Wherever vampires existed in the imaginations of different peoples, they adapted themselves to the customs of the local culture. As a result, vampire lore is extremely diverse. So too, representations of the vampire in creative works have been marked by much originality. In "The Vampyre" (1819), John Polidori introduced Lord Ruthven and established the vampire craze of the 19th century that resulted in a flood of German vampire poetry, French vampire drama, and British vampire fiction. This tradition culminated in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (1897), which fixed the character of the Transylvanian nobleman as the archetypal vampire firmly in the public imagination. Numerous films drew from Stoker's novel to varying degrees, with each emphasizing different elements of his vampire character. And more recent writers have created works in which vampirism is used to explore contemporary social concerns.

The contributors to this volume discuss representations of the vampire in fiction, folklore, film, and popular culture. The first section includes chapters on Stoker and his works, with attention to such figures as Oscar Wilde and Edvard Munch. The second section explores the vampire in film and popular culture from Bela Lugosi to "Blacula." The volume then looks at such modern writers as Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro who have adapted the vampire legend to meet their artistic needs. A final section studies contemporary issues, such as vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS in ""Killing Zoe."

This interdisciplinary volume seeks to examine and explore the various issues surrounding image construction, identity making and representations of the North, as well as the interconnectedness between those issues. The aim is to elucidate the multiple aspects of the idea of the North, both as a mythological space and a discursive system created and shaped by cultures outside the North as well as from within. The objective of the research project "Iceland and Images of the North" is to elucidate several aspects of images of the North and to explore their functions in the present, focusing especially on Iceland. What effect have Iceland and its people had on images of the North, and how do those images influence the Icelanders and other nations? The project will be a cooperative, interdisciplinary undertaking by researchers in the humanities and social sciences.

Digital Humanities is rapidly evolving as a significant approach to/method of teaching, learning and research across the humanities. This is a first-stop book for people interested in getting to grips with digital humanities whether as a student or a professor. The book offers a practical guide to the area as well as offering reflection on the main objectives and processes, including: Accessible introductions of the basics of Digital Humanities through to more complex ideas A wide range of topics from feminist Digital Humanities, digital journal publishing, gaming, text encoding, project management and pedagogy Contextualised case studies Resources for starting Digital Humanities such as links, training materials and exercises Doing Digital Humanities looks at the practicalities of how digital research and creation can enhance both learning and research and offers an approachable way into this complex, yet essential topic.

A Companion to Virginia Woolf is a thorough examination of her life, work, and multiple contexts in 33 essays written by leading scholars in the field. * Contains insightful and provocative new scholarship and sketches out new directions for future research * Approaches Woolf s writing from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, including modernism, post-colonialism, queer theory, animal studies, digital humanities, and the law * Explores the multiple trajectories Woolf s work travels around the world, from the Bloomsbury Group, and the Hogarth Press to India and Latin America * Situates Woolf studies at the vanguard of contemporary literature scholarship and the new modernist studies

This collection of essays addresses the question of lucidity as a thematic in literature and film but also as a quality of both expression and insight in literary criticism and critical thought more generally. The essays offer treatments of lucidity in itself and in relation to its opposites, forms of obscurity and darkness. They offer attention to problems of philosophical thought and reason, to questions of literary and poetic form, and of photographic and filmic contemplation. Ranging from engagements with early modern writing through to more recent material the contributions focus in particular on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French prose and poetry, the field which has been the predominant focus of Alison Finch's critical writing. They are written as tributes to the distinctively lucid insights of her work and to the breadth and clarity of its intellectual engagement.

Co-winner of the Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize for 2009

When Lord Byron identified the periodical industry as the "Literary Lower Empire," he registered the cultural clout that periodicals had accumulated by positioning themselves as both the predominant purveyors of scientific, economic, and social information and the arbiters of literary and artistic taste. "British Periodicals and Romantic Identity "explores how periodicals such as the "Edinburgh," "Blackwood's," and the "Westminster" became the repositories and creators of "public opinion." In addition, Schoenfield examines how particular figures, both inside and outside the editorial apparatus of the reviews and magazines, negotiated this public and rapidly professionalized space. Ranging from Lord Byron, whose self-identification as lord and poet anticipated his public image in the periodicals, to William Hazlitt, equally journalist and subject of the reviews, this engaging study explores both canonical figures and canon makers in the periodicals and positions them as a centralizing force in the consolidation of Romantic print culture.

The 1840s, 50s, and 60s: three decades during which the British feminist movement saw some of its most intense activity of the nineteenth-century, and readers find some of the most monstrous, troubling representations of women by male writers in all of literary history. In Fixing Patriarchy, Donald E. Hall suggests that feminism at mid-century posed intertwined social, economic, political and psychological threats to patriarchy. Hall explores the metamorphic nature of Victorian definitions of masculinity and femininity through an analysis of male authors such as Dickens, Tennyson, Kingsley, Thackeray, Hughes, Collins, and Trollope in dialogue with Victorian feminists and other women writers.

Synthesizing historical research with pertinent queer, feminist, post-structuralist, and materialist theories, Hall locates both startling admissions of moral fallibility and violent strategies of retrenchment and containment of this perceived threat to the male social body. Fixing Patriarchytraces parallels among Victorian discourses of religion, science, economics, and aesthetics, as it explores a cultural dynamic of un-fixedness and heightened desires for fixity.

"The Life of Daniel Defoe" examines the entire range of Defoe's writing in the context of what is known about his life and opinions.
A critical study of the writing of Daniel Defoe.
Features extended and detailed commentaries on Defoe's political and religious journalism, as well as on his narrative fictions.
Places emphasis on Defoe's distinctive style and rhetoric.

"Moving Beyond Boundaries" makes a major contribution to our understanding of under-represented literatures by expanding our knowledge about the issues, experiences, and concerns of black women writing in different communities and in a wide range of geographic contexts. It is unique in the fact that it focuses, not only on African-American women's literature, but on black women's writing from around the world.

Covering writers from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe, and such well-known authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Nadine Gordimer, and bell hooks, Moving Beyond Boundaries contains both creative and critical writings.

Volume one includes personal reflections, short stories, and essays as well as a large selection of poetry from women from all around the world.

Alchemy and Amalgamexplores a relatively un-researched area of the Baudelairean corpus (his translations from English) and relates them to the rest of his works. It seeks to establish a link between translational and creative writing, arguing for a reassessment of the place of translation in Baudelaire's writing method. Rather than a sideline in Baudelaire's creative activities, translation is thus shown to be a central form of dual writing at the core of his works. Baudelaire's translations from English, his constant rewriting of pre-existing material (including his own), the doublets, the transpositions d'art, and the art criticism are all based on an approach to writing which is essentially derivative but also transformative. Thus the Baudelairean experiment illustrates the limits of romantic notions of originality, creativity and genius, reminding us that all writing is intrinsically intertextual. It also shows the complexity of translation as a form of creation at the core of modern writing. The book is one of the first of its kind to link the study the translational activity of a major writer to his 'creative' writings. It is also one of the first to provide an integrated presentation of French 19th-century translation approaches and to link them to questions of copyright and authorship in the context of the rise of capitalism and romantic views of creation and genius. It offers, therefore, a new perspective both on translation history and on literary history. Alchemy and Amalgam will be of interest to students of translation, comparative literature and French studies.

During these times of growing interest in the spiritual life, in personal prayer, and in meditation, many people are asking questions about the inner life. The Inward Pilgrimage opens the way for readers to discover the riches of sixteen spiritual classics that have brought new life to Christians of all denominations. Now updated with a foreword and questions for reflection by Bradley P. Holt, author of Thirsty for God, this revised edition of The Inward Pilgrimage is ideal for individuals and study groups exploring Christian spirituality.

This comprehensive exploration of curiosity in the fiction and life-writing of Andre Gide (1869-1951) is an important modernist contribution to the field of curiosity in literature and cultural studies more broadly. Curiosity was a credo for Gide. By observing the world and then manifesting in writing these observations, he stimulates the curiosity of readers, conceived as virtual conduits of a curiosity once his own. Using a thematic structure of sexual, scientific and writerly curiosity, this volume identifies processes of curiosity in the life-writing (including the travel-writing) which illuminate processes in the fiction, and vice versa. Theories of fetishism, gender and sexuality are applied to Gide's corpus to illustrate his championing of a masculine curiosity of enlightenment and adventure over a feminised 'curiosite-defaillance' of disobedience and harm, and to explore objects eliciting his incuriosity. Gide's creativity is nourished by his curiosity, as close readings of his work informed by Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic writing on epistemophilia reveal. Curiosity is a rewarding, non-reductionist perspective from which the exceptional variety of Gide's subject matter, style and genre can be more coherently understood. Research draws principally on the six Pleiade volumes of Gide's oeuvre, published 1996-2009.

The history of African American performance and theatre is a topic that few scholars have closely studied or discussed as a critical part of American culture. In this fascinating interdisciplinary volume, David Krasner reveals such a history to be a tremendously rich one, focusing particularly on the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the 20th century. The fields of history, black literary theory, cultural studies, performance studies and postcolonial theory are utilized in an examination of several major productions. In addition, Krasner looks at the aesthetic significance of African American performers on the American stage and the meaning of the technique entitled "cakewalking." Investigating expressions of protest within the theatre, Krasner reveals that this period was replete with moments of resistance to racism, parodies of the minstrel tradition, and double consciousness on the part of performers. An enlightening work which unveils new information about its subject, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre offers insights into African American artistry during an era of racism and conflict.

Finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism 'Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny' Sunday Times 'Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise' Emilia Clarke 'She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be' New Yorker Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books - selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude - have been described as 'virtuoso performances', and 'small masterpieces'. From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated - and mordantly funny.

This volume, which includes essays on Catalonia, the Basque country, Galicia, and literature written by African immigrants, focuses on issues of "difference" that are at the center of current debates in Spain and elsewhere--the emergence of minoritized literatures, multilingualism and identity, new relationships between culture and institutions, the negotiation of historical memories, the connections between migrations and the redefinition of nationhood, and the impact of global trends on local symbolic systems.

Drawing from an eclectic mix of scholars from the US, UK, and Australia, "Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture" examines the persistence of medieval themes, characters, and situations in a variety of media from reality television to Virginia Woolf, Arthurian film to Disney animation, Shrek to historical fantasy. Each essay demonstrates that the Middle Ages are not relegated to a static past but continue to fashion a vital presence in contemporary popular culture, changing our assumptions about the flow of history and the creation of the present.

Product information not available.

In The City of Ye in the Chinese Literary Landscape, Joanne Tsao demonstrates how the city of Ye changed from an iconic space that represented Cao Cao's heroic enterprise to a symbol of the fruitlessness of human endeavour, and then finally to a literary landmark, a synecdoche for the vicissitudes of human life caught in the predictable cycles of dynastic rise and decline. Through a close reading of literary works on Ye, she illustrates how the city transformed from a lived to imaginative space to become a symbol in the poetic lexicon. Making use of literary and historical texts on Ye and its material remains through the Song and beyond she shows the potency of place as a generative force in literary production and in historical discourse.

This fascinating title, first published in 1922, presents a detailed overview of the life and works of Shakespeare. Alden first considers Shakespeare's Elizabethan context, alongside exploring the Classical and Italian foundations, political theories, concepts and theatrical trends that influenced his works. Next, a comprehensive biography provides insight into Shakespeare's probable education, relationships and contemporaries. The final sections are devoted to the genres into which Shakespeare's works have been categorised, with full analyses of and backgrounds to the poems, histories, comedies and tragedies. An important study, this title will be of particular value to students in need of a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare's life and works, as well as the more general inquisitive reader.

'This is a marvellous, endlessly illuminating book ... It doesn't go on the shelf alongside other critics; it goes on the shelf alongside Dickens' Howard Jacobson ___________________ Discover the tricks of a literary master in this essential guide to the fictional world of Charles Dickens. From Pickwick to Scrooge, Copperfield to Twist, how did Dickens find the perfect names for his characters? What was Dickens's favourite way of killing his characters? When is a Dickens character most likely to see a ghost? Why is Dickens's trickery only fully realised when his novels are read aloud? In thirteen entertaining and wonderfully insightful essays, John Mullan explores the literary machinations of Dickens's eccentric genius, from his delight in cliches to his rendering of smells and his outrageous use of coincidences. A treat for all lovers of Dickens, this essential companion puts his audacity, originality and brilliance on full display. 'Brilliantly sharp ... Mullan makes us see that Charles Dickens was one of the most artful, which is to say skilled, writers the world has ever seen' Mail on Sunday 'Put it on your Christmas list and spend the post-goose collapse reading the good bits aloud' Laura Freeman 'Even if you know a lot about Dickens you will find revelations in this book, and if you know nothing about him it will be the perfect appetiser' The Times, The best paperbacks of 2021