The Penguin English Library is an imprint of Penguin Books. The series was first created in 1963 [1] as a 'sister series' [2] 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 (for example, Juvenal's Sixteen Satires). The English Library was merged into the Classics stable in the mid 1980s, [1] and all titles hitherto published in the Library were reissued as Classics.
The imprint was resurrected in 2012 for a new series of titles. [2] [3] The present English Library no longer seeks to provide critical editions; the focus is now 'on the beauty and elegance of the book'. [3]
The Penguin English Library aimed to publish 'a comprehensive range of the literary masterpieces which have appeared in the English language since the 15th century'. [1] All texts in the Library were published with an introduction and explanatory notes written and compiled by an editor; some with a bibliography as well. [2] Editors were also required to provide 'authoritative texts', using their own judgement in printing one, or in some cases creating their own. [2] The series was recognisable chiefly by its distinctive orange spine. [1] [3]
Most, if not all, titles were reprinted as Penguin Classics following the merger of the two imprints in the mid 1980s. Some of these editions were superseded in the 1990s or later, [4] while some continue to be reprinted today as Classics. Additionally, the introductions to some titles survive in present-day Penguin Classics as appendices – for example, Tony Tanner's introduction to Mansfield Park.
The imprint was resurrected in name, though not so much in spirit, in 2012. Texts published in the series no longer include critical apparatus; they instead feature an essay by a notable literary figure, usually excerpted from prior work - for example, the essays of Harold Bloom, V. S. Pritchett and John Sutherland have been featured. [3] A portrait or photograph of the author remains printed on the inside of the front cover. [3] The focus is now on cover art, with each title designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. [3]
This is an incomplete list of the titles in the Penguin English Library:[ citation needed ]
All titles listed below are assumed to have lists of further reading appended and/or are no longer in print having been superseded by new editions, unless stated.
Author | Title | Essayist | Essay | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
Elizabeth von Arnim | Elizabeth and Her German Garden | |||
Jane Austen | Persuasion | Elizabeth Bowen | Unknown | |
Jane Austen | Pride and Prejudice | J. B. Priestley | Austen Portrays a Small World with Humour and Detachment | |
Charlotte Brontë | Jane Eyre | Elaine Showalter | Jane Eyre | The essay is from Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) |
Emily Brontë | Wuthering Heights | Virginia Woolf | Wuthering Heights | |
Lewis Carroll | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | Virginia Woolf | Lewis Carroll | |
G. K. Chesterton | The Man Who Was Thursday | Unknown | Unknown | |
Wilkie Collins | The Moonstone | T. S. Eliot | The Moonstone | |
Daniel Defoe | Robinson Crusoe | David Blewett | The Island and the World | The essay is taken from a chapter in Blewett's Defoe's Art of Fiction: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). |
George Eliot | Silas Marner | Correspondence between John Blackwood and George Eliot, and two contemporary reviews | ||
Henry Fielding | Tom Jones | R. P. C. Mutter | Tom Jones | The essay is a reprint of Mutter's introduction to the original Penguin English Library edition (see above). |
F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby | |||
Elizabeth Gaskell | North and South | V. S. Pritchett | The South Goes North | The essay is from Sir Victor's 1942 collection of essays, In My Good Books. |
Nathaniel Hawthorne | The Scarlet Letter | D. H. Lawrence | Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter | The essay is from Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature. |
James Joyce | Dubliners | |||
Katherine Mansfield | The Garden Party | |||
Baroness Orczy | The Scarlet Pimpernel | |||
George Orwell | Animal Farm | |||
Walter Scott | Ivanhoe | A. N. Wilson | Ivanhoe | |
Mary Shelley | Frankenstein | Paul Cantor | The Nightmare of Romantic Idealism | The text is that of the 1985 Penguin Classics edition, edited by Maurice Hindle, i. e. the 1832 text. The essay is taken from a chapter in Cantor's book, Creature and Creator: Myth-Making and English Romanticism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). |
Laurence Sterne | Tristram Shandy | V. S. Pritchett | Tristram Shandy | |
Bram Stoker | Dracula | John Sutherland | Why Does the Count Come to England? | The essay is taken from Sutherland's Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Great Puzzles in Nineteenth Century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). |
Mark Twain | The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Harold Bloom | Unknown | |
Evelyn Waugh | Brideshead Revisited | |||
Oscar Wilde | The Picture of Dorian Gray | Peter Ackroyd | - | The essay is a reprint of Ackroyd's introduction to the first Penguin Classics edition. |
The Anatomy of Melancholy is a book by Robert Burton, first published in 1621, but republished five more times over the next seventeen years with massive alterations and expansions.
A paperback book is one with a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. In contrast, hardback (hardcover) books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth, leather, paper, or plastic.
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 Limited 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.
The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical dictionary written by American journalist Ambrose Bierce, consisting of common words followed by humorous and satirical definitions. The lexicon was written over three decades as a series of installments for magazines and newspapers. Bierce's witty definitions were imitated and plagiarized for years before he gathered them into books, first as The Cynic's Word Book in 1906 and then in a more complete version as The Devil's Dictionary in 1911.
Everyman's Library is a series of reprints of classic literature, primarily from the Western canon. It begun in 1906. It is currently published in hardback by Random House. It was originally an imprint of J. M. Dent, who continue to publish Everyman Paperbacks.
Ladybird Books is a London-based publishing company, trading as a stand-alone imprint within the Penguin Group of companies. The Ladybird imprint publishes mass-market children's books.
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), alternatively known by the shorter title Lives of the Poets, is a work by Samuel Johnson comprising short biographies and critical appraisals of 52 poets, most of whom lived during the eighteenth century. These were arranged, approximately, by date of death.
This is a bibliography of works by Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).
The New American Library is an American publisher based in New York, founded in 1948. Its initial focus was affordable paperback reprints of classics and scholarly works as well as popular and pulp fiction, but it now publishes trade and hardcover titles. It is currently an imprint of Penguin Random House; it was announced in 2015 that the imprint would publish only nonfiction titles.
The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha is a newly edited edition of the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. This 2005 edition was printed as The Bible in 2006. The editor is David Norton, Reader in English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Norton is author of A History of the Bible as Literature (1993) revised and condensed as A History of the English Bible as Literature (2000). He wrote A Textual History of the King James Bible as a companion volume to the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible.
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 since 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 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.
Les Belles Lettres is a French publisher specialising in the publication of ancient texts such as the Collection Budé.
The Pevsner Architectural Guides are four series of guide books to the architecture of the British Isles. The Buildings of England series was begun in the 1940s by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, with its 46 original volumes published between 1951 and 1974. The fifteen volumes in The Buildings of Scotland series were completed between 1978 and 2016, and the ten in The Buildings of Wales series between 1979 and 2009. The volumes in all three series have been periodically revised by various authors. The revision of the England series will be completed in June 2024 with the re-issue of Staffordshire. The Buildings of Ireland series was begun in 1979 and remains incomplete, with six volumes published. A standalone volume covering the Isle of Man was published in 2023.
The Norrœna Society was an early 20th-century publishing house dedicated to Northern European culture. It published expensively produced reprints of classic 19th-century editions, mostly translations, of Old Norse literary and historical works, Northern European folklore, and medieval literature.
The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism, essays, novels, and non-fiction books written by the British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), either under his own name or, more usually, under his pen name George Orwell. Orwell was a prolific writer on topics related to contemporary English society and literary criticism, who has been declared "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture." His non-fiction cultural and political criticism constitutes the majority of his work, but Orwell also wrote in several genres of fictional literature.
A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or particularly noteworthy. What makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Classics?" and "What Is a Classic?" have been essayed by authors from different genres and eras. The ability of a classic book to be reinterpreted, to seemingly be renewed in the interests of generations of readers succeeding its creation, is a theme that is seen in the writings of literary critics including Michael Dirda, Ezra Pound, and Sainte-Beuve. These books can be published as a collection or presented as a list, such as Harold Bloom's list of books that constitute the Western canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas.
Critical Essays (1946) is a collection of wartime pieces by George Orwell. It covers a variety of topics in English literature, and also includes some pioneering studies of popular culture. It was acclaimed by critics, and Orwell himself thought it one of his most important books.
New Penguin Shakespeare is a series of the works of William Shakespeare published from 1967 to 1987 as an imprint of Penguin Books. Printed in paperback the editions were very popular in schools where they were used for teaching Shakespeare.