Along with Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson brought to life the monstrous nature that hides within humanity. For his masterpiece The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the clever manipulator of the dark and gothic mood revealed the duality of human nature with a tale that resonates still today. This new selection gathers together 'The Body Snatcher', 'A Lodging for the Night', 'The Isle of Voices', 'The Bottle Imp', 'Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk', and many other chilling and thrilling stories for readers who delight in the shadows and the mysterious. The Flame Tree Gothic Fantasy, Classic Stories and Epic Tales collections bring together the entire range of myth, folklore and modern short fiction. Highlighting the roots of suspense, supernatural, science fiction and mystery stories, the books in Flame Tree Collections series are beautifully presented, perfect as a gift and offer a lifetime of reading pleasure.

The papers collected in this volume were first presented at the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Bergamo, 2006). Alongside studies of syntax, morphology, lexis and semantics, published in two sister volumes, many innovative contributions focused on geo-historical variation in English. A carefully peer-reviewed selection, including two plenary lectures, appears here in print for the first time, bearing witness to the increasing scholarly interest in varieties of English other than so-called standard English. In all the contributions, well-established methods of historical dialectology combine with new theoretical approaches, in an attempt to shed more light on phenomena that have hitherto remained unexplored, or have only just begun to be investigated. Perceptual dialectology is also taken into consideration, and state-of-the-art tools, such as electronic corpora and atlases, are employed consistently, ensuring the methodological homogeneity of the contributions.

This volume presents the results of a research team of the University of Bergamo, whose aim was the analysis of verbal modality in the Helsinki corpus. This corpus includes a large selection of texts compiled in Middle English and Early Modern En