A Bantam classic

Eliot's touching novel of a miser and a little child combines the charm of a fairy tale with the humor and pathos of realistic fiction. The gentle linen weaver, Silas Marner, exiles himself to the town of Raveloe after being falsely accused of a heinous theft. There he begins to find redemption and spiritual rebirth through his unselfish love for an abandoned child he discovers in his isolated cottage.

The castle of Otranto / Horace Walpole The Old English Baron / Clara Reeve Mistrust or Blanche and Osbright / Matthew Gregory Lewis The heir of Mondolfo / Mary Shelley The white old maid / Nathaniel Hawthorn [The fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe Carmilla / Sheridan Le Fanu.

Parade of comic characters and hilarious anecdotes as the American humorist recalls his Ohio childhood.

Extravagant power of invention and remarkable comic vitality make Aristophanes one of the most brilliant of the ancient Greek playwrights. From the hilariously bawdy yet fundamentally serious play, "Lysistrata", to the creative fantasy of the "Birds", to his comic masterpiece, the "Frogs", Aristophanes displays the biting satire, exquisite lyricism and licentious frankness that continue to make audiences laugh at the immensity of their own follies. A poet who hated an age of decadence, armed conflict and departure from tradition, Aristophanes' comic genius influenced the political and social order of his own fifth-century Athens. His true claim upon our attention is as the most brilliant and artistic and thoughtful wit our world has known. [Back cover].

Appreciated by children as an adventure story and by adults as a devastating satire of society, "Gulliver's Travels" is a fascinating blend of travelogue, realism, symbolism, and fantastic voyage--all with a serious philosophical intent.

This essential one-volume collection brings together some of the most influential and significant works by African-American writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Included herein are such classics as Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) and excerpts from W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901), and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). Whether read as records of African-American history, autobiography, or literature, these invaluable texts stand as timeless monuments to the courage, intellect, and dignity of those for whom writing itself was an act of rebellion--and whose voices and experiences would have otherwise been silenced forever.Edited with an introduction by Anthony Appiah, who explains the distinctive American literary and cultural context of the time, this edition of Early African-American Classics remains the standard by which all similar collections will inevitably be compared.From the Paperback edition.