A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...

The adventures of an orphaned young man in Victorian England who is given a great deal of money by an unknown benefactor to enable him to live as a gentleman, pursuing a good education and fulfilling great expectations.

Originally serialized in Knickerbocker's Magazine between 1847 and 1849, The Oregon Trail is a fascinating chronicle of Francis Parkman's travels on the Oregon Trail during the summer of 1846 through the western states of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado. Living and hunting with a tribe of Native Americans for a period of time, Francis Parkman captures the spirit of the old west in this gripping 19th century narrative. Fans of the old west...

From almost the moment of its publication in 1667, 'Paradise Lost' was considered a classic. This new edition is derived from the editors' modernized 'Oxford Authors' text, with a new introduction that discusses the poem's complexity and critical history.

"The Pilgrim's Progress (Part I 1678/Part II 1684) holds a unique place in the history of English literature. No other seventeenth-century work except the King James Bible, nothing from the pen of a writer of Bunyan's social class in any period, and no other Christian work, has enjoyed such an extensive readership." "The pilgrim Christian, Mr Worldly Wiseman, Giant Despair, Hopeful, and Ignorance are engaged in a powerful drama set against a solidly...

Lorna Doone, A Romance of Exmoor R. D. Blackmore - Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor is a novel by English author Richard Doddridge Blackmore, published in 1869. It is a romance based on a group of historical characters and set in the late 17th century in Devon and Somerset, particularly around the East Lyn Valley area of Exmoor.Set in the 17th century in the Badgworthy Water region of Exmoor in Devon and Somerset, England. John Ridd is the son of...

Though written in the 1850s, 'The Scarlet Letter' is a story fit for our modern times, with its exploration of female independence in a restrictive society where the concept of sin is used as a repressive instrument of control, particularly of women. A clear inspiration for Margaret Atwood's dystopian powerhouse, 'The Handmaid's Tale,' Hawthorne artfully highlights the hypocricy of Hester Prynne's humiliation, and charts her struggle to assert her...

Huck tells of his adventures travelling down the Mississippi on a raft with an escaped slave, and of the many people they encounter, including a pair of swindlers and two families in a feud.

"When Isabel Archer, a young American woman with looks, wit, and imagination, arrives in Europe, she sees the world as 'a place of brightness, of free expression, of irresistible action'. She turns aside from suitors who offer her their wealth and devotion to follow her own path. But that way leads to disillusionment and a future as constricted as 'a dark narrow alley with a dead wall at the end'. In a conclusion that is one of the most moving in...