Florent Quenu returns to Paris after being unjustly imprisoned and finds the city utterly changed. The great new food market, Les Halles, has been built, and food dominates the political and social life of the capital.

Sterne travelled extensively in the 1760s, and drew on his experiences to write the narrative of Mr Yorick, the sentimental traveller. This volume demonstrates the rare early satire which marked the beginning of the major phase of Sterne's career.

In its towering central characters, vast geographical & historical sweep, 'Antony & Cleopatra' is perhaps the most ambitious of Shakespeare's designs. Yet the degree & nature of its success remain surprisingly contentious, & performances of the play have seldom matched the extravagant expectations of its admirers.

In Basil's secret and unconsummated marriage to the linen-draper's sexually precocious daughter, and the shocking betrayal, insanity, and death that follow, Collins reveals the bustling, commercial London of the 19th century wreaking its vengeance on a still powerful aristocratic world.

This is both the story of a love affair between the Scottish peer, Oswald, Lord Nelvil and a beautiful poetess, and a homage to the landscape, literature and art of Italy. The author weaves discreet French Revolutionary political allusion and allegory into her romance, whose publication saw her order of exile renewed by Napoleon.

Moliere's prose plays demonstrate both his versatility as a playwright and the reasons for his enduring popularity from the France of Louis XIV to the present.

Turgenev focuses on Bazarov, the nihilistic hero and the first in a long literary line of angry young men, whose life in turn illuminates the social, political and philosophical issues current in contemporary Russian society.

Including resource notes, this edition has the complete text, with glossary, of Ibsen's A Doll's House. Written in the 19th century, the play provides a classic view of the status of women in European society

During Shakespeare's lifetime 'Henry IV, Part I' was his most reprinted play, and it remains enormously popular with theatre- goers and readers. David Bevington's introduction discusses the play in both peformance and criticism from Shakespeare's time to our own, illustrating the variety of interpretations of which the text is capable.

These five stories are told by Dr Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, the forerunner of the modern psychiatrist, who is willing to consider ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions. Le Fanu drew on the Gothic tradition, Irish folklore and on contemporary social and political anxieties.