James Joyce was educated almost exclusively by the Jesuits; this education and these priests make their appearance across Joyce's oeuvre. This dynamic has never been properly explicated or rigorously explored. Using Joyce's religious education and psychoanalytic theories of depression and paranoia, this book opens radical new possibilities for reading Joyce's fiction. It takes readers through some of the canon's most well-read texts and produces bold, fresh new readings. By placing these readings in light of Jesuit religious practice - in particular, the Spiritual Exercises all Jesuit priests and many students undergo - the book shows how Joyce's deepest concerns about truth, literature, and love were shaped by these religious practices and texts. Joyce worked out his answers to these questions in his own texts, largely by forcing his readers to encounter, and perhaps answer, those questions themselves. Reading Joyce is a challenge not only in terms of interpretation but of experience - the confusion, boredom, and even paranoia readers feel when making their way through these texts.

Katherine Forrest's bestselling "Daughters of a Coral Dawn "first appeared in 1984 and became an instant classic. Through seven printings, including the 10th anniversary edition published in 1994, this story of women creating their own world after escaping an oppressive society has continued to gain fans and influence writers for 18 years.

While film genres go in and out of style, the romantic comedy endures-from year to year and generation to generation. Endlessly adaptable, the romantic comedy form has thrived since the invention of film as a medium of entertainment, touching on universal predicaments: meeting for the first time, the battle of the sexes, and the bumpy course of true love. These films celebrate lovers who play and improvise together, no matter how nutty or at what great odds they may appear. As Eugene Pallette mutters in My Man Godfrey (1936), "All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people." Daniel Kimmel's book about romantic comedy is like watching a truly funny movie with a knowledgeable friend.

Few novels ever swept the world with such overpowering impact as LES MISERABLES. Within twenty-four hours of its publication in 1862, the first Paris edition was sold out. In other great cities throughout the world, it was devoured with equal relish.

Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, LES MISERABLES is not only a superb adventure but a powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean Valjean struggles to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed. One of the greatest works in Western literature, LES MISERABLES is an exhilarating and deeply profound reading experience.

Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility has delighted generations of readers with its masterfully crafted portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Forced to leave their home after their father's death, Elinor and Marianne must rely on making good marriages as their means of support. But unscrupulous cads, meddlesome matriarchs, and various guileless and artful women impinge on their chances for love and happiness. The novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote, "The technique of [Jane Austen's novels] is beyond praise....Her mastery of the art she chose, or that chose her, is complete."

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition contains a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize finalist David Gates, in addition to new explanatory notes.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

This book engages in an interdisciplinary study of the establishment and entrenchment of gender roles in early modern England. Drawing upon the methods and sources of literary criticism and social history, this edited volume shows how politics at both the elite and plebeian levels of society involved violence that either resulted from or expressed hostility toward the early modern gender system. Contributors take fresh approaches to prominent works by Shakespeare, Middleton, and Behn as well as discuss lesser known texts and events such as the execution of female heretics in Reformation Norwich and the punishment of prostitutes in seventeenth-century London to draw new conclusions about gender in early modern England.