Silas is the friendless miserly weaver who lives by himself in a small cottage near the village of Raveloe in the heart of the English countryside. Nobody in the village knows anything about his strange past. The very sight of him terrifies the local children. His life and those of his neighbours become entwined through a series of extraordinary events in which a small child plays a very central part. Silas Marner tells a story that has long been the favourite among George Eliots novels. A great trasure of beauty and humanity ... were the words with which Henry James described the work.

Since the appearance of Lotman's Poetics of the Artistic Text (1970) and Universe of the Mind (1990), and Eco's Introduction to Semiotics (1972), the investigation of the working of signs in language, the arts and the sciences has witnessed an ever-increasing impact on our understanding of human culture. In this book an attempt is made at developing a linguistic model for the semiotics of culture, and to apply this to the analysis of a number of Russian and Polish dramatic texts, mostly from the nineteenth-century. In the first five chapters such well known plays as Ostrovskij's The Thunderstorm, Turgenev's A Month in the Country and Gogol's The Inspector-General are discussed, alternatively with Stowacki's Fantazy and some of Fredro's comedies. Special chapters are devoted to the performance of drama, and to some urgent issues concerning the structure of semiotic space. The last and most lengthy chapter presents an outline of so-called text linguistics, here conceived as a variety of case grammar, duely revised for application to the analysis of drama and its non-verbal context. The book addresses itself to readers familiar with Slavic languages and interested in the relation between language and literary themes, and the place of drama in culture

This is the famous story of a young boy's voyage down the great Mississippi River. A story of adventure, of rich imagination and the strong desire for freedom. Huck meets Jim, a runaway slave, and they begin their exciting river voyage. Along the way the two boys meet all kinds of people...

This is Dickens' most famous story about the orphaned boy, Oliver Twist, who grows up in a workhouse unloved and abused. He runs away to London where he finds his first taste of happiness living with thieves. But will Oliver ever find someone who really takes care of him?

When he wrote THE JUNGLE BOOKS in 1894, Kipling probably did not know that he was creating one of the most popular characters in fiction. The stories of Mowgli, the man-cub and his adventures with Bagheera the Panther, Baloo the Bear and Shere Khan the Tiger have captured the imagination of generations ever since. This volume contains a selection of the Mowgli stories together with the animal stories Rikki-tikki-tavi and The Undertaker. Kiplings stories combine adventure, humour and romance and reveal the authors political and philosophical concerns beneath his simple writing style.

The story of a crabby old miser who raises an orphan with honest-to-goodness dimples and "auburn hair" with "little ringlets", George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) starts off by laying on the tragedy. Young Silas is betrayed, exiled, isolated, and then robbed. A baby is born to an opium-addled mom and a deadbeat dad and then abandoned at the side of the road. But by the last page, everyone's living happily together in a quaint little cottage with a quaint little garden in a quaint little village full of quaint local characters.