Bedford Cultural Editions Series

Particularly appropriate for courses that emphasize a new historicist or cultural studies approach, Bedford Cultural Editions reprint authoritative editions of literary works with an abundance of thematically arranged historical and cultural documents. The documents - relevant excerpts from such sources as diaries, letters, periodicals, conduct books, legal documents, and literary works that parallel the themes of the main text - are carefully selected to give students a rich sense of a work's historical and cultural contexts. Each volume also provides a full complement of useful pedagogical aids: a historical and critical introduction to the work, a chronology, an introduction to each thematic unit of documents, headnotes for the documents, text annotations, maps and illustrations, and an extensive bibliography.