Oxford world's classics (Oxford University Press) | Park County Library System

1) A journal of the plague year

Author

Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731

Earliest Publication Date

1960

Summary

Imagine a plague so horrific, only forty percent of the population lived to tell the tale. Written as a first-person account of the world's most dangerous pandemic, the mysterious narrator bears witness to a society that has seemingly given up hope during terrifying times. . From mounting death tolls, to horrific bodily ailments, contracting the Black Plague was considered a fate worse than death. Combining his own experiences within each of the...

2) A journey to the centre of the Earth

Author

Verne, Jules, 1828-1905

Earliest Publication Date

1959

Summary

Describes the discovery and exploration of a secret tunnel which leads through a volcano to the centre of the earth.

3) A love story

Author

Zola, Émile, 1840-1902

Earliest Publication Date

2017

Summary

Helene Grandjean, an attractive young widow, lives a secluded life in Paris with her only child, Jeanne. Jeanne is a delicate and nervous girl who jealously guards her mother's affections. When Jeanne falls ill, she is attended by Dr Deberle, whose growing admiration for Helene gradually turns into mutual passion. Deberle's wife Juliette, meanwhile, flirts with a shallow admirer, and Helene, intent on preventing her adultery, precipitates a crisis...

4) An essay on the principle of population

Author

Malthus, T. R. (Thomas Robert), 1766-1834

Earliest Publication Date

2008

Summary

The first major study of population size and its tremendous importance to the character and quality of society, this polemic examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources. Pivotal in establishing the field of demography, it remains crucial to understanding modern problems with food production and distribution. Anglican parson Thomas Robert Malthus wrote his famous essay in 1798 in response to speculations on social perfectibility...

5) An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations: a selected edition

Author

Smith, Adam, 1723-1790

Earliest Publication Date

2008

6) A portrait of the artist as a young man

Author

Joyce, James, 1882-1941

Earliest Publication Date

1916

Summary

A portrait is a key example of the Keunstlerroman (an Artist's Buldungsroman) in English literature. Joyce's novel trace the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions in which he has been raise.

7) A tale of two cities

Author

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870

Earliest Publication Date

1859

Summary

A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens's great historical novel, set against the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author's novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores...

8) A vindication of the rights of men: A vindication of the rights of woman ; An historical and moral view of the French Revolution

Author

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797

Earliest Publication Date

2008

Summary

"This volume brings together the major political writings of Mary Wollstonecraft as they appeared in the revolutionary 1790s." "It traces her passionate and indignant response to the excitement of the early days of the French Revolution and then her uneasiness at its later bloody phase. It reveals her developing understanding of women's involvement in a nation's political and social life and her growing awareness of the relationship between politics...

Author

Lewis, Sinclair, 1885-1951

Earliest Publication Date

1922

Summary

Babbitt turns the spotlight on middle America and strips bare the hypocrisy of business practice, social mores, politics, and religious institutions. In his introduction and notes Gordon Hutner explores the novel's historical and literary contexts, and highlights its rich cultural and social references. --from publisher description

10) Barchester towers

Author

Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882

Earliest Publication Date

1945

Summary

Written as a sequel to "The Warden", this is the second book of the Barsetshire novels. Described as humorous, this wonderful novel that interweaves power, love, greed, and deceit in Barchester.

11) Ben-Hur: a tale of the Christ

Author

Wallace, Lew, 1827-1905

Earliest Publication Date

1880

Summary

A deluxe Harper Perennial Legacy Edition, with an introduction from John Swansburg, Deputy Editor at SlateOne of the best-selling books of all time, Lew Wallace's enduring epic is a tale of revenge, betrayal, honor, compassion and the power of forgiveness, set during the life of Christ. At the beginning of the first century, Judah Ben-Hur lived as a prince, descended from the royal line of Judea and one of Jerusalem's most prosperous merchant families....

12) Billy Budd, sailor and selected tales

Author

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891

Earliest Publication Date

1998

13) Candide, and other stories

Author

Voltaire, 1694-1778

Earliest Publication Date

1966

Summary

"The story of Candide, a naive youth who is conscripted, shipwrecked, robbed, and tortured by the Inquisition without losing his will to live, is accompanied by four other stories"--NoveList.

14) Casting the runes and other ghost stories

Author

James, M. R. (Montague Rhodes), 1862-1936

Volume

21

Earliest Publication Date

2002

Summary

When we think of ghost stories, we tend to think of cub scouts cringing by a fire, s'mores at the ready, as some aging camp counselor tries to scare them witless with yet another tale from the crypt. M.R. James had a great, and simple, formula for writing ghost stories. Establish the mundane and everyday detail (which is heightened by the Victorian academic settings), and then introduce, briefly, the supernatural, which cracks the surface of everything...

15) Confessions

Author

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778

Earliest Publication Date

1971

Summary

In his Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the world of modern civilization. In trying to explain who he was and how he came to be the object of others' admiration and abuse, Rousseau analyzes with...

16) Confessions of an English opium-eater and other writings

Author

De Quincey, Thomas, 1785-1859

Earliest Publication Date

2013

Summary

"Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) launched a fascination with drug use and abuse that has continued from his day to ours. In the Confessions De Quincey invents recreational drug taking, but he also details both the lurid nightmares that beset him in the depths of his addiction as well as his humiliatingly futile attempts to renounce the drug. Suspiria de Profundis centres on the deep afflictions of De Quincey's childhood,...

17) Culture and anarchy

Author

Arnold, Matthew, 1822-1888

Earliest Publication Date

2006

Summary

"Matthew Arnold's famous series of essays, which were first published in book form under the title Culture and Anarchy in 1869, debate important questions about the nature of culture and society. Arnold seeks to find out what culture really is, what good it can do, and if it is really necessary. He contrasts culture, which he calls the study of perfection, with anarchy, the mood of unrest and uncertainty that pervaded mid-Victorian England." "This...

18) Daisy Miller: and, An international episode

Author

James, Henry, 1843-1916

Earliest Publication Date

2013

Summary

This unique edition reunites two tales which James intended to be complementary --"Daisy Miller" and "An International Episode." Young Daisy Miller perplexes, amuses, and charms her stiff but susceptible fellow-American, Frederick Winterbourne. Is she innocent or corrupt? Has he lived too long in Europe to judge her properly? Amid the romantic scenery of Lake Geneva and Rome, their lively, precarious relationship develops to a climax in the Coliseum...

19) David Copperfield

Author

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870

Volume

18

Earliest Publication Date

1907

Summary

David Copperfield enjoys an idyllic life with his gentle, widowed mother and his loving nurse, Peggotty. Then tragedy strikes when Mr. Murdstone weds David's mother and drives her to an early grave. Despised by his stepfather, the boy is forced to live in misery and poverty until he runs away to throw himself upon the mercy of his eccentric aunt. Charles Dickens's classic tale of growing up.

Author

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881

Earliest Publication Date

2008

Summary

The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, Devils (1871-2), also known as The Possessed, is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray that follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small provincial town.

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