Explore the vast range of titles available.

A retelling of the adventures and exploits of King Arthur and his knights at the court of Camelot and elsewhere in the land of the Britons.

A Connecticut Yankee is Mark Twain's most ambitious work, a tour de force with a science-fiction plot told in the racy slang of a Hartford workingman, sparkling with literary hijinks as well as social and political satire. Mark Twain characterized his novel as \"one vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the servilities of our poor human race.\" The Yankee, suddenly transported from his native nineteenth-century America to the sleepy sixth-century Britain of King Arthur and the Round Table, vows brashly to \"boss the whole country inside of three weeks.\" And so he does. Emerging as \"The Boss,\" he embarks on an ambitious plan to modernize Camelot—with unexpected results.

During and after the Hundred Years War, English rulers struggled with a host of dynastic difficulties, including problems of royal succession, volatile relations with their French cousins, and the consolidation of their colonial ambitions toward the areas of Wales and Scotland. Patricia Ingham brings these precarious historical positions to bear on readings of Arthurian literature in Sovereign Fantasies, a provocative work deeply engaged with postcolonial and gender theory.Ingham argues that late medieval English Arthurian romance has broad cultural ambitions, offering a fantasy of insular union as an \"imagined community\" of British sovereignty. The Arthurian legends offer a means to explore England's historical indebtedness to and intimacies with Celtic culture, allowing nobles to repudiate their dynastic ties to France and claim themselves heirs to an insular heritage. Yet these traditions also provided a means to critique English conquest, elaborating the problems of centralized sovereignty and the suffering produced by chivalric culture. Texts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Caxton's edition of Malory's Morte Darthur provide what she terms a \"sovereign fantasy\" for Britain. That is, Arthurian romance offers a cultural means to explore broad political contestations over British identity and heritage while also detailing the poignant complications and losses that belonging to such a community poses to particular regions and subjects. These contestations and complications emerge in exactly those aspects of the tales usually read as fantasy-for example, in the narratives of Arthur's losses, in the prophecies of his return, and in tales that dwell on death, exotic strangeness, uncanny magic, gender, and sexuality.Ingham's study suggests the nuances of the insular identity that is emphasized in this body of literature. Sovereign Fantasies shows the significance, rather than the irrelevance, of medieval dynastic motifs to projects of national unification, arguing that medieval studies can contribute to our understanding of national formations in part by marking the losses produced by union.

A modern take on \"King Lear.\" It's 1288, and the king's fool, Pocket, and his dimwit apprentice, Drool, set out to clean up the mess Lear has made of his kingdom.

Virginia Woolf's debut novel 'The Voyage Out' has been enjoyed around the world for 95 years. Now you can read this classic story, set on a ship bound for South America and following Rachel Vinrace, who boards the ship to escape her oppressive life in London and seek a voyage of personal discovery, which somewhat mirrors Woolf's own experience as she joined the Bloomsbury Group.

A retelling of the Arthurian legend.

01 02 Postcolonial Fiction and Disability explores the politics and aesthetics of disability in postcolonial literature. The first book to make sustained connections between postcolonial writing and disability studies, it focuses on the figure of the exceptional child in well-known novels by Grace, Dangarembga, Sidhwa, Rushdie, and Okri. While the fictional lives of disabled child characters are frequently intertwined with postcolonial histories, providing potent metaphors for national 'damage' and vulnerability, Barker argues that postcolonial writers are equally concerned with the complexity of disability as lived experience. The study focuses on constructions of normalcy, the politics of medicine and healthcare, and questions of citizenship and belonging in order to demonstrate how progressive health and disability politics often emerge organically from writers' postcolonial concerns. In reframing disability as a mode of exceptionality, the book assesses the cultural and political insights that derive from portrayals of disability, showing how postcolonial writing can contribute conceptually towards building more inclusive futures for disabled people worldwide. 08 02 'Clare Barker's Exceptional Children is a very timely and distinctive book, which makes a strong ethical argument for a critical negotiation of postcolonial studies and disability studies through some illuminating readings of the figure of the child in postcolonial fiction.' - Stephen Morton, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Southampton. 02 02 This book is the first study of disability in postcolonial fiction. Focusing on canonical novels, it explores the metaphorical functions and material presence of disabled child characters. Barker argues that progressive disability politics emerge from postcolonial concerns, and establishes dialogues between postcolonialism and disability studies. 19 02 First book to focus on postcolonial literature and representations of disability - surprisingly common feature of this kind of literature Brings together critical debates in the fields of postcolonial studies and disability studies Wide-ranging geographical focus of the book – includes discussion of writers from New Zealand, Pakistan, India, Zimbabwe and Nigeria Discusses canonical figures in postcolonial fiction (eg, Rushdie, Okri) 04 02 Acknowledgements Introduction 'Decrepit, Deranged, Deformed': Indigeneity and Cultural Health in Potiki Hunger, Normalcy, and Postcolonial Disorder in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not Cracking India and Partition: Dismembering the National Body The Nation as Freak Show: Monstrosity and Biopolitics in Midnight's Children 'Redreaming the World': Ontological Difference and Abiku Perception in The Famished Road Conclusion: Growing Up Bibliography Index 13 02 CLARE BARKER Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, UK. 31 02 This book explores the representation of disabled children in postcolonial fiction, establishing interdisciplinary engagements between postcolonial studies and disability studies

This book investigates the development of crime fiction in the 1880s and 1890s, challenging studies of late-Victorian crime fiction which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures and have offered an over-simplified analytical framework, thereby overlooking the generic, moral, and formal complexities of the nascent genre.

Great Britain can be accused of many things; a proliferation of queuing, a fondness of the demon drink; but it's not without more than its fair share of important historical and modern people. Great Britons: A Very Peculiar History looks at a myriad brillliant Britons and their influence on the world. The book features a short potted history of each person, detailing their acheivements, personalities and lifestyles in a quirky and memorable way. From kings and queens, pirates and politicians, actors and directors to sportsmen, explorers, scientists and inventors, Great Britons: A Very Peculiar History celebrates the men and women who have shaped Great Britain and made it what it is today.