An accomplished biographer of figures ranging from Talleyrand to Cardinal Newman, Charlotte Blennerhassett (1843 1917) originally published this three-volume study in German. Reissued here is the English translation of 1889 by J.E. Gordon Cumming. Madame de Stael (1766 1817), an intellectual in Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century, was ranked by Auguste Comte as among the 'great men' of the era. A novelist, salonniere, literary and social critic, and follower of Rousseau, she became keenly involved in the opposition to Louis XVI. Volume 1 of Blennerhassett's authoritative study addresses Madame de Stael's life up to the Revolution, examining her ancestry, family, and marriage to the Swedish ambassador to France. The volume also covers her views on marriage, slavery, the Rights of Man, and the contemporary political turmoil.

With an introduction by the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon `Like the best memoirs, this one is written with novelistic and poetic flair. Red Dust Road is a fantastic, probing and heart-warming read' Independent From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay's journey in Red Dust Road is one of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions. In a book remarkable for its warmth and candour, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that what triumphs, ultimately, is love.

What can we learn about life, love, and artillery from an eighty-two-year-old man whose favorite hobby is firing his homemade cannons? Visit by visit--often with his young daughters in tow--author Michael Perry finds out.

Toiling in his shop, Tom Hartwig makes gag shovel handles, parts for quarter-million-dollar farm equipment, and--now and then--batches of potentially "extralegal" explosives. Tom, who is approaching his sixtieth wedding anniversary with his wife, Arlene, and is famous for driving a team of oxen in local parades, has stories dating back to the days of his prize Model A and an antiauthoritarian streak refreshed daily by the interstate that was shoved through his front yard in 1965 and now dumps more than eight million vehicles past his kitchen window every year. And yet Visiting Tom is dominated by the elderly man's equanimity and ultimately--when he and Perry converse as husbands and the fathers of daughters--unvarnished tenderness.

"A richly rewarding, insightful, and engaging study."
--"American Literary Realism"

"Glass provides a novel, nuanced, and sound critical perspectives on the productive interaction of seemingly opposite forces: modernism and the mass market."--"Choice"

"Glass offers insightful readings of such books as Stein's "Everybody's Autobiography"(1937) and Hemingway's "Death in the Afternoon" (1932)."
--"The Journal of American History"

"A fascinating exploration of the relationship among modern authorial celebrity, the rise of the mass market, and the crisis of masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century. This crisply argued book unites sophisticated theoretical arguments about the changing shape of subjectivity in American culture with attentive literary readings and careful historical scholarship."
--Janice Radway, Duke University

"Provocatively and deftly tackles the question of literary celebrity in modern America. A smart and combelling book that has broken through the silence on literary celebrity, and it will serve as the foundation for other inquiries into this complex phenomenon."
--"The Hemingway Review"

The first comprehensive and systematic study of literary celebrity in the twentieth-century United States, Authors Inc. focuses on the autobiographical work of Mark Twain, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. Through these classic American authors, Loren Glass reveals the degree to which literary modernism in the United States is inseparable from the mass cultural forces it opposed.

Chronicling the emergence of literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century up through its contemporary manifestations, Glass focuseson how individual authors themselves struggled with the conditions of mass cultural renown. Furthermore, by emphasizing the complex relation between masculinity and modernist authorship in the United States, the book provides a bracing new account of the psychosexual economy of the American profession of authorship.

By combining a socio-historical approach with a rhetorical analysis of the autobiographical work in which classic American writers attempted to intervene in the formation of their public personae, Authors Inc. offers a long overdue study of one of the most important, and neglected, aspects of modern American literature.

Originally published in 1952, this biography collects both the published and unpublished correspondence of Hannah More, as well as the plethora of references made to her in contemporary letters and memoirs, in order to create a portrait of a deeply religious and philanthropic playwright and educator who challenged the mores of her society. Jones charts the continuity and change of More's interests through her life, and in doing so reveals a cross-section of English religious and social life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the role and place of women in this period of great cultural development and change.

'Shocking and searing. This is a devastating book about harm' Sunday Times

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, the anonymous author of The Incest Diary was raped by her father. Beneath a veneer of normal family life, she grew up in and around this all-encompassing secret. Her sexual relationship with her father lasted, off and on, into her twenties. It formed her world, and it formed her deepest fears and desires. Even after she broke away - even as she grew into an independent and adventurous young woman - she continued to seek out new versions of the violence, submission and secrecy she had struggled to leave behind.

In this graphic and harrowing memoir, the author revisits her early traumas and their aftermath to explore the ways in which her father's abuse shaped her, and still does. As a matter of psychic survival, she became both a sexual object and a detached observer, a dutiful daughter and the protector of a dirty secret. And then, years later, she made herself write it down.

With lyric concision, in vignettes of almost unbearable intensity, this writer tells a story that is shocking but that will ring true to many other survivors of abuse. It has never been faced so directly on the page.

'Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt' Sunday Times 'An unsparing, honest and insightful memoir, that shows how private failure becomes national disaster' Hilary Mantel Twenty years after the end of the war, Horst Kruger attempted to make sense of his childhood. He had grown up in a quiet Berlin suburb. Here, people lived ordinary lives, believed in God, obeyed the law, and were gradually seduced by the promises of Nazism. He had been 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'. With tragic inevitability, this world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble. Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides a searing portrait of life under the Nazis.

In Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013, the world's leading Munro scholar offers a critical overview of Alice Munro and her writing spanning forty years. Beginning with a newly written overarching introduction, featuring directive interleaved commentaries addressing chronology and contexts, ending with encompassing afterword, this collection provides a selection of essays and reviews that reflect their times and tell the story of Munro's emergence and recognition as an internationally acclaimed writer since the 1970s. Acknowledging her beginnings and her persistence as a writer of increasingly exceptional short stories, and just short stories, it treats her career through Thacker's criticism up to her fourteenth collection, Dear Life (2012), and to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Altogether, this book encompasses the whole trajectory of Munro's critical presence while offering a singularly informed retrospective perspective.

The essays in Writing between the Lines explore the lives of twelve of Canada's most eminent anglophone literary translators, and delve into how these individuals have contributed to the valuable process of literary exchange between francophone and anglophone literatures in Canada. Through individual portraits, this book traces the events and life experiences that have led W.H. Blake, John Glassco, Philip Stratford, Joyce Marshall, Patricia Claxton, Doug Jones, Sheila Fischman, Ray Ellenwood, Barbara Godard, Susanne de Lotbinire-Harwood, John Van Burek, and Linda Gaboriau into the complex world of literary translation. Each essay-portrait examines why they chose to translate and what linguistic and cultural challenges they have faced in the practice of their art. Following their relationships with authors and publishers, the translators also reveal how they have defined the goals and the process of literary translation. Containing original, detailed biographical and bibliographical material, Writing between the Lines offers many new insights into the literary translation process, and the diverse roles of the translator as social agent. The first text on Canadian translators, it makes a major contribution in the areas of literary translation, comparative literature, Canadian literature, and cultural studies.

Mary Shelley was brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day. Aged sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe, as she coped with debt, infidelity and the deaths of three children, before early widowhood changed her life forever. Most astonishingly, it was while she was still a teenager that Mary composed her canonical novel Frankenstein, creating two of our most enduring archetypes today.

The life story is well-known. But who was the woman who lived it? She's left plenty of evidence, and in this fascinating dialogue with the past, Fiona Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story. She uncovers a complex, generous character - friend, intellectual, lover and mother - trying to fulfil her own passionate commitment to writing at a time when to be a woman writer was an extraordinary and costly anomaly.

Published for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this is a major new work of biography by a prize-winning writer and poet.

Remembered for both his satirical and serious work, Robert Barnabas Brough (1828-60) was a playwright, journalist, poet and founder member of the Savage Club. Built around a series of inspired etchings by the celebrated artist George Cruikshank (1792-1878), this is a delightful fictional biography, 'from authentic sources', of that most colourful of Shakespeare's characters. We hear how our hero was descended from the great Saxon leader Hundwulf Falstaff, how the name is a corruption of 'False-thief', of his adventures with his beloved Prince Hal, and of Christmas 1412 with the Whittington family. Henry V's terrible rejection of him - 'I know thee not, old man' - is touchingly depicted, as are the episode of the laundry basket and other misadventures at Windsor, along with his sad death at the Boar's Head in 1415. First published in 1858, this book is a must-read for every lover of this larger-than-life figure.

One of the most popular Victorian writers, Samuel Smiles (1812 1904) made his name in 1859 with the original self-improvement manual Self-Help. His highly successful multi-volume Lives of the Engineers (also reissued in this series) contained biographies of men who had, like him, achieved greatness not through privilege but through hard work. Left incomplete at his death, edited by the social theorist Thomas Mackay (1849 1912) and first published in 1905, his autobiography opens with a vivid description of the Scottish garrison town of his birth during the Napoleonic wars. In his later years he was a vocal supporter of state education, and the value of education was a constant theme throughout his life. He remembers his schooldays here with clarity, writing that 'a good education is equivalent to a good fortune'. Straightforward and unpretentious, this book will be of interest to historians and readers fascinated by the Victorian drive for self-improvement.

Highly educated and accustomed to intellectual society, the writer Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741 1821) became a close friend of Samuel Johnson through her first husband, the brewer Henry Thrale. Her second marriage, to the Italian musician Gabriel Mario Piozzi in 1784, estranged her from Johnson, but following his death she published her groundbreaking Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, anticipating Boswell's biography. In addition to publishing essays, memoirs, poetry and travel diaries, she was one of the first women to produce works on philology and history. Edited by the essayist Abraham Hayward (1801 84) and incorporating correspondence and other writings, this two-volume work offers a valuable insight into the life of an important woman of letters and how she was perceived by contemporaries and posterity. Reissued here is the enlarged second edition of 1861. Volume 1 is devoted to Hayward's biographical essay and critique of her works.

Highly educated and accustomed to intellectual society, the writer Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741 1821) became a close friend of Samuel Johnson through her first husband, the brewer Henry Thrale. Her second marriage, to the Italian musician Gabriel Mario Piozzi in 1784, estranged her from Johnson, but following his death she published her groundbreaking Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, anticipating Boswell's biography. In addition to publishing essays, memoirs, poetry and travel diaries, she was one of the first women to produce works on philology and history. Edited by the essayist Abraham Hayward (1801 84) and incorporating correspondence and other writings, this two-volume work offers a valuable insight into the life of an important woman of letters and how she was perceived by contemporaries and posterity. Reissued here is the enlarged second edition of 1861. Volume 2 presents her autobiographical writings together with marginalia, letters and poetry.

An accomplished biographer of figures ranging from Talleyrand to Cardinal Newman, Charlotte Blennerhassett (1843-1917) originally published this three-volume study in German. Reissued here is the English translation of 1889 by J. E. Gordon Cumming. Madame de Stael (1766-1817), an intellectual in Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century, was ranked by Auguste Comte as among the 'great men' of the era. A novelist, salonniere, literary and social critic, and follower of Rousseau, she became keenly involved in the opposition to Louis XVI. Volume 2 of Blennerhassett's authoritative study addresses Madame de Stael's life from the Revolution through to the first decade of the nineteenth century, examining the ascent of Napoleon, with whom she strongly disagreed, and her exile to Coppet in Switzerland - where she organised her famous salon - as well as her celebrated visit to England and travels in Germany.

An accomplished biographer of figures ranging from Talleyrand to Cardinal Newman, Charlotte Blennerhassett (1843 1917) originally published this three-volume study in German. Reissued here is the English translation of 1889 by J.E. Gordon Cumming. Madame de Stael (1766 1817), an intellectual in Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century, was ranked by Auguste Comte as being among the 'great men' of the era. A novelist, salonniere, literary and social critic, and follower of Rousseau, she became keenly involved in the opposition to Louis XVI. Volume 3 of Blennerhassett's authoritative study covers Madame de Stael's life from the early years of the nineteenth century through to her death. It includes a fascinating account of her journey to Weimar and friendships with Goethe and Schiller, her travels in Italy, her return to Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, and her acquaintance with the Duke of Wellington.

A renowned Enlightenment polymath, Sir William Jones (1746-94) was a lawyer, translator and poet who wrote authoritatively on politics, comparative linguistics and oriental literature. Known initially for his Persian translations and political radicalism, Jones became further celebrated for his study and translation of ancient Sanskrit texts following his appointment to the supreme court in Calcutta in 1783. He spent the next eleven years introducing Europe to the mysticism and rationality of Hinduism, becoming a pioneer in comparative religion. Through works such as his nine 'Hymns' to Hindu deities and his translation of the Sanskrit classic Sacontala, Jones inspired and influenced Romantic writers from William Blake to August Wilhelm Schlegel. These thirteen volumes of his works, published in 1807, begin with a memoir by his friend and editor Lord Teignmouth (1751-1834). Volume 1 explores Jones' heritage and birth through to his departure for India.

A renowned Enlightenment polymath, Sir William Jones (1746-94) was a lawyer, translator and poet who wrote authoritatively on politics, comparative linguistics and oriental literature. Known initially for his Persian translations and political radicalism, Jones became further celebrated for his study and translation of ancient Sanskrit texts following his appointment to the supreme court in Calcutta in 1783. He spent the next eleven years introducing Europe to the mysticism and rationality of Hinduism, becoming a pioneer in comparative religion. Through works such as his nine 'Hymns' to Hindu deities and his translation of the Sanskrit classic Sacontala, Jones inspired and influenced Romantic writers from William Blake to August Wilhelm Schlegel. These thirteen volumes of his works, published in 1807, begin with a memoir by his friend and editor Lord Teignmouth (1751-1834). Volume 2 covers Jones' life and death in India, and includes important correspondence and unpublished work.

A renowned Enlightenment polymath, Sir William Jones (1746-94) was a lawyer, translator and poet who wrote authoritatively on politics, comparative linguistics and oriental literature. Known initially for his Persian translations and political radicalism, Jones became further celebrated for his study and translation of ancient Sanskrit texts following his appointment to the supreme court in Calcutta in 1783. He spent the next eleven years introducing Europe to the mysticism and rationality of Hinduism through works such as his nine 'Hymns' to Hindu deities and his translation of the Sanskrit classic Sacontala, influencing Romantic writers from William Blake to August Wilhelm Schlegel. Volume 3 of his thirteen-volume works, published in 1807, contains Jones' 'Anniversary Discourses' (1784-94) addressed to the Asiatick Society as its president - including 'On the Hindus' (1786), a seminal work of comparative linguistics. It also contains his landmark essay of cultural comparison, 'On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India' (1784).

A renowned Enlightenment polymath, Sir William Jones (1746-94) was a lawyer, translator and poet who wrote authoritatively on politics, comparative linguistics and oriental literature. Known initially for his Persian translations and political radicalism, Jones became further celebrated for his study and translation of ancient Sanskrit texts following his appointment to the supreme court in Calcutta in 1783. He spent the next eleven years introducing Europe to the mysticism and rationality of Hinduism through works such as his nine 'Hymns' to Hindu deities and his translation of the Sanskrit classic Sacontala, influencing Romantic writers from William Blake to August Wilhelm Schlegel. Volume 4 of his thirteen-volume works, published in 1807, contains Jones' extensive Indic scholarship and translations published in British periodicals such as Asiatick Researches and The Asiatick Miscellany, and includes the unprecedented 'On the Musical Modes of the Hindus' (1792) and 'On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindus' (1791).

A renowned Enlightenment polymath, Sir William Jones (1746-94) was a lawyer, translator and poet who wrote authoritatively on politics, comparative linguistics and oriental literature. Known initially for his Persian translations and political radicalism, Jones became further celebrated for his study and translation of ancient Sanskrit texts following his appointment to the supreme court in Calcutta in 1783. He spent the next eleven years introducing Europe to the mysticism and rationality of Hinduism through works such as his nine 'Hymns' to Hindu deities and his translation of the Sanskrit classic Sacontala, influencing Romantic writers from William Blake to August Wilhelm Schlegel. Volume 5 of his thirteen-volume works, published in 1807, contains Jones' researches into Indian botany - including the comparative 'Botanical Observations on Select Indian Plants' - coupled with his groundbreaking Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), the work which established Jones as one of the eighteenth century's greatest orientalists.

A renowned Enlightenment polymath, Sir William Jones (1746-94) was a lawyer, translator and poet who wrote authoritatively on politics, comparative linguistics and oriental literature. Known initially for his Persian translations and political radicalism, Jones became further celebrated for his study and translation of ancient Sanskrit texts following his appointment to the supreme court in Calcutta in 1783. He spent the next eleven years introducing Europe to the mysticism and rationality of Hinduism through works such as his nine 'Hymns' to Hindu deities and his translation of the Sanskrit classic Sacontala. Volume 6 of his thirteen-volume works, published in 1807, contains Jones' Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum (1774). A work of comparative literature after mentor Robert Lowth's De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (1753) - in which Lowth established the Old Testament as a masterpiece of oriental literature - Poeseos provides detailed Latin commentary on the language and techniques of Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish poetry.

A renowned Enlightenment polymath, Sir William Jones (1746-94) was a lawyer, translator and poet who wrote authoritatively on politics, comparative linguistics and oriental literature. Known initially for his Persian translations and political radicalism, Jones became further celebrated for his study and translation of ancient Sanskrit texts following his appointment to the supreme court in Calcutta in 1783. He spent the next eleven years introducing Europe to the mysticism and rationality of Hinduism through works such as his nine 'Hymns' to Hindu deities and his translation of the Sanskrit classic Sacontala. Volume 7 of his thirteen-volume works, published in 1807, addresses Jones' significant jurisprudential work, containing his 'Charges' as a supreme court judge. It also contains Jones's most controversial work, his Institutes of Hindu Law (1794), a translation from Sanskrit which Jones considered his masterpiece, although postcolonial scholars argue that it cemented Britain's imperial control over India.

A renowned Enlightenment polymath, Sir William Jones (1746-94) was a lawyer, translator and poet who wrote authoritatively on politics, comparative linguistics and oriental literature. Known initially for his Persian translations and political radicalism, Jones became further celebrated for his study and translation of ancient Sanskrit texts following his appointment to the supreme court in Calcutta in 1783. He spent the next eleven years introducing Europe to the mysticism and rationality of Hinduism through works such as his nine 'Hymns' to Hindu deities and his translation of the Sanskrit classic Sacontala. Volume 8 of his thirteen-volume works, published in 1807, contains more of Jones' legal work, including his pre-India tracts on Islamic laws of succession and inheritance - culturally comparative works debunking prejudiced claims that Islamic cultures denied private property. Also included is his formative 'Essay on the Law of Bailments' (1781), a work still cited in some legal cases today.