**Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year**The Penguin Classics Book is a reader's companion to the largest library of classic literature in the world.
A vital resource for scholars, students and actors, this book contains glosses and quotes for over 14,000 words that could be misunderstood by or are unknown to a modern audience.
This compilation, in the tradition of the Victorian miscellany, gathers together essential facts and fascinating insights into the plays and poems, the man behind them (insofar as this is known), and the context in which he worked.
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft is the acclaimed bestselling biography by Claire TomalinWinner of the Whitbread First Book PrizeWitty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day.
'Enjoyable, lively such a pleasure to read renders the drama of Shakespeare s contemporaries more than fringe entertainment Independent Shakespeare is one of the greatest of all English figures, considered a genius for all time.
How vocabularies once associated with outsiders became objects of fascination in eighteenth-century BritainWhile eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied-from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to grammar and elocution books of the period-less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon.
How the study of Shakespeare's legacy, specifically in film and television, can radically challenge what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as "e;faithful"e; or "e;unfaithful"e; to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing.
No other American novelist has written so fully about language-grammar, diction, the place of colloquialism and dialect in literary English, the relation between speech and writing-as William Dean Howells.