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In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. “Nonsense,” said the sensible Bernard Suits: “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Through the jocular voice of Aesop's Grasshopper, a “shiftless but thoughtful practitioner of applied entomology,” Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a central part of the ideal of human existence, and so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia.

This new edition of The Grasshopper includes illustrations from Frank Newfeld created for the book’s original publication, as well as an introduction by Thomas Hurka and a new appendix on the meaning of ‘play.’

R.M. Liuzza’s acclaimed translation of the classic story of Beowulf, hero and dragon-slayer, appears here in an updated and expanded edition.

Adeline, the protagonist of Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, became a model for later Gothic heroines. Passionate, imaginative, and sensitive, in the course of the novel she travels rapidly through the forests and Gothic ruins of France, pursued by the villain de Montfort and perpetually threatened by what appear to be supernatural events. The publication of The Romance of the Forest in 1791 had a significant impact on Radcliffe’s career and on the rise of what would be known as the Gothic novel. The novel was widely praised upon publication and became a measure of quality against which all her future novels were gauged. Along with critical praise, The Romance of the Forest found an enthusiastic general audience and opened the new genre of Gothic Romance to a wider range of readers.

The extensive historical appendices provide material on the novel’s contemporary reception, the Gothic novel, sensibility and sentiment, and the aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque.

While students today have access to more sources of information than ever before, they are not necessarily equipped to make informed judgments about those sources. Teaching students to evaluate sources has become even more challenging in the last year, as issues regarding fake news and "alternative facts" have become a heated matter in conversations taking place in the public sphere. The book will present students with a set of tools that they can use to evaluate any source that they encounter. In addition to learning how to use sources in their writing, students who read Who's Your Source? will become more savvy consumers of the sources they encounter in their daily lives.

This new anthology of early modern philosophy enriches the possibilities for teaching this period by highlighting not only metaphysics and epistemology, but also new themes such as virtue, equality and difference, education, the passions, and love. It contains the works of forty-three philosophers, including traditionally taught figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, as well as less familiar writers such as Lord Shaftesbury, Anton Amo, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, and Denis Diderot. It also highlights the contributions of women philosophers, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Gabrielle Suchon, Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, and Emilie Du Châtelet.

A new edition of Florence Marryat’s groundbreaking novel about a biracial woman vampire.

To what degree can anarchism be an effective organized movement? Is it realistic to think of anarchist ideas ever forming the basis for social life itself? These questions are widely being asked again today in response to the forces of economic globalization. The framework for such discussions was perhaps given its most memorable shape, however, in George Woodcock's classic study of anarchism—now widely recognized as the most significant twentieth-century overview of the subject. 

Woodcock surveys all of the major figures that shaped anarchist thought, from Godwin and Proudhon to Bakunin, Goldman, and Kropotkin, and looks as well at the long-term prospects for anarchism and anarchist thought. In Woodcock's view "pure" anarchism—characterized by "the loose and flexible affinity group which needs no formal organization"—was incompatible with mass movements that require stable organizations, that are forced to make compromises in the face of changing circumstances, and that need to maintain the allegiance of a wide range of supporters. Yet Woodcock continued to cherish anarchist ideals; as he said in a 1990 interview, "I think anarchism and its teachings of decentralization, of the coordination of rural and industrial societies, and of mutual aid as the foundation of any viable society, have lessons that in the present are especially applicable to industrial societies."

This classic work of intellectual history and political theory (first published in the 1960s, revised in 1986) is now available exclusively from UTP Higher Education.

Leonid Andreyev’s The Red Laugh is an experimental depiction of war and its psychological effects, both on those who participate in the fighting and on those who hear of its atrocities from afar. Translated into English for the first time since 1905, it is here paired with a fresh translation of Andreyev’s earlier story “The Abyss,” which caused scandal upon its first publication. This edition provides an illuminating introduction by translator Kirsten Lodge as well as a range of background materials that help set the novel in its historical, literary, and artistic contexts.

A classic of science fiction and a dark meditation on Darwinian thought in the late Victorian period, The Island of Doctor Moreau explores the possibility of civilization as a constraint imposed on savage human nature. The protagonist, Edward Prendick, finds himself stranded on an island with the notorious Doctor Moreau, whose experiments on the island’s humans and animals result in unspeakable horrors.

The critical introduction to this Broadview Edition gives particular emphasis to Wells’s hostility towards religion as well as his thorough knowledge of the Darwinian thought of his time. Appendices provide passages from Darwin and Huxley related to Wells’s early writing; in addition, excerpts from other writers illustrate late-nineteenth-century anxieties about social degeneration.

To borrow a phrase used by one of the characters in the novel, Dracula is “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance.” In her introduction to this edition Glennis Byron first discusses the famous novel as an expression not of universal fears and desires, but of specifically late nineteenth-century concerns. And she discusses too the ways in which to the modern reader it is not Transylvania but London that is the location of the monstrosity in Dracula. The many appendices include contemporary reviews; source materials drawn on by Stoker; documents expressing contemporary views on trances, sleepwalking and hypnotism; and other relevant writing by Stoker, including “the censorship of Fiction,” in which he expresses his belief in the need to defend the social and moral purity of the nation.

R.M. Liuzza’s translation of Beowulf, first published by Broadview in 1999, has been widely praised for its accuracy and beauty. The translation is accompanied in this edition by genealogical charts, historical summaries, and a glossary of proper names. Historical appendices include related legends, stories, and religious writings from both Christian and Anglo-Saxon traditions. These texts help readers to see Beowulf as an exploration of the politics of kingship and the psychology of heroism, and as an early English meditation on the bridges and chasms between the pagan past and the Christian present.

Appendices also include a generous sample of other modern translations of Beowulf, shedding light on the process of translating the poem. This new edition features an updated introduction and an expanded section of material on Christianity and paganism.

“This is the best, the most thoughtful advanced school edition of Frankenstein ever done.” — Jerome McGann, University of Virginia

The Magic of Unknowing is a unique philosophical and literary work. Cast in the dialogue form, it unfolds in the mood of soliloquy. Mervyn Sprung has created an imaginative meeting of the minds of great western philosophers: Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Pyrrho. All are brothers, the more skeptical sons of Aristotle. Later they hear as well from Chang, a Taoist, and Nagaraj, a Buddhist, both lately adopted into the family.

The dialogue dramatises the erosion in modern times of Aristotelian rationality under the pressures of its own logic. The two eastern thinkers throw the weight of their own skepticism into the discussion at the critical point.

In the end the brothers realize that they have moved away from Western philosophy’s faith in the singular power of reason to establish truth and sense in the human world. They discover the magic of unknowing that lies in the reciprocal penetration of knowledge and behavior, each receiving its sense from the other. They discover that philosophies are not the issue of reasoning alone but are themselves already inseparably thought and action. And they realise that this entails an unheard-of future for philosophy.

“This is the best translation of Sir Gawain ” — Gordon Teskey, Cornell University

In 1750 at the age of twenty-seven Sarah Scott published her first novel, a conventional romance. A year later she left her husband after only a few months of marriage and devoted herself thereafter to writing and to promoting such causes as the creation of secular and separatist female communities. This revolutionary concept was given flesh in Millenium Hall, first published in 1762 and generally thought to be the finest of her six novels.

The text may be seen as the manifesto of the ‘bluestocking’ movement—the protean feminism that arose under eighteenth-century gentry capitalism (originating in 1750, largely under the impetus of Scott’s sister Elizabeth Montagu), and that rejected a world which early feminists saw symbolized in the black silk stockings demanded by formal society. It is a comment on Western society as well as on the strengths of Scott’s novel that the message of Millenium Hall continues to resonate strongly more than two centuries later.