Catafalque offers a revolutionary new reading of the great psychologist Carl Jung as mystic, gnostic and prophet for our time.

This book is the first major re-imagining of both Jung and his work since the publication of the Red Book in 2009 -- and is the only serious assessment of them written by a classical scholar who understands the ancient Gnostic, Hermetic and alchemical foundations of his thought as well as Jung himself did. At the same time it skillfully tells the forgotten story of Jung's relationship with the great Sufi scholar, Henry Corbin, and with Persian Sufi tradition.

The strange reality of the Red Book, or "New Book" as Carl Jung called it, lies close to the heart of Catafalque. In meticulous detail Peter Kingsley uncovers its great secret, hidden in plain sight and still -- as if by magic -- unrecognized by all those who have been unable to understand this mysterious, incantatory text.

But the hard truth of who Jung was and what he did is only a small part of what this book uncovers. It also exposes the full extent of that great river of esoteric tradition that stretches all the way back to the beginnings of our civilization. It unveils the surprising realities behind western philosophy, literature, poetry, prophecy -- both ancient and modern.

In short, Peter Kingsley shows us not only who Carl Jung was but who we in the West are as well. Much more than a brilliant spiritual biography, Catafalque holds the key to understanding why our western culture is dying. And, an incantatory text in its own right, it shows the way to discovering what we in these times of great crisis must do.

This book explores the vast array of animals that populate detective fiction. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed, with Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), then detective fiction's very first culprit is an animal. Animals, moreover, consistently appear as victims, clues, and companions, while the abstract conception of animality is closely tied to the idea of criminality. Although it is often described as an essentially conservative form, detective fiction can unsettle the binary of human and animal to intersect with developing concerns in animal studies: animal agency, the ethical complexities of human/animal interaction, the politics and literary aesthetics of violence, and animal metaphor. Gathering its 14 essays into sections on ontologies, ethics, politics, and forms, Animals in Detective Fiction provides a compelling and nuanced analysis of the central role creatures play in this enduringly popular and continually morphing literary form.

This collection of essays brings together an international team of scholars with the aim to shed new light on various interconnected aspects of the Gothic through the lens of converging critical and methodological approaches. With its wide-ranging interdisciplinary perspective, the book explores the domains of literary, pictorial, filmic, televisual and popular cultural texts in English from the eighteenth century to the present day. Within these pages, the Gothic is discussed as a dynamic form that exceeds the concept of literary genre, proving able to renovate and adapt through constant processes of hybridisation. Investigating the hypothesis that the Gothic returns in times of cultural crisis, this study maps out transgressive and experimental modes conducive to alternative experiences of the intricacies of the human (and post-human) condition.

Essays collected in this book discuss textual and discursive formulations of dominance and resistance. The authors analyze how they are narrated and re-narrated, framed and reframed in different social, political and language communities and realities, through different media and means, and translated into different contexts and languages. As the ways we name, rename, or label events, people and places have implications in the real world, the essays are also meant to investigate the ways in which we partake in negotiating its construction, its changing meanings and senses through the stories we tell and the practices we live by.

The book presents a theory of relationships between the forms of devotion and early drama genres. The historical background is the circumstances of the Church becoming independent of the Empire. A theological and philosophical aspect of the transformation of piety at the time was the specification of the ontological status of the sacred (spiritualization) and "shifting it to Heaven" (transcendentalization). In opposition to a theory of Western civilization as a process of increasing individual self-control, the author argues for the need to take into account purely religious conditions (the idea of recapitulation). This allows the author to develop a holistic aesthetics for the religiously inspired creativity in the period spanning the 11th-15th centuries and to propose a new typology of medieval drama.

This monograph is a study of the work of British author A. S. Byatt, exploring the cultural representation of the woman intellectual in her fiction. It argues that Byatt's representations of this figure show narratives of intellectual women to be inherently mythopoeic, or capable of restructuring the myth of the intellectual as male by default. This mythopoeia is, furthermore, intrinsically feminist in function, thus potentially broadening the conventional, limited view of women in intellectual history. The book will be the first study of Byatt's work to examine this figure in detail, and the first study of women intellectuals in historical and literary discourse to apply concepts of mythopoeia and sexual difference in ways that allow new readings of women's status and work in public spheres.

This book captures a cross-section of the most significant recent developments in criticism on one of the most challenging authors of our time. It brings together essays by a new generation of Pynchon critics alongside some more established names in the field, building on and moving beyond existing critical paradigms in the study of Pynchon's work. In a critical landscape in which the postmodernism of Pynchon's earlier novels has been thoroughly established, this collection presents fresh analytical methodologies and new perspectives on Pynchon's fiction informed by the more expansive, globalized, and politicized network models that undergird recent advances in American literary theory and criticism. The New Pynchon Studies illustrates how Pynchon's later novels, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge, demand a re-orientation of our approach to his entire oeuvre and enables readers to trace lines of continuity and development in his writing from V. to the present day.

Revised to reflect critical trends of the past 15 years, the third iteration of this widely adopted critical edition presents the 1831 text of Mary Shelley's English Romantic novel along with critical essays that introduce students to Frankenstein from contemporary psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, gender/queer, postcolonial, and cultural studies perspectives. The text and essays are complemented by contextual documents, introductions (with bibliographies), and a glossary of critical and theoretical terms. In the third edition, three of the six essays are new, representing recent gender/queer, postcolonial, and cultural theories. The contextual documents have been significantly revised to include many images of Frankenstein from contemporary popular culture.

This is a new English translation of a classic of medieval Islamic learning, which illuminates the intellectual debates of its age and speaks vividly to the concerns of our own. It is the most famous work of the Brethren of Purity, a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad. In this rich allegorical fable the exploited and oppressed animals pursue a case against humanity. They are granted the gift of speech and presented as subjects with views and interests of their own. Over the course of the hearing they rebuke and criticise human weakness, deny man's superiority, and make powerful demands for greater justice and respect for animals. This sophisticated moral allegory combines elements of satire with a thought-provoking thesis on animal welfare. Goodman and McGregor accompany their translation with an introduction and annotations that explore the rich historical and cultural context to the work.

This book offers insight into the ways students enrolled in European classrooms in higher education come to understand American experience through its literary fiction, which for decades has been a key component of English department offerings and American Studies curricula across the continent and in Great Britain and Ireland. The essays provide an understanding of how post-World War II American writers, some already elevated to 'canonical status' and some not, are represented in European university classrooms and why they have been chosen for inclusion in coursework. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and American studies, and to students in American literature and American studies courses.

Published in English for the first time, Refugee Conversations is a delightful work that reveals Brecht as a master of comic satire. Written swiftly in the opening years of the Second World War, the dialogues have an urgent contemporary relevance to a Europe once again witnessing populations on the move. The premise is simple: two refugees from Nazi Germany meet in a railway cafe and discuss the current state of the world. They are a bourgeois Jewish physicist and a left-leaning worker. Their world views, their voices and their social experience clash horribly, but they find they have unexpected common ground - especially in their more recent experience of the surreal twists and turns of life in exile, the bureaucracy, and the pathetic failings of the societies that are their unwilling hosts. Their conversations are light and swift moving, the subjects under discussion extremely various: beer, cigars, the Germans' love of order, their education and experience of life, art, pornography, politics, 'great men', morality, seriousness, Switzerland, America ... despite the circumstances of both characters there is a wonderfully whimsical serendipity about their dialogue, the logic and the connections often delightfully absurd. This edition features a full introduction and notes by Professor Tom Kuhn (St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, UK).

A Hardcover Classics edition of Thomas Hardy s impassioned novel of courtship in rural life, soon to be a movie starring Carey Mulligan and Michael Sheen In Thomas Hardy s first major literary success, independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, the soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy, and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community. One of his first works set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex, Hardy s novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships. This edition, based on Hardy s original 1874 manuscript, is the complete novel he never saw published, and restores its full candor and innovation. Rosemarie Morgan s introduction discusses the history of its publication, as well as the biblical and classical allusions that permeate the novel."

The story of four remarkable women who shaped the intellectual history of the 20th century: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. On the cusp of the Second World War, four women went to Oxford to begin their studies: a fiercely brilliant Catholic convert; a daughter of privilege longing to escape her stifling upbringing; an ardent Communist and aspiring novelist with a list of would-be lovers as long as her arm; and a quiet, messy lover of newts and mice who would become a great public intellectual of our time. They became lifelong friends. At the time, only a handful of women had ever made lives in philosophy. But when Oxford's men were drafted in the war, everything changed. As Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch labored to make a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, as they made friendships and families, and as they drifted toward and away from each other, they never stopped insisting that some lives are better than others. They argued that courage and discernment and justice-and love-are the heart of a good life. This book presents the first sustained engagement with these women's contributions: with the critique and the alternative they framed. Drawing on a cluster of recently opened archives and extensive correspondence and interviews with those who knew them best, Benjamin Lipscomb traces the lives and ideas of four friends who gave us a better way to think about ethics, and ourselves.

Cruelty, corruption, sensuality, desperation and death: the sensationalism and morbid pessimism that characterized French decadence in the late nineteenth century quickly attracted converts throughout Europe, including Russia. Here are the horrifying, dramatic and erotic short stories and poetry, most of which have never before been translated into English, by the most decadent Russian writers. These explore the depths of the unconscious, as their characters experience sadism, masochism, rape, murder, suicide, and, in a story by Gippius, even passionate love for the dead. * describes the spread of madnessand the collapse of advanced, but decadent, civilizations that indulge in refined pleasures * Andreyev portrays the collapse of all moral values on a personal level in his famous story The Abyss Femmes fatales lure men to destruction, but the most seductive enchantress in the anthology is death itself.

This Element looks at adaptations of bestselling works of popular fiction to cinema, television, stage, radio, video games and other media platforms. It focuses on 'transmedia storytelling', building its case studies around the genre of modern fantasy: because the elaborate storyworlds produced by writers like J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling and George R. R. Martin have readily lent themselves to adaptations across various media platforms. This has also made it possible for media entertainment corporations to invest in them over the long term, enabling the development of franchises through which their storyworlds are presented and marketed in new ways to new audiences.

The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labeled Borgesian. Umberto Eco's international bestseller, The Name of the Rose, is, on one level, an elaborate improvisation on Borges' fiction "The Library," which American readers first encountered in the original 1962 New Directions publication of Labyrinths. This new edition of Labyrinths, the classic representative selection of Borges' writing edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (in translations by themselves and others), includes the text of the original edition (as augmented in 1964) as well as Irby's biographical and critical essay, a poignant tribute by Andre Maurois, and a chronology of the author's life. Borges enthusiast William Gibson has contributed a new introduction bringing Borges' influence and importance into the twenty-first century."

"I am a sick man . . .  I am a spiteful man," the irascible voice of a nameless narrator cries out.  And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the brutal self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn and iconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature. Notes From Underground, published in 1864, marks a tuming point in Dostoevsky's writing:  it announces the moral political, and social ideas he will treat on a monumental scale in Crime And Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov

This Element explores the mechanisms through which 'African literature', as a market category, has been consecrated within the global literary field. Drawing on archival, textual and field-based research, it proposes that the normative story of African literary writing has functioned to efface a broader material history of African literary production located on and oriented to the continent itself.

Virgil's great epic transforms the Homeric tradition into a triumphal statement of the Roman civilizing mission. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald.