In his Discourses (1755), Rousseau argues that inequalities of rank, wealth, and power are the inevitable result of the civilizing process. If inequality is intolerable - and Rousseau shows with unpa ... 続きを読む

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was a writer of great versatility, and his career as a London dramatist spans the most productive, innovative, and exciting period of theatrical activity in the history of ... 続きを読む

First published in the turbulent decade following the French Revolution, Memoirs of Emma Courtney is based on Mary Hays' own passionate struggle with romance and Enlightenment philosophy. A feminist a ... 続きを読む

As the Pargiters, a middle-class English family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the 'present day' of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, ... 続きを読む

In Elective Affinities Goethe conducts an experiment with the lives of people who are living badly. Charlotte and Eduard, aristocracts with little to occupy them, invite Ottilie and the Captain into ... 続きを読む

The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) is a compelling novel of passion and daring, of prisons and heroic escape, of political chicanery and sublime personal courage. Set at the beginning of the nineteenth ... 続きを読む

Manu was seated, when the great seers came up to him: "Please, Lord, tell us the Laws of all the social classes, as well as of those born in between..."' The Law Code of Manu is the most authorita ... 続きを読む

Inspired by Voltaire's two-year stay in England (1726-8), this is one of the key works of the Enlightment. Exactly contemporary with Gulliver's Travels and The Beggar's Opera, Voltaire's controversia ... 続きを読む

You should know that men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, need not be subject to the law.' Thus spoke Pope Paul III on learning that Cellini had murdered a fellow artist, so great was h ... 続きを読む

Old Mortality (1816), which many consider the finest of Scott's Waverley novels, is a swift-moving historical romance that places an anachronistically liberal hero against the forces of fanaticism in ... 続きを読む