dickens trimmed, reworded, and re-shaped material from the novels to create stories that would be self-contained artistic entities. These concise “performance fictions,” shaped in every way to be accessible to a broad audience, a...

That James Joyce’s “The Dead” forms an extraordinary conclusion to his collection Dubliners, there can be no doubt. But as many have pointed out, “The Dead” may equally well be read as a novella—arguably, one of the finest novellas ever written.“The Dead,” a “story of public life,” as Joyce categorized it, was written more than a year after Joyce had finished the other stories in the collection, and was meant to redress what he felt was their “unnecessary harsh[ness].” Set...

A century ago Tennyson had begun to be dismissed as a poet whose work embodied everything the modern world was looking to leave behind. He still seems to readers to embody the substance of the Victorian era more fully than any other poet—but nowadays that is counted in his favor. Critics continue to find layers of complexity in poems once thought simplistic—while appreciating with fresh ears Tennyson’s aural mastery.This new edition includes the two long poems In Memoriam ...

The Siege of Jerusalem (c. 1370-90 CE) is a difficult text. By twenty-first-century standards, it is gruesomely violent and offensive. It tells the story of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, an event viewed by its author (as by many in the Middle Ages) as divine retribution against Jews for the killing of Christ. It anachronistically turns first-century Roman emperors Titus and Vespasian into Christian converts who battle like medieval crusaders to ...

In Samson Agonistes, Milton’s last great work, he addresses questions that pressed insistently on the imagination of all who were unhappy with the changes wrought by the Restoration. How do we respond to the experience of defeat, and to fears of having been abandoned by the divine? How do we know when our actions accord with divine will, or when they are fueled instead by our fallen desires and weaknesses? At what point do accommodation and compromise with an enemy become a failur...

In all six of its volumes The Broadview Anthology of British Literature presents British literature in a truly distinctive light. Fully grounded in sound literary and historical scholarship, the anthology takes a fresh approach to many canonical authors, and includes a wide selection of work by lesser-known writers. The anthology also provides wide-ranging coverage of the worldwide connections of British literature, and it pays attention throughout to issues of race, gender, class...