By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American hard-boiled crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Cultures breathes new life into staple themes of crime fiction and cinema. Leading international scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies analyze a range of literature and film, from neglected examples of film noir and true crime , crime fiction by female African American writers, to reality TV, recent films such as Elephant, Collateral and The Departed, and contemporary fiction by J. G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. They offer groundbreaking interpretations of new elements such as the mythology of the hitman, technology and the image, and the cultural impact of senseless murders and reveal why crime is a powerful way of making sense of the broader concerns shaping modern culture and society.

Focusing on the work of the aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee, this collection offers a wide range of critical writings that reflect the diversity of Lee's own interests. Organized in a broadly chronological order these essays examine key pieces in Lee's oeuvre, offering original approaches to a number of Lee's works including "Euphorion," "Hauntings: Fantastic Stories," "Prince Albert and the Lady Snake," "Louis Norbert," "The Ballet of the Nations," "The Handling of Words," and "Music and Its Lovers." The book will also shed new light on Lee's relationship with contemporaries such as her brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton, her friend and mentor Walter Pater, and the art historian and fellow intellectual Bernard Berenson.

This volume marks the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siecle. At the end of the nineteenth-century, the move towards new models of economic thought marked the transition from a marketplace centred around the fulfilment of 'needs' to one ministering to anything that might, potentially, be desired. This collection considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Drawing on theoretical and conceptual approaches including queer theory, feminist theory, and gift theory, contributors offer original analyses of work by canonical and lesser-known writers, including Oscar Wilde, A.E. Housman, Baron Corvo, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Lucas Malet. The collection builds on recent critical developments in fin-de-siecle literature (including major interventions in the areas of Decadence, sexuality, and gender studies) and asks, for instance, how did late nineteenth-century writing schematise the libidinal and somatic dimensions of economic exchange? How might we define the relationship between eroticism and the formal economies of literary production/performance? And what relation exists between advertising/consumer culture and (dissident) sexuality in fin-de-siecle literary discourses? This book marks an important contribution to 19th-Century and Victorian literary studies, and enhances the field of fin-de-siecle studies more generally.

In her persuasively argued study, Patricia Pulham astutely combines psychoanalytic theory with socio-historical criticism to examine a selection of fantastic tales by the female aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). Lee's own definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is not found in the Society of Psychical Research but in our own psyches, where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D.W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Pulham argues that the prevalence of the past in Lee's tales signifies not only an historical but a psychic past. Thus the 'ghosts' that haunt Lee's supernatural fiction, as well as her aesthetic, psychological, and historical writings, held complex meanings for her that were fundamental to her intellectual development and allowed her to explore alternative identities that permit the expression of transgressive sexualities.

Specially commissioned essays offer revisionary readings of canonical poets and bring into focus rediscovered writers. The specially commissioned essays in Victorian Women Poets, written by scholars from Britain and North America, offer revisionary readings of canonical poets and bring into focus re-discovered writers. The volume both engages critically with the political and aesthetic agenda behind the project of recovery, and also presents a pioneering approach to reading poets who have slipped out of the canon. The work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and ChristinaRossetti is re-assessed and given surprising and innovative literary, political and intellectual contexts that will change the way we interpret their poetry. Writers of emerging significance, such as Theodosia Garrow Trollope, Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field and Margaret Veley, are given prominence in groundbreaking analysis that situates their writing within the wider debates of the period. The themes interwoven throughout the essays - literary history and canonicity, political poetics, nationhood, print culture, and genre - provide a radically new understanding of Victorian women's poetry that maps an agenda for future research. JOSEPH BRISTOW, SUSAN BROWN, GLENNIS BYRON, ALISON CHAPMAN, NATALIE M. HOUSTON, MICHELE MARTINEZ, PATRICIA PULHAM, MARJORIE STONE. ALISON CHAPMAN lectures in English literature at the University of Glasgow.

In her persuasively argued study, Patricia Pulham astutely combines psychoanalytic theory with socio-historical criticism to examine a selection of fantastic tales by the female aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). Lee's own definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is not found in the Society of Psychical Research but in our own psyches, where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D.W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Pulham argues that the prevalence of the past in Lee's tales signifies not only an historical but a psychic past. Thus the 'ghosts' that haunt Lee's supernatural fiction, as well as her aesthetic, psychological, and historical writings, held complex meanings for her that were fundamental to her intellectual development and allowed her to explore alternative identities that permit the expression of transgressive sexualities.

SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY PRICE! (Valid until three months after publication.) Since its advent in the 1840s, modern spiritualism has been a topic of popular interest and critical scrutiny. Spiritualism gained increasing prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century, and developed as a religious movement with no defining creeds or formal doctrines, beyond the belief that the dead survived in spirit form and could communicate with the living. Scholars have noted its philosophical origins in the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg; considered its rise against the backdrop of Darwin's theory of evolution and the accompanying crisis in faith; examined the fascination of celebrated believers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William James, and Arthur Conan Doyle; explored its potential in the context of gender and sexuality; charted its investigation by the Society for Psychical Research; and identified key periods that mark a rise in spiritualist activity. The history of spiritualist belief and practice has been the subject of extensive debate (see, for example, Routledge's eight-volume collection, The Rise of Victorian Spiritualism (2001) (978-0-415-23640-9), edited by Bob Gilbert). Similarly, considerable research has been devoted to the question of Spiritualism and gender (explored in the Routledge/Edition Synapse two-volume collection, Women, Spiritualism, and Madness (2003) (978-0-415-27633-7), edited by Bridget Bennett, Helen Nicholson, and Roy Porter). Complementing those earlier collections, this new four-volume set demonstrates spiritualism's hugely significant-but hitherto often neglected-contemporary engagement with questions of race, eugenics, and the body, and with anti-spiritualist critique. Moreover, as spiritualism is commonly identified as a predominantly Victorian-and western-phenomenon, little has been done better to understand spiritualism in its global and temporal contexts. Furthermore, while numerous studies of spiritualism in canonical Victorian literature exist, the movement's own rich literary output and its relationship with the non-spiritualist gothic remain underexplored. Indeed, despite the explosion of scholarly interest in modern spiritualism across a wide range of disciplines, almost none of the movement's key philosophical, literary, political, and medical texts are currently in print. The learned editors of this collection have remedied these imbalances and Spiritualism, 1840-1930 offers access to a wide range of materials from an important period in spiritualism's history, including previously unpublished material relating to Arthur Conan Doyle's investment in spiritualism and transcriptions of the Henri Louis Rey seances in New Orleans (the only entirely African-American nineteenth-century spiritualist circle whose records have been preserved). The collection focuses on key topics and situates inaccessible primary sources alongside better-known works to posit their importance in the development of spiritualism as a social, cultural, and transatlantic phenomenon. Making readily available materials which are currently very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use, Spiritualism, 1840-1930 is a veritable treasure-trove. The gathered materials are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to texts and permitting citation to the original pagination. Each volume is also supplemented by a substantial introduction, newly written by the editors, which contextualizes the material and steers readers towards significant secondary sources. And with a full index and a detailed appendix providing data on the provenance of the gathered works, the collection is destined to be welcomed as a vital research and reference resource.

This book argues that, in Victorian literature, desires which cannot be openly acknowledged are often buried and encrypted in the marble bodies of statues. Examining sculpture's ubiquity in Victorian galleries and museums Pulham observes that, while touch is prohibited in these cultural locations, Victorian texts offer 'safe' spaces where statues may be kissed or caressed using metaphors of tactility that work at the intersections of touch and vision to permit the recovery of forbidden love.

This volume marks the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siecle. At the end of the nineteenth-century, the move towards new models of economic thought marked the transition from a marketplace centred around the fulfilment of 'needs' to one ministering to anything that might, potentially, be desired. This collection considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Drawing on theoretical and conceptual approaches including queer theory, feminist theory, and gift theory, contributors offer original analyses of work by canonical and lesser-known writers, including Oscar Wilde, A.E. Housman, Baron Corvo, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Lucas Malet. The collection builds on recent critical developments in fin-de-siecle literature (including major interventions in the areas of Decadence, sexuality, and gender studies) and asks, for instance, how did late nineteenth-century writing schematise the libidinal and somatic dimensions of economic exchange? How might we define the relationship between eroticism and the formal economies of literary production/performance? And what relation exists between advertising/consumer culture and (dissident) sexuality in fin-de-siecle literary discourses? This book marks an important contribution to 19th-Century and Victorian literary studies, and enhances the field of fin-de-siecle studies more generally.

Vernon Lee writes in the Preface to Hauntings, "My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts... of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own." First published in 1890, Lee's most famous volume of supernatural tales occupies a special place in the literature of the fantastic for its treatment of the femme fatale and the allure of the past, along with the themes of thwarted artistic creativity and psychological obsession. This collection, which includes the four stories originally published in Hauntings and three others, enables readers to consider Lee's work anew for its subtle redefinitions of gender and sexuality during the Victorian fin-de-siecle. The appendices, which include extensive excerpts from writings by Lee's predecessors and peers, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Lee's brother Eugene Lee-Hamilton, allow the reader to see how Lee takes on the themes and preoccupations of the late-Victorian period but adapts them to her own purposes.

By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American 'hard-boiled' crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Culture breathes new life into staple themes of crime fiction and cinema. Leading international scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies analyze a range of literature and film, from neglected examples of film noir and 'true crime', crime fiction by female African American writers, to reality TV, recent films such as Elephant, Collateral and The Departed, and contemporary fiction by J. G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. They offer groundbreaking interpretations of new elements such as the mythology of the hitman, technology and the image, and the cultural impact of 'senseless' murders and reveal why crime is a powerful way of making sense of the broader concerns shaping modern culture and society.

Explores Victorian writers' erotic investment in statues Theorises the function of the sculptural body in Victorian poetry and prose Offers thorough readings of sculpture in Victorian texts and contexts Examines a wide range of works by well-known and lesser-known writers of the period (e.g. Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Olive Custance, Arthur O'Shaughnessy) Extends the British focus to encompass nineteenth-century European and American writings This book argues that, in Victorian literature, transgressive desires that cannot be openly acknowledged are often buried and encrypted in the marble bodies of statues. Examining sculpture's ubiquity in Victorian galleries and museums, Pulham observes that while touch is prohibited in these cultural locations Victorian texts offer 'safe' spaces where sculptures may be kissed or caressed using metaphors of tactility that work at the intersections of touch and vision and permit the recovery of forbidden love.