Richard Marsh was one of the most popular and prolific authors of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. His bestselling The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker's Dracula. A prolific author within a range of genres including Gothic, crime, humour and romance, Marsh produced stories about shape-shifting monsters, morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life. However, while Marsh's work appealed to a public greedy for sensationalist fiction, both the cultural elite of the day and twentieth-century literary critics looked askance at his popular middlebrow fiction. In the wake of the recent rediscovery of Marsh's fiction, this essay collection builds on burgeoning scholarly interest in the author. Marsh emerges here as a fascinating writer who helped shape the genres of popular fiction and whose stories offer surprising responses to issues of criminality, gender and empire in this period of cultural transition. -- .

A prominent francophone thinker and writer from sub-Saharan Africa, V. Y. Mudimbe is known for his interdisciplinary spirit in bridging Western and African modes of knowledge and in critiquing a range of disciplines, from the classics and philosophy to anthropology and comparative literature. Though Mudimbe has been regarded as an essential postcolonial thinker-on par with more canonized figures such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha- The Mudimbe Reader offers for the first time a ground-breaking work of modern intellectual African history that includes new translations of essays which had previously been in French and out of print. Constituting an intellectual history of the humanities in the late twentieth century from an African intellectual's point of view, The Mudimbe Reader provides an introduction and a comprehensive bibliography that frame four thematic gatherings of Mudimbe's writings. Part 1 bears witness to Mudimbe's attempts, as a university professor in the new nation-state of Zaire, to balance the postindependence discourse of authenticity with his training in Western philosophy and philology. Part 2 focuses on Mudimbe's exploration of racial, ethnic, and religious discourses to reflect upon postcolonialism in Zaire and in the United States. In the third part, Mudimbe interrogates ancient Greek and Latin texts as a strategy to engage the legacy of antiquity for European and African modernity. Finally, the book concludes by focusing on visual culture and Mudimbe's recurring attempt to elucidate how African ""primitiveness"" has been constructed, challenged, dismissed, and reinvented from the Renaissance to the present day.

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the classical world has been seen as foundational and exemplary to Western civilization. However, the Greeks never invaded and colonised western and northern Europe the way the Romans did, and, conversely, Greece was a difficult place to reach for modern travellers well into the nineteenth century. Inevitably, therefore, the links with ancient Greece were a product of the imagination: an exemplary civilization, in its politics, arts, and culture. There was one problem, however: the Greeks, it seemed, enjoyed pederastic relations. And not only this: one of Athens' most famous teachers, Socrates, was attracted to boys. Daniel Orrells offers a fresh, original examination of how modern thinkers in Germany and Britain, who were so invested in a model of history that directly traced the European present back to an ancient Greek past, negotiated the tricky issue of ancient Greek pederasty.

A prominent francophone thinker and writer from sub-Saharan Africa, V. Y. Mudimbe is known for his interdisciplinary spirit in bridging Western and African modes of knowledge and in critiquing a range of disciplines, from the classics and philosophy to anthropology and comparative literature. Though Mudimbe has been regarded as an essential postcolonial thinker-on par with more canonized figures such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha- The Mudimbe Reader offers for the first time a ground-breaking work of modern intellectual African history that includes new translations of essays which had previously been in French and out of print. Constituting an intellectual history of the humanities in the late twentieth century from an African intellectual's point of view, The Mudimbe Reader provides an introduction and a comprehensive bibliography that frame four thematic gatherings of Mudimbe's writings. Part 1 bears witness to Mudimbe's attempts, as a university professor in the new nation-state of Zaire, to balance the postindependence discourse of authenticity with his training in Western philosophy and philology. Part 2 focuses on Mudimbe's exploration of racial, ethnic, and religious discourses to reflect upon postcolonialism in Zaire and in the United States. In the third part, Mudimbe interrogates ancient Greek and Latin texts as a strategy to engage the legacy of antiquity for European and African modernity. Finally, the book concludes by focusing on visual culture and Mudimbe's recurring attempt to elucidate how African ""primitiveness"" has been constructed, challenged, dismissed, and reinvented from the Renaissance to the present day.