No book is more central to the study of nineteenth-century American literature than Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or The Whale. First published it 1851, it still speaks powerfully to readers today. Combining reprinted documents with clear introductions for student readers, this volume examines the contexts of and critical responses to Melville's work. It draws together:
*an introduction to the contexts in which Melville was writing and relevant contextual documents, including letters
*chronology of key facts and dates
*critical history and extracts from early reviews and...

With its sustained social criticism and complex construction, Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853) is considered by many critics to be Dickens's most remarkable novel. Janice Allan:

• introduces the contextual issues that most directly influenced Dickens's writing and reprints relevant source documents
• provides a comprehensive survey of the criticism of Bleak House from publication to the present, then introduces, reprints and annotates extracts from significant critical texts
• discusses key passages of the text, which are reprinted and fully...

Valerius Maximus was an indefatigable collector of historical anecdotes illustrating vice and virtue. Mueller focuses on what Valerius can tell us about Roman attitudes to religion, and argues that Roman religion could be deeply emotional.

Offers an introduction to Charles Dickens' work of the nineteenth century, David Copperfield. This title considers issues such as autobiography and Victorian social conditions. It traces responses to the novel from the first reviews to modern criticism. It provides insights into the novel's humour, its reflections of class and gender structures.

Emma is widely regarded as Jane Austen's most perfectly constructed novel. At once a comedy of misunderstanding, a razor-sharp analysis of the English class-system, a classic tale of moral growth, and a romance that combines sense with sensibility, it has appealed to readers of every generation and critics of every disposition.
This sourcebook introduces readers not only to Jane Austen's text, but also to the literary and historical contexts within which the novel was written, and to the many different critical readings that it has generated, from the time of its publication to...