Oxford World's Classics is an imprint of Oxford University Press. First established in 1901 by Grant Richards and purchased by OUP in 1906, this imprint publishes primarily dramatic and classic literature for students and the general public. Its competitors include Penguin Classics, Everyman's Library, and the Modern Library. Most titles include critical apparatus – usually, an introduction, bibliography, chronology, and explanatory notes – as is the case with Penguin Classics. [1]
The World's Classics imprint was created by London publisher Grant Richards in 1901. [2] Richards had an "ambitious publishing programme", [2] and this ambition led to the liquidation of Grant Richards in 1905. Henry Frowde, manager of the Oxford University Press, purchased the series in October 1905.
The Oxford World's Classics were classed as "the most famous works of the English Language" [3] and many volumes contained introductions by distinguished authors, such as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, among others. [4] The books were marketed as a cheap and accessible series for the general public to read some of the greatest works of literature:
World's Classics were first published as 'pocket-sized hardbacks'. [4]
In response to competition from Penguin, the series was relaunched in paperback format in 1980, with twenty-four initial titles. [6]
The World's Classics series was renamed in 1998 as Oxford World's Classics. [7] The new series initially had a dark blue and off-white colour scheme, but this was changed to red and off-white after Penguin Books USA brought a lawsuit in 1998, which argued that the new covers were similar in design to theirs, constituting an infringement on their 'trade dress' rights. [6]
A decade later, a major redesign (retaining the basic red and white colour scheme) of all titles was introduced. [8]
Many existing titles are reprints of texts established by the earlier Oxford English Novels series, with revisions to the critical material. [6] [9] [10] Some of these titles have since been updated with new introductions and notes by different editors, while retaining the original base text. [10] For example, the Oxford World's Classics edition of Emma has been updated twice with new introductions by different editors since it was first published in the series in 1980, while retaining the base text established by James Kinsley. [11]
Oxford English Drama editions offer a selection of plays, selected from an author's œuvre or as an anthology of plays linked by topic or theme (e. g. Four Revenge Tragedies). Renaissance, Restoration and eighteenth-century plays have glossaries of archaic words appended, in addition to the usual array of critical material. The series' general editor is Michael Cordner of the University of York. Scholar Anne Barton praised the series as a 'splendid and imaginative project', adding that it 'should reshape the canon in a number of significant areas'.
Major Works are mini-anthologies of an author's most significant works and selected correspondence. For example, the Major Works edition of Alexander Pope includes the major poems like The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad , alongside prose essays like Peri Bathous , and an excerpt of his translation of Homer. Some editions include whole novels as well; the Major Works edition of Oscar Wilde anthologises many of his plays and prose alongside the whole of The Picture of Dorian Gray . [12] Most titles are often reprints (with revisions) of volumes from an earlier Oxford series, Oxford Authors, under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. [12]
Oxford World's Classics feature multiple works from antiquity in new translations. One notable series consists of Latin standards including The Golden Ass by Apuleius, and The Satyricon by Petronius translated and with introductions by P.G.Walsh. [13] Another is the Euripides series translated from the Greek by James Morwood and Robin Waterfield, including Medea, The Bacchae and 17 other plays by Euripides. The series comprises five volumes, each with an introduction by the classicist Edith Hall.
Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete. There are many fragments of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books by decree in 1586, it is the second oldest university press after Cambridge University Press.
The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books as a hobby during the interwar period.
The Masnavi, or Masnavi-ye-Ma'navi, also written Mathnawi, or Mathnavi, is an extensive poem written in Persian by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi, also known as Rumi. The Masnavi is one of the most influential works of Sufism, ascribed to be like a "Quran in Persian". It has been viewed by many commentators as the greatest mystical poem in world literature. The Masnavi is a series of six books of poetry that together amount to around 25,000 verses or 50,000 lines. It is a spiritual text that teaches Sufis how to reach their goal of being truly in love with God.
W. W. Norton & Company is an American publishing company based in New York City. Established in 1923, it has been owned wholly by its employees since the early 1960s. The company is known for its Norton Anthologies and its texts in the Norton Critical Editions series, both of which are frequently assigned in university literature courses.
Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Its success showed that large audiences existed for serious books. It also affected modern British popular culture significantly through its books concerning politics, the arts, and science.
Jonathan Culler is an American literary critic. He was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and literary criticism.
Jane West, was an English novelist who published as Prudentia Homespun and Mrs. West. She also wrote conduct literature, poetry and educational tracts.
Penguin Classics is an imprint of Penguin Books under which classic works of literature are published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean among other languages. Literary critics see books in this series as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-Western origin; indeed, the series for decades from its creation included only translations, until it eventually incorporated the Penguin English Library imprint in 1986. The first Penguin Classic was E. V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, published in 1946, and Rieu went on to become general editor of the series. Rieu sought out literary novelists such as Robert Graves and Dorothy Sayers as translators, believing they would avoid "the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders many existing translations repellent to modern taste".
Oxford Classical Texts (OCT), or Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, is a series of books published by Oxford University Press. It contains texts of ancient Greek and Latin literature, such as Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, in the original language with a critical apparatus. Works of science and mathematics, such as Euclid's Elements, are generally not represented. Since the books are meant primarily for serious students of the classics, the prefaces and notes have traditionally been in Latin, and no translations or explanatory notes are included. Several recent volumes, beginning with Lloyd-Jones and Wilson's 1990 edition of Sophocles, have broken with tradition and feature introductions written in English.
Robin Anthony Herschel Waterfield is a British classical scholar, translator, editor, and writer of children's fiction.
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Centre for Hellenic Studies at King's College, London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a Chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University, Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea, and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
Susan Sellers is a British author, translator, editor and novelist. She was the first woman to be made a Professor in the field of English literature as well as creative writing at the University of St Andrews, and is co-General Editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of the writings of Virginia Woolf.
James Henry Weldon Morwood was an English classicist and author. He taught at Harrow School, where he was Head of Classics, and at Oxford University, where he was a Fellow of Wadham College, and also Dean. He wrote almost thirty books, ranging from biography to translations and academic studies of Classical literature.
Alfred Chilton Pearson, FBA was an English classical scholar, noted for his work on Greek tragedy.
The Cresset Press was a publishing company in London, England, active as an independent press from 1927 for 40 years, and initially specializing in "expensively illustrated limited editions of classical works, like Milton's Paradise Lost" going on to produce well-designed trade editions of literary and political works. Among the leading illustrators commissioned by Cresset were Blair Hughes-Stanton and Gertrude Hermes — The Pilgrim's Progress (1928), The Apocrypha (1929), and D. H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1930). Cresset subsequently became part of the Barrie Group of publishers, and later an imprint of the Ebury Press within the Random House Group.
The Penguin English Library is an imprint of Penguin Books. The series was first created in 1963 as a 'sister series' to the Penguin Classics series, providing critical editions of English classics; at that point in time, the Classics label was reserved for works translated into English. The English Library was merged into the Classics stable in the mid 1980s, and all titles hitherto published in the Library were reissued as Classics.
Nicola Anne Lulham Bradbury D. Phil. is an English literary critic, lecturer, editor, and author, specializing in the 19th century novel.
Franklin Thomas Grant Richards was a British publisher and writer. After creating his own publishing firm at the age of just 24 years old, he launched The World's Classics series and published writers such as George Bernard Shaw, A. E. Housman, Samuel Butler and James Joyce. He made "a significant impact on the publishing business of the early twentieth century".
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