Author: Jane Austen File Type: mobi Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classicsseries, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics ull All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works. lulFrom its sharply satiric opening sentence, Mansfield Park dealas with money and marriage, and how strongly they affect each other. Shy, fragile Fanny Price is the consummate poor relation. Sent to live with her wealthy uncle Thomas, she clashes with his spoiled, selfish daughters and falls in love with his son. Their lives are further complicated by the arrival of a pair of witty, sophisticated Londoners, whose flair for flirtation collides with the quiet, conservative country ways of Mansfield Park. Written several years after the early manuscripts that eventually became Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park retains Austens familiar compassion and humor but offers a far more complex exploration of moral choices and their emotional consequences. hrAmanda Claybaugh is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She also wrote the Introduction and Notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Uncle Toms Cabin. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. From Amanda Claybaughs Introduction to Mansfield ParkMary Crawford is, or so it seems, the very model of a Jane Austen heroine. Spirited, warm-hearted, and, above all else, witty, she displays all the familiar Austen virtues, and she stands in need of the familiar Austen lessons as well. Like Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice (1813), she banters archly with the man she is falling in love with, and, like Elizabeth, she must learn to set aside her preconceptions in order to recognize that love. Like Emma Woodhouse, the heroine of Emma (1816), she speaks more brilliantly and speculates more dazzlingly than anyone around her, and, like Emma, she must learn to rein in the wit that tempts her at times to impropriety. But Mary Crawford is not the heroine of Mansfield Park (1814)Fanny Price is, and therein lies the novels great surprise. For Fanny differs not merely from Mary, but also from our most basic expectations of what a novels protagonist should do and be. In Fanny, we have a heroine who seldom moves and seldom speaks, and never errs or alters. I must move, Mary announces, resting fatigues me. Before her arrival at Mansfield, she had made a glamorous circuit of winters in London and summers at the country houses of friends, with stops at fashionable watering places in between, and at Mansfield she is no less mobile. A vigorous walker, she soon takes up riding, cantering as soon as she mounts. Fanny, by contrast, has hardly left the grounds of Mansfield since her arrival eight years before, and she is further immobilized by her weakness and timidity. A half-mile walk is beyond her, a ball, she fears, will exhaust her, and she is prostrated by headache after picking roses. She must be lifted onto the horse she was long too terrified to approach, and her exercise consists of being led by a groom. Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat, says Mary to her listeners, who have not, in fact, caught the joke at all. So dazzling a talker is Mary that she must serve as her own best audience, amusing herself with witticisms the others cannot hear. With a keener eye and a sharper tongue than those around her, Mary sets her words dancing alongside the inanities, vulgarities, and hypocrisies that make up the other characters speech. Fanny, by contrast, barely speaks at all, and when she does, it is in the silencing language of moral certainty. Very indecorous, Edmund says of Marys far more captivating discourse, and Fanny is quick to agree and contribute a judgment of her own and very ungrateful. There is little that can be said after that. I will stake my last like a woman of spirit, Mary proclaims in the midst of a card game that Fanny had been reluctant to play at all. Mary wins the hand, only to find that it has cost her more than it was worth, and, in doing so, she reminds us that to act is necessarily to risk being wrong. Fanny, by contrast, is always right. Fanny is the only one who has judged rightly throughoutthis is Edmund Bertram speaking to Sir Thomas in the aftermath of the theatricals, but it could just as properly be the narrator at the novels end. The language of Fannys right judgment suggests, however, that her moral certainty is a function of her passivity No, indeed, I cannot act, she had insisted, and the double meaning of acting suggests that Fanny knows not to act in a theatrical sense because she never really acts at all. It is in the contrast between Fanny and Mary that we can most clearly see that Mansfield Park is, in the words of the critic Tony Tanner, a novel about rest and restlessness, stability and change-the moving and the immovable (_Jane Austen_, p. 145 see For Further Reading). Mansfield Park is hardly the only Austen novel to take as its subject matter a pair of opposed terms, but typically these terms stand in a dynamic relation to one another, each altering the other until a proper synthesis or balance is achieved. In Sense and Sensibility (1811), for instance, the rational Elinor Dashwood and her romantic sister Marianne must each learn from the other to moderate her mode of feeling similarly, Mr. Darcy must modify his pride and Elizabeth, her prejudice before marriage can unite them. Other of Austens novels draw careful distinctions within a single term, as when Persuasion (1818) establishes a continuum from the most laudable to the most lamentable instances of conforming to the wishes of others. Mansfield Park stands alone in this regard, for it unequivocally endorses one set of terms and unequivocally condemns the other. Rest has, in this novel, nothing to learn from restlessness, and restlessness can in no way be redeemed. Fannys arrival at her wealthy relatives estate creates a conflict of class and virtue.

Author: Dante Alighieri File Type: epub The New Life is the masterpiece of Dantes youth, an account of his love for Beatrice, the girl who was to become his lifelong muse, and of her tragic early death. An allegory of the souls crisis and growth, combining prose and poetry, narrative and meditation, dreams and songs and prayers, The New Life is a work of crystalline beauty and fascinating complexity that has long taken its place as one of the supreme revelations in the literature of love. The New Life is published here in the beautiful translation by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an inspired poetic re-creation comparable to Edward Fitzgeralds Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a classic in its own right. **Review Rossetti made a remarkable translation of the Vita Nuova, in some places improving (or at least enriching) the original. He was indubitably the man sent, or chosen, for that particular job. Ezra Pound [Rossettis translation is] the fruit of countless hours of brooding over Italian painting, Italian images, Italian sounds and thoughts. John Wain About the Author Dante Alighieri (12651321) was born into a noble family in Florence. He fought as a cavalryman, served in a variety of civic and diplomatic positions, and in 1300 attained a preeminent place in the administration of his native city. Florence was at the time caught in a bitter struggle between the Guelphs and the Ghibellinesas well as between contending factions within those political partiesand in 1301, having been sent on an embassy to the Pope in Rome, Dante learned that his enemies had come to power. He was never to see Florence again, and was later banished from the city and sentenced to death. After years of a wandering and uncertain life, Dante finally settled in Ravenna in 1318. Celebrated as a poet from his youth, when he was among those whose writings in Italian were applauded for their sweet new style, Dante was also an influential literary and political theorist. His most famous works are The New Life (circa 1293) De vulgari eloquentia (circa 13047), a defense of the use of the vernacular in literature and his epic vision of the afterlife, The Divine Comedy, which he began in 1307 and finished shortly before his death. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (182882), the son of an exiled Italian scholar and revolutionary, studied painting at the Royal Academy of Arts and was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Though he is best known as a painter, Rossetti was also a poet, and his poems, along with his translations of Dante and Francois Villon, made a lasting impression on such writers as Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and Ezra Pound. Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has published ten collections of poetry and has taught at universities in the United States and Europe. He has worked extensively with contemporary dance for twenty-five years and has collaborated with numerous visual artists and composers. His most recent collections are At Passages (1995), The Lion Bridge Selected Poems 19721995 (1998), The Promises of Glass (2000), and Codes Appearing Poems 19791988 (2001).