Metaphor is a central concept in literary studies, but it is also prevalent in everyday language and speech. Recent literary theories such as postmodernism and deconstruction have transformed the study of the text and revolutionized our thinking about metaphor.

In this fascinating volume, David Punter:

• establishes the classical background of the term from its philosophical roots to the religious and political tradition of metaphor in the East
• relates metaphor to the public realms of culture and politics and the way in which these influence the literary
• examines metaphor in relation to literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies
• illustrates his argument with specific examples from western and eastern literature and poetry.

This comprehensive and engaging book emphasizes the significance of metaphor to literary studies, as well as its relevance to cultural studies, linguistics and philosophy.

First published in 1981.The primary purpose of this book is to serve as an introduction to writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to major Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelly - the authors discuss writers such as Austen, Hazlitt and Burke, who are usually studied in a different context, and genres such as fiction and political writing, which are often cut off from the central body of poetry. An original and highly stimulated study, this book will appeal to all those who are dissatisfied with the conventional categories into which writers and literary movements are usually placed. .

The first edition was regarded as the definitive survey of Gothic and related terror writing in English. No other text considers this genre on such a scale and covers the theoretical perspectives so comprehensively. In the latest edition, the broad range of theoretical perspectives has been enlarged to include modern critical theories. Volume One is a thoroughly updated edition of the original text, covering the period from 1765 up to the Edwardian age, exploring the richness and literary diversity of the gothic form: from the original eighteenth-century gothic of Ann Radcliffe to the melodramatic fiction of Wilkie Collins.

The Literature of Terror: the Modern Gothic is the second volume in David Punter's impressive survey of gothic writing covering over two centuries. This long awaited second edition has been expanded to take into account the latest critical research, and is now published in two volumes. Volume One covers the period from 1765 to the Edwardian age while Volume Two discusses modern gothic, starting with the 'decadent' gothic writing of Oscar Wilde and continuing through the twentieth century.

This book provides a series of new addresses to the enduring problem of how to categorize the Fantastic. The approach taken is through the lens of spatiality; the Fantastic gives us new worlds, although of course these are refractions of worlds already in being. In place of 'real' spaces (whatever they might be), the Fantastic gives us imaginary spaces, although within those spaces historical and cultural conflicts are played out, albeit in forms that stretch our understanding of everyday location, and our usual interpretations of cause and effect. Many authors are addressed here, from a variety of different geographical and national traditions, thus demonstrating how the Fantastic - as a mode, a genre, a way of thinking, imagining and writing - continually traverses borders and boundaries. We hope to move the ongoing debate about the Fantastic forward in a scholarly as well as an engaging way.

Writing the Passions is a book of literary criticism, of philosophy and of the politics of modernity. It explores the arguments on the location of feeling in literature; on the fragmentation of the self under the pressure of the passions; of the place of the passions in psychoanalytic practice and theory; and on the notions of multiplicity, soul, spirit, polytheism and animism developed from their bases in psychoanalytic and Derridean theory. The relations between writing and the passions are addressed through individual texts, ranging across many centuries and from Europe to China. Writers and texts discussed include Plato, Andrew Marvell, Swinburne, Salman Rushdie, Iain Banks, Deleuze, Guattari and many others. Topics addressed include: the meaning of crime passionnel; art and the wound; passion and ceremonial; adoration and abjection; dread and disgust; the nature of the exotic; shame and irony; separation, incompletion and the cure. Written in a uniquely engaging and accessible style, Writing the Passions provides readers with a fascinating exploration of the general notion of 'the passions', together with a set of historical insights into how the passions have been considered and treated in different literatures and cultures.

Writing the Passions is a book of literary criticism, of philosophy and of the politics of modernity. It explores the arguments on the location of feeling in literature; on the fragmentation of the self under the pressure of the passions; of the place of the passions in psychoanalytic practice and theory; and on the notions of multiplicity, soul, spirit, polytheism and animism developed from their bases in psychoanalytic and Derridean theory. The relations between writing and the passions are addressed through individual texts, ranging across many centuries and from Europe to China. Writers and texts discussed include Plato, Andrew Marvell, Swinburne, Salman Rushdie, Iain Banks, Deleuze, Guattari and many others. Topics addressed include: the meaning of crime passionnel; art and the wound; passion and ceremonial; adoration and abjection; dread and disgust; the nature of the exotic; shame and irony; separation, incompletion and the cure. Written in a uniquely engaging and accessible style, Writing the Passions provides readers with a fascinating exploration of the general notion of 'the passions', together with a set of historical insights into how the passions have been considered and treated in different literatures and cultures.

The Literature of Terror: the Modern Gothic is the second volume in David Punter's impressive survey of gothic writing covering over two centuries. The text was originally published in 1980 to wide acclaim and following its publication, critical interest in gothic writing has risen substantially. This long awaited second edition has been expanded to take into account the latest critical research, and is now published in two volumes.Volume One covers the period from 1765 to the Edwardian age while Volume Two discusses modern gothic, starting with the 'decadent' gothic writing of Oscar Wilde and continuing through the twentieth century. David Punter's thorough analysis places gothic writing within its historical and sociological context. A new chapter on post-war fiction and film extends the scope of the original study, exploring the development of a contemporary 'culture of horror' and showing the continuing relevance of the Gothic as a means of expression. This new edition also contains a new chapter which analyses the relationship between cultural material and sociopathic behaviour, offering an important contribution to contemporary sociological debate. The two volumes combined pr

The first edition was regarded as the definitive survey of Gothic and related terror writing in English. No other text considers this genre on such a scale and covers the theoretical perspectives so comprehensively. In the latest edition, the broad range of theoretical perspectives has been enlarged to include modern critical theories. Volume One is a thoroughly updated edition of the original text, covering the period from 1765 up to the Edwardian age, exploring the richness and literary diversity of the gothic form: from the original eighteenth-century gothic of Ann Radcliffe to the melodramatic fiction of Wilkie Collins.

First published in 1981.The primary purpose of this book is to serve as an introduction to writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to major Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelly - the authors discuss writers such as Austen, Hazlitt and Burke, who are usually studied in a different context, and genres such as fiction and political writing, which are often cut off from the central body of poetry. An original and highly stimulated study, this book will appeal to all those who are dissatisfied with the conventional categories into which writers and literary movements are usually placed. .

'Rapture' The act of seizing or carrying off as prey or plunder; the act of carrying or being carried; and the expression of ecstasy or euphoria in words. The concept of rapture in literature navigates along a specific trajectory, from rapine status through to 'being carried (away)'. This book identifies the apparent impossibility of recounting such 'rapturous states', and of fixing them in words or in time within cultural expectations, while questioning what we can do with those who are 'enrapt', and what we do inside ourselves with reading moments of rapture. ... Rapture: Literature, Secrecy, Addiction engages with the 'states of heightened awareness', and seeks to connect with the notion of addiction as an alternative to the moral law. Punter deals with notions of writing as itself a kind of 'seizure', writing as a 'fit', in the works of Blake, Holderlin, Novalis, Nietzsche, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Genet, and Ballard. 'Writing it down' - the process of returning from states of exaltation to find oneself writing in often bleak locations, underlines the relationship between rapture and literature. The author concludes that the very possibility of communication and interpretation is radically open to doubt. The addict-writer becomes representative of the dialectic of writing as an act of communication; an act which is tragically doomed from the outset.

Metaphor is a central concept in literary studies, but it is also prevalent in everyday language and speech. Recent literary theories such as postmodernism and deconstruction have transformed the study of the text and revolutionized our thinking about metaphor.

In this fascinating volume, David Punter:

• establishes the classical background of the term from its philosophical roots to the religious and political tradition of metaphor in the East
• relates metaphor to the public realms of culture and politics and the way in which these influence the literary
• examines metaphor in relation to literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies
• illustrates his argument with specific examples from western and eastern literature and poetry.

This comprehensive and engaging book emphasizes the significance of metaphor to literary studies, as well as its relevance to cultural studies, linguistics and philosophy.

In Stranger we journey from people to places, visiting creatures, objects and conditions, all of which are odd, slightly off-kilter, seen from a unusual perspective... Linguistically deft and formally inventive, the poems challenge us to reflect on the stranger in our midst, conceptions of social and personal estrangement, the strangeness of everyday life and what we might take as apparitions. With sections introduced by translations of Chinese Sung Dynasty poetry, the poems move between brief apercus to longer meditations. Original, haunting, alive to our current global situation, even at their most oneiric, these are inventive poems brimming with integrity from a distinctive voice.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

This book brings together fourteen of the most ambitious and thought-provoking recent essays by David Punter, who has been writing on the Gothic to academic and general acclaim for over thirty years. Punter addresses developments in Gothic writing and Gothic criticism since the mid-eighteenth century, by isolating and discussing specific themes and scenarios that have remained relevant to literary and philosophical discussion over the decades and centuries, and also by paying close attention to the motifs, figures and recurrences that loom so large in twenty-first-century engagements with the Gothic. This book, while engaging deeply with Gothic history, constantly addresses our continuing immediate encounters with Gothic tropes - the vampire, the zombie, the phantom, the living dead.

'Rapture' The act of seizing or carrying off as prey or plunder; the act of carrying or being carried; and the expression of ecstasy or euphoria in words. The concept of rapture in literature navigates along a specific trajectory, from rapine status through to 'being carried (away)'. This book identifies the apparent impossibility of recounting such 'rapturous states', and of fixing them in words or in time within cultural expectations, while questioning what we can do with those who are 'enrapt', and what we do inside ourselves with reading moments of rapture. ... Rapture: Literature, Secrecy, Addiction engages with the 'states of heightened awareness', and seeks to connect with the notion of addiction as an alternative to the moral law. Punter deals with notions of writing as itself a kind of 'seizure', writing as a 'fit', in the works of Blake, Holderlin, Novalis, Nietzsche, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Genet, and Ballard. 'Writing it down' - the process of returning from states of exaltation to find oneself writing in often bleak locations, underlines the relationship between rapture and literature. The author concludes that the very possibility of communication and interpretation is radically open to doubt. The addict-writer becomes representative of the dialectic of writing as an act of communication; an act which is tragically doomed from the outset.

Provides new definitions of the Gothic in a variety of artistic contexts Explores a range of Gothic from architecture through literature to music and the technological arts Provides an opportunity to hear new thinking from established scholars as well as showcasing work by new scholars Highlights new definitions of the Gothic from a wide variety of perspectives The Gothic in all its artistic forms and ramifications is traced from the medieval to the twenty-first century. From architecture, painting and sculpture through music, ballet, opera and dance to installation art and the graphic novel, each of the 33 chapters reflects on and weighs in on the ways in which the Gothic is taken up in the art forms and modes under examination. An Introduction discusses Gothic as a changing cultural form across the centuries with deep psychological roots. This is followed by sections on: architectural arts; the visual arts; music and the performance arts; the literary arts; and media and cultural arts.

Young Alphonsus Cohenburg enters his mother's bedroom and finds her covered in blood. She tells him his uncle has murdered his father, and orders him to flee Cohenburg castle forever to save his own life

A disconsolate exile, Alphonsus wanders the earth seeking the means of survival, first as a soldier, then a miner, and finally as sacristan of a church, where he meets the beautiful Lauretta. They wed and establish a home together, and everything seems to promise them a happy future. But their domestic tranquillity is shattered, when a band of ruffians kidnaps the unfortunate Lauretta Alphonsus must solve the mystery of Lauretta's disappearance and the riddle of his mother's strange conduct. And when he hears that ghosts inhabit Cohenburg castle, tolling the great bell each night at midnight, the mystery only deepens....

One of the greatest of all Gothic novels, "The Midnight Bell" (1798) features a blend of fast-paced action and spine-tingling suspence, pervaded throughout by a tone of profound melancholy. This edition, the first in forty years, features a new introduction by David Punter, one of the world's foremost experts on Gothic literature.