Spellbound before his own portrait, Dorian Gray utters a fateful wish. In exchange for eternal youth he gives his soul, to be corrupted by the malign influence of his mentor, the aesthete and hedonist Lord Henry Wotton. The novel was met with moral outrage by contemporary critics who, dazzled perhaps by Wilde's brilliant style, may have confused the author with his creation, Lord Henry, to whom even Dorian protests, 'You cut life to pieces with your...

In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall, a country estate owned by the mysteriously remote Mr. Rochester. "One of the finest novels ever written, 'Jane Eyre' is also one of the most misunderstood masterpieces of world literature. Whereas most modern teaching of the text misreads or misinterprets Charlotte Brontë's devout and profoundly ingrained Christian faith and intentions,...

"The word 'romantic' has so many varied meanings that C.S. Lewis quipped it should be deleted from our vocabulary. Yet, from the perspective of English literature, 'romantic' is associated, first and foremost, with the poetry of Romanticism, the movement that accentuated the aesthetic value of emotion, human experience, and the majesty of nature. In this volume the finest works of the first generation of Romantic poets--Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge--are...