Jane Austen began writing in her early teens, and filled three notebooks with her fiction. Her earliest work reflects her interest in the novel as a genre; in brilliant short pieces she plays with plots, stock characters, diction, and style, developing a sense of form at a remarkably early age. The characters of these stories have a jaunty and never-failing devotion to themselves. They perpetually lie, cheat, steal - and occasionally commit murder. Throughout these short or unfinished pieces, Austen exhibits her sense of the preposterous in life and fiction with tough-mindedness and robust humour. Alice, the mock-heroine of Jack and Alice has `many rare and charming qualities, but Sobriety is not one of them'. In her later published fiction, Austen had learned to take demands for propriety seriously, reining in whatever might be thought boisterous or coarse. Here we see Jane Austen without her inhibitions. In addition to prose fiction and prayers, this collection also contains many of Jane Austen's poems, written to amuse or console friends, and rarely reprinted. The texts have been compared with the manuscripts and edited to give a number of new readings. The notes recreate the texture of daily life in Jane Austen's age, and demonstrate her knowledge of the fiction of her time. The introduction by Margaret Anne Doody sets the writings within the context of Jane Austen's life and literary career. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

vol. 3-4 include appendix: "The Political cabinet."

Humorous Wit is a new compilation of quotations in their most humoristic form. There are over 15,000 of these taken from various parts of the world, with over 1,200 of them translated into English for the first time. This book features 5,000 authors from every corner of the globe, covering a period starting before classical antiquity, when man first started to record his thoughts, to modern times, enriching the cultural heritage. This does not in any way mean that the caveman was less humorous, but the richness of the environment we live in today and the variety of subject matter contribute considerably to a refined sense of humour. Moreover, considering that chimps and other primates also possess the ability to laugh, humour may have been around longer than the human race : )

This book explores the evolution of male writers marked by peculiar traits of childlike immaturity. The ‘Boy-Man’ emerged from the nexus of Rousseau’s counter-Enlightenment cultural primitivism, Sensibility’s ‘Man of Feeling’, the Chattertonian poet maudit, and the Romantic idealisation of childhood. The Romantic era saw the proliferation of boy-men, who congregated around such metropolitan institutions as The London Magazine. These included John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Hood. In the period of the French Revolution, terms of childishness were used against such writers as Wordsworth, Keats, Hunt and Lamb as a tool of political satire. Yet boy-men writers conversely used their amphibian child-adult literary personae to critique the masculinist ideologies of their era. However, the growing cultural and political conservatism of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of a canon of serious literature, inculcated the relegation of the boy-men from the republic of letters.

Jane Austen's ironic reference to 'the trash with which the press now groans' is only one of innumerable Romantic complaints about fiction's newly overwhelming presence. This book draws on evidence from over one hundred Romantic novels to explore the changes in publishing, reviewing, reading, and writing that accompanied the unprecedented growth in novel publication during the Romantic period. With particular focus on the infamous Minerva Press, the most prolific fiction-producer of the age, Hannah Hudson puts its popular authors in dialogue with writers such as Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin. Using paratextual materials including reviews, advertisements, and authorial prefaces, this book establishes the ubiquity of Romantic anxieties about literary 'excess', showing how beliefs about fictional overproduction created new literary hierarchies. Ultimately, Hudson argues that this so-called excess was a driving force in fictional experimentation and the advertising and publication practices that shaped the genre's reception. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The swan maiden is a supernatural woman forced to marry, keep house, and bear children for a mortal man who holds the key to her imprisonment. When she manages to regain this key, she escapes to the otherworld, rarely to return. In this book, Barbara Fass Leavy studies the meaning of gender in the stories that cluster around the swan maiden. The author poses questions concerning how the female folk socialize other women in a man's world, how myths of feminine evil attach themselves to widely disseminated folktales, and how ominous meanings are obscured by the traditional happy endings of some fairy tales. By including the swan maiden in a group of folklore characters designated as animal brides, and comparing them to animal grooms, Leavy also offers an alternative to the traditional emphasis by folklorists and other scholars on animal groom narratives, and shows how the commentators' neglect of frog princesses in favor of frog princes, for example, is paralleled by the folklore themes in stories of shapeshifting women. Beautifully written, this book reveals the myriad ways in which the folktales become allegories of gender relations. Barbara Fass Leavy expertly combines literary, gender, and cultural studies to present the swan maiden as the prototypical other. The swan maiden tale has been interpreted as depicting exogamous marriages. Barbara Fass Leavy's argument is a more radical and inclusive variation of this speculation. She believes that, in the societies in which the tale and its variants were told, woman was the other - trapped by marriage in a world never quite her own. Leavy shows how the tale, though rarely explicitly recognized, is frequently replayed in modern literature and life.