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Anti-Portraits: Poetics of the Face in Modern English, Polish and Russian Literature (1835-1965) is a study of a-physiognomic descriptions of the face. It demonstrates that writers such as George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, Nicolay Gogol, Virginia Woolf and Witold Gombrowicz vigorously resisted the belief that facial features reflect character. While other studies tend to focus on descriptions which affirm physiognomy, this book examines portraits which question popular face-reading s...

First published in 1983, this books aims to guide Wordsworth students through his difficult masterpiece by reading it in continuous sequence and making its sense emerge. The special value of this commentary is that it explains the structure of The Prelude by encouraging study of the poem as a continuous whole rather than selectively looking at individual sections - an approach that has typified modern criticism of the work. This depends upon a close attention to the careful arrangement of the ve...

"At last, here is a book written by an Italian about the homeopathic but essential role that Italian artists, and among them, important writers, have played to introduce the digital transformation to Italians. Long before government or business, and least of all educators, took notice, artists, as was their wont for centuries, were the first to reveal the potential of the new technologies. Emanuela Patti not only pays them a long overdue tribute, but along the way revisits with care and engaging...

‘Richard Marsh’ (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) was a bestselling, versatile and prolific author of gothic, crime, adventure, romantic and comic fiction. This book, the first on Marsh, establishes his credentials as a significant agent within the fin de siècle gothic revival. Marsh’s work spans a range of gothic modes, including the canonical fin de siècle subgenres of urban and imperial gothic and gothic-inflected sensation and supernatural fiction, but also rarer hybrid genres such as th...

From the ghosts which reside in Midlands council houses in Every Day is Mother's Day to the resurrected historical dead of the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, the writings of Hilary Mantel are often haunted by supernatural figures. One of the first book-length studies of the writer's work, Reading Hilary Mantel explores the importance of ghosts in the full range of her fiction and non-fiction writing and their political, social and ethical resonances. Combining material f...

Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised. In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of...

Reading, writing and the influence of Harold Bloom takes the work of the world's best-known living literary critic and discovers what it is like to read 'with', 'against' and 'beyond' his ideas. The editors, Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears, introduce the collection by assessing the impact of Bloom's brand of agonistic criticism on literary critics and its ongoing relevance to a discipline attempting to redefine and settle on its collective goals. Firmly grounded in, though not confined to, Bloom'...

This title situates Carmilla within its Irish Cultural milieu and treats the text as self-standing rather than as a precursor to Dracula. Unlike other collections of Gothic literature, Costello-Sullivan's work focuses solely on Carmilla.

This book examines writing in the Gothic mode which subverts the dominant national narrative of the British home front. Instead of seeing wartime experience as a site of fellowship and emotional resilience, Elizabeth Bowen, Anna Kavan, Mervyn Peake, Roy Fuller and others depict shadowy figures on the margin of the nation.

This book demonstrates how representations of the Victorian suburb in mid- to late-nineteenth century British writing occasioned a literary sub-genre unique to this period, one that attempted to reassure readers that the suburb was a place where outsiders could be controlled and where middle-class values could be enforced. Whelan explores the dissonance created by the differences between the suburban ideal and suburban realities, recognizing the persistence of that ideal in the face of abundant...

Giants are a ubiquitous feature of medieval romance. As remnants of a British prehistory prior to the civilization established, according to the Historium regum Britannie, by Brutus and his Trojan followers, giants are permanently at odds with the chivalric culture of the romance world. Whether they are portrayed as brute savages or as tyrannical pagan lords, giants serve as a limit against which the chivalric hero can measure himself. In Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medie...

Cervantes's great novel Don Quixote is a diptych, the first part of which was published in 1605 and the second in 1615. Focusing almost entirely on the novel's second part, Henry W. Sullivan is the first critic to offer a systematic account of Don Quixote's passage from madness to sanity. Sullivan argues that Part II of the novel is a salvation epic, within which the Cave of Montesinos episode is the single most important pivot in the Knight's confrontation with his own emotional difficulties....

Introduces new readers and students to a celebrated and controversial Victorian novel-poem Michele Martinez guides readers through the poem's major themes and literary and socio-cultural contexts, introducing a range of interpretive frameworks. Long extracts from the poem are accompanied by helpful explanatory commentary. The text's composition history, major influences and modes of poetic expression are also discussed. The teaching and bibliographic chapters offer supplementary materials includ...

This timely interdisciplinary study traces the evolution of nativist cultural movements in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales as a response, and as a reaction, to the consolidation of the British nation state across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gothic Britain analyses texts as diverse as the Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1711) and Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams (1907) to consider the critiques of the Union that individual writers offered over two centuries. By examin...

The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley takes stock of developments in the study of a major Romantic poet and prose writer, and seeks to advance Shelley studies in new directions. It consists of forty-two chapters written by an international cast of established and emerging scholar-critics. This Handbook is divided into five thematic sections: Biography and Relationships; Prose; Poetry; Cultures, Traditions, Influences, and Afterlives. The first section reappraises Shelley's life and relatio...

In Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination, Farrell O'Gorman presents the first study of the recurrent role of Catholicism in a Gothic tradition that is essential to the literature of the United States. In this tradition, Catholicism is depicted as threatening to break down borders separating American citizens-or some representative American-from a larger world beyond. While earlier studies of Catholicism in the American literary imagination have tended to highlight t...

In this beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned book, Ayn Rand throws a new light on the nature of art and its purpose in human life. Once again Miss Rand eloquently demonstrates her refusal to let popular catchwords and conventional ideas stand between her and the truth as she has discovered it. The Romantic Manifesto takes its place beside The Fountainhead as one of the most important achievements of our time.