"I never can resist a touch of the dramatic." The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is now best remembered for its concluding story in which the great detective appears to plunge to his death into the waters at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, locked in a struggle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty. However, the collection also brings the reader back to the beginnings of Holmes' career, involving a mutiny at sea and a treasure hunt in a Sussex country house, and a first encounter with Holmes' older brother Mycroft, of whom Holmes says, "If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from any armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived". This collection includes some of the detective's greatest cases, such as 'Silver Blaze' and 'The Naval Treaty', and even one case which Holmes fails to solve. Edited with an introduction by Jarlath Killeen, this volume examines Holmes as a safeguard against social breakdown and chaos, as well as an agent of justice and goodness against the forces of evil. It also situates the collection in the growth of life writing in the period, and explores the ways in which Holmes became increasingly 'real' to readers as more details about his personality and biography are revealed in the stories. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Oscar Wilde's two collections of children's literature, The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), have often been marginalised in critical accounts as their apparently conservative didacticism appears at odds with the characterisation of Wilde as an amoral aesthete. In this, the first full-length study of Wilde's fairy tales for children, Jarlath Killeen argues that Wilde's stories are neither uniformly conservative nor subversive, but a blend of both. Killeen contends that while they should be read in relation to a literary tradition of fairy tales that emerged in nineteenth century Europe; Irish issues heavily influenced the work. These issues were powerfully shaped by the 'folk Catholicism' Wilde encountered in the west of Ireland. By resituating the fairy tales in a complex nexus of theological, political, social, and national concerns, Killeen restores the tales to their proper place in the Wilde canon.

This book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses on different varieties of the child found in the work of a range of Irish Protestant writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. The book is structured around a detailed examination of six 'versions' of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the political child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the freakish child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children's bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries. Examines a broad range of texts, including well-known canonical texts, such as Gulliver's Travels, neglected fiction, such as Stephen Cullen's The Haunted Priory, and little studied genres, such as catechisms and children's bibles

History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914 is a detailed and accessible study of Gothic literature in the nineteenth century. It examines how the themes and tropes associated with the early Gothic novel were diffused widely in many different genres in the Victorian period, including the ghost story, the regional novel, children's literature and the realist novel. It looks in particular at how the Gothic attempted to resolve the psychological and theological problems thrown up by the modernization and secularization of British society. The book argues that the fetishized figure of the child came to stand for what many believed was being lost by the headlong rush into a technological and industrial future. The relationship between regionalism and horror is examined, the use of the occult in the Gothic is detailed and the book demonstrates that, far from being a simple rejection or acceptance of secularization, the Gothic attempts to articulate an entirely different way of being modern.

Best known for his Gothic masterpiece Uncle Silas and the vampire story Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was a prolific writer whose extensive body of work included historical, sensation and horror novels, poems and ballads, numerous stories of the supernatural, journalism and a verse-drama. While his name is well known to aficionados of the horror genre, much of his work still remains in the shadows. Indeed, despite his vampire creation, Carmilla, being the best-known female blood-sucker in the world, and despite an enormous scholarly and popular interest in the novella in which this character first appeared (an interest evident in the very large number of cinematic, televisual and even new media adaptations of the story), Le Fanu himself is almost completely unknown outside of the world of Irish Gothic scholarship, and most of his fiction remains difficult to obtain or is out of print. To celebrate the bicentenary of Le Fanu's birth, this collection brings together established scholars and emerging researchers in order to shed new light on some of his less famous fiction and celebrate his influential contribution to the Gothic genre. The main aim of the collection is to read Le Fanu in the round, expanding the critical focus away from its current obsession with a small proportion of his work and taking account of the full extent of his writing, from his other Gothic novels, The Rose and the Key, Haunted Lives and A Lost Name, to his short stories and journalism. The collection also considers Le Fanu's relationship to Victorian Ireland and especially Dublin from a number of different angles, as well as addressing his status as an 'Irish' writer of substance.