Wordsworth Editions (49)

Nineteen Eighty Four

ISBN: 9781840228021

Author: George Orwell    Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

The Thought Police, doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother - '1984' itself: these terms and concepts are central to our thinking about freedom and its suppression. ...


The Thought Police, doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother - '1984' itself: these terms and concepts are central to our thinking about freedom and its suppression. Yet they were newly created by George Orwell in 1949 as he conjured his dystopian vision of a totalitarian world. The principal characters are ordinary human beings like ourselves: Winston Smith and Julia, whose love is also an act of rebellion against the Party. Opposing them are the massed powers of the state. No-one is free from surveillance; the 'truth' is constantly altered; and Big Brother controls all. Even the simple act of keeping a diary is punishable by death. In Winston's battle to keep his freedom of thought, his powerful adversary O'Brien uses fear and pain to enter his very thought processes. Does 2+2=4? Or is it 5? We find out in Room 101. Nineteen Eighty-Four was Orwell's last novel; but the world he created is always with us, as we find within it a mirror for our own times and a warning for the future.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 385


Dimensions: 125 x 198 x 20 mm


Publication Date: 01-08-2021


$9.99
Animal Farm

ISBN: 9781840228038

Author: George Orwell    Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

To George Orwell, Joseph Stalin was always a "disgusting murderer". But, when the Soviet Union became Britain's ally against Nazi Germany, this became an uncomf...


To George Orwell, Joseph Stalin was always a "disgusting murderer". But, when the Soviet Union became Britain's ally against Nazi Germany, this became an uncomfortable truth that few wanted to hear. Orwell felt an urgent need to forcefully remind people of Stalin's brutality. An essay would never reach a wide audience: a novel would take too long to write. He hit on the inspired idea of combining the moralism of the 'beast fable' with the satire of Gulliver's Travels. A group of farmyard animals overthrow their human masters. Their revolution is inspired by ideals of liberty and equality, but when Napoleon the pig takes command, he creates a new tyranny worse than the old. Published in 1945, this little book became a seminal text in the emerging 'cold war' (a phrase Orwell coined). Today, Animal Farm remains a powerful fable about the nature of tyranny which applies for all ages.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 216


Dimensions: 127 x 197 x 15 mm


Publication Date: 01-01-1945


$9.99
The Time Machine & Other Works

ISBN: 9781840227383

Author: H G Wells    Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

Contains: The Time Machine, When the Sleeper Awakes and The Chronic Argonauts. With an Introduction and Notes by Laurence Davies, Honorary Senior Research Fello...


Contains: The Time Machine, When the Sleeper Awakes and The Chronic Argonauts. With an Introduction and Notes by Laurence Davies, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow In these 'scientific romances' H. G. Wells sees the present reflected in the future and the future in the present. His aim is to provoke rather than predict. The Sleeper falls into a trance, waking up two centuries later as the richest man in a world of new technologies, power-greedy leaders, sensual elites, and brutalised industrial slaves. Arriving in the year 802,701, the Time-Traveller finds that humanity has evolved into two drastically different species; going farther still, he witnesses the ultimate fate of the solar system. The Chronic Argonauts, the original version of The Time Machine, pits a scientist with daring views of time and space against superstitious villagers. In all three works Wells laces vivid adventure stories with the latest ideas in biology and physics.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 352


Publication Date: 01-01-2017


Tag: Classics
$9.99
The Crystal Egg & Other Stories

ISBN: 9781840227390

Author: H G Wells    Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

This volume contains a generous selection of the tales of H. G. Wells, some of them famous, some forgotten. They demonstrate his immense imaginative energy, his...


This volume contains a generous selection of the tales of H. G. Wells, some of them famous, some forgotten. They demonstrate his immense imaginative energy, his originality, his prophetic genius, and his mastery of a range embracing Gothic horror, social satire, lyrical reverie and Utopian fantasy. Here Wells predicts the use of the tank, the aeroplane, the parachute and the bathysphere; he depicts the arrival of monsters from the deep, and envisages the destruction of life on our planet. Nevertheless, in social comedy, Wells anticipates E. M. Forster. We also see why Wells proved to be a provocation and inspiration not only to numerous science-fiction writers but also to such eminent authors as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and William Golding. Entertaining, disturbing, astonishing and thought-provoking, these tales constitute a Wellsian cornucopia. Enjoy!


Bind: paperback


Pages: 480


Publication Date: 01-01-2017


Tag: Classics
$9.99
The Island of Doctor Moreau & Other Works

ISBN: 9781840227406

Author: H G Wells    Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

'Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of ...


'Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own!' declares Doctor Moreau to hapless narrator Edward Prendick. Moreau's highly controversial methods and ambitions conflict with the religious, moral and scientific norms of his day and Wells later called The Island of Doctor Moreau 'a youthful exercise in blasphemy'. Today his vivid depictions of the Beast People still strike modern readers with an uncanny glimpse of the animal in the human, while the behaviour of humans leave us wondering who is the most monstrous after all. This volume unites four of Wells' liveliest and most engaging tales of the strange evolution and behaviour of animals - including human beings. The Island of Doctor Moreau is followed by three fantastic yet chillingly plausible short stories of human-animal encounters. The Empire of the Ants is a darkly humorous account of intelligent Amazonian ants threatening to displace humans as ‘the lords of the future and masters of the earth’. In The Sea Raiders, the south coast of England is terrorized by an unwelcome visit from deep-sea predator Haploteuthis ferox, while Æpyornis Island provides a marooned egg collector with an unusual companion.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 192


Publication Date: 01-01-2017


Tag: Classics
$9.99
The Invisible Man & The Food of the Gods

ISBN: 9781840227413

Author: H G Wells    Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

At the end of the nineteenth century a stranger arrives in the Sussex countryside and mayhem ensues; in the sleepy county of Kent a miracle food brings biologic...


At the end of the nineteenth century a stranger arrives in the Sussex countryside and mayhem ensues; in the sleepy county of Kent a miracle food brings biological chaos that engulfs and threatens the entire planet. H. G. Wells's fertile and mercurial imagination never brought us more bizarre and unsettling stories than those revealed in The Invisible Man (1897) and The Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth (1904). These are stories of extraordinary physical transformations and are at once extremely funny and richly imaginative. At the same time, Wells poses some very probing questions about the ethical dimensions to science and the human capacity for both pity and cruelty. Brought together for the first time in this new Wordsworth edition, The Invisible Man and The Food of the Gods are two of Wells's most entertaining and thought-provoking works.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 352


Publication Date: 01-01-2017


Tag: Classics
$9.99
The War of the Worlds & The War in the Air

ISBN: 9781840227420

Author: H G Wells    Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

In these two compelling novels H.G. Wells imagines terrifying futures in which civilisation itself is threatened. The narrator of The War of the Worlds is quick...


In these two compelling novels H.G. Wells imagines terrifying futures in which civilisation itself is threatened. The narrator of The War of the Worlds is quick to discover that what appeared to be a falling star was, in fact, a metallic cylinder landing from Mars. Six million people begin to flee London in panic as tentacled invaders emerge and overpower the city. With their heat-ray, killing machines, black gas, and a taste for fresh human blood, is there anything that can be done to stop the Martians? In The War in the Air, naive but resourceful Bert Smallways is thrilled by speed and fascinated by the new flying machines. His curiosity sweeps him away by accident into a German plan to conquer America, beginning with the destruction of New York. The ease of movement in aerial warfare means that nothing and nobody is safe as Total War erupts, civilisation crumbles, and Bert's hopes of getting back to London to marry his love seem impossibly distant.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 432


Publication Date: 01-01-2017


Tag: Classics
$9.99
The Wordsworth Crossword Companion

ISBN: 9781840223057

Author: Stephen Curtis    Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

Pages: 288


Tag: Reference
$15.99
The Confessions

ISBN: 9781853264658

Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau    Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

When it was first published in 1781, The Confessions scandalised Europe with its emotional honesty and frank treatment of the author's sexual and intellectual d...


When it was first published in 1781, The Confessions scandalised Europe with its emotional honesty and frank treatment of the author's sexual and intellectual development. Since then, it has had a more profound impact on European thought. Rousseau left posterity a model of the reflective life - the solitary, uncompromising individual, the enemy of servitude and habit and the selfish egoist who dedicates his life to a particular ideal. The Confessions recreates the world in which he progressed from incompetent engraver to grand success; his enthusiasm for experience, his love of nature, and his uncompromising character make him an ideal guide to eighteenth-century Europe, and he was the author of some of the most profound work ever written on the relation between individual and the state.


Pages: 672


Dimensions: 129 x 198 x 38 mm


Publication Date: 06-05-1996


Tag: Classics
$19.99
Sense and Sensibility

ISBN: 9781853260162

Author: Jane Austen    Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

Pages: 272


Dimensions: 126 x 198 x 15 mm


Publication Date: 01-05-1992


$9.99
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