Stacey Abbott In 1896, French magician and filmmaker George Méliès brought forth the first celluloid vampire in his film Le manoir du diable. The vampire continues to be one of film's most popular gothic monsters and in fact, today more people become acquainted with the vampire through film than through literature, such as Bram Stoker's classic Dracula. How has this long legacy of celluloid vampires affected our understanding of vampire mythology? And how has the vampire morphed from its folkloric and literary origins?

In this entertaining and absorbing work, Stacey Abbott challenges the conventional interpretation of vampire mythology and argues that the medium of film has completely reinvented the vampire archetype. Rather than representing the primitive and folkloric, the vampire has come to embody the very experience of modernity. No longer in a cape and coffin, today's vampire resides in major cities, listens to punk music, embraces technology, and adapts to any situation. Sometimes she's even female.

With case studies of vampire classics such as Nosferatu, Martin, Blade, and Habit, the author traces the evolution of the American vampire film, arguing that vampires are more than just blood-drinking monsters; they reflect the cultural and social climate of the societies that produce them, especially during times of intense change and modernization. Abbott also explores how independent filmmaking techniques, special effects makeup, and the stunning and ultramodern computer-generated effects of recent films have affected the representation of the vampire in film.

M. H. Abrams

Alison Adburgham

Nancy Armstrong Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic case histories and theories of reading, Armstrong shows that the emergence of a particular form of female subjectivity capable of reigning over the household paved the way for the establishment of institutions which today are accepted centers of political power. Neither passive subjects nor embattled rebels, the middle-class women who were authors and subjects of the major tradition of British fiction were among the forgers of a new form of power that worked in, and through, their writing to replace prevailing notions of "identity" with a gender-determined subjectivity. Examining the works of such novelists as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Brontes, she reveals the ways in which these authors rewrite the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to create the historical context through which modern institutional power would seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore to be desired.

Bill Ashcroft The experience of colonialization and the challenges of the post-colonial world have produced an explosion of powerful new writing in cultures as diverse as India, Australia, the West Indies, Africa and Canada. This comprehensive study opens debates about the interrelationships of these literatures, and investigates the powerful forces acting on language in the post-colonial text.

Peter Bailey

Mikhail Bakhtin Intended for those interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

George L. Barnett

Pierre Bayard

John Bayley

John Bayley

R.T. Davies and B.G. Beatty

Gillian Beer

Miles Franklin Jill Roe Margaret Bettison

Christel van Boheemen

M.C. Bradbrook

A. C. Bradley

R F Brissenden

Homer Obed Brown

Jenni Calder

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino Translated from the Italian by Tim Parks, "The Road to San Giovanni" is a posthumously published collection of five autobiographical essays by one of the masters of Italian literature, ranging from a lyrical portrait of the author's relationship with his father to a perceptive essay on his own youthful obsession with the cinema.

Italo; Creagh, Patrick (translation) Calvino

Laura Claridge

Norma Clarke An investigation into the lives and writings of six leading female authors Johnson knew: Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Thrale, Hannah More and Fanny Burney. It explores their relationships with Johnson, each other, and the world of letters.

Stephen Copley

M. Couturier An examination of the novel from Richardson to Nabokov in relation to the printing and publishing industry. Blending literary theory with a historical analysis of communications, Couturier carries the debate of the novel beyond the pioneering work of Booth and Genette, while responding to and taking issue with the writings of Foucault, Baudrillard, McLuhan and Barthes. Barthes' famous assertion of "the death of the author" has led to novels being treated as nothing more than a semiotic object - a bundle of signs, independent of authorial intention.

Christina Crosby

Amy Cruse

Margaret Dalziel

John F. Danby

Richard Davenport-Hines Beginning with the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631, an event so powerful it created a new landscape and inspired the desolate and savage paintings of Salvator Rosa, Richard Davenport-Hines traces the evolution of the gothic imagination. This revelatory history ranges through art, architecture, gardening, literature, photography, filmmaking, music, and clothing design, and takes in artists and creations as various as Byron, Horace Walpole, Goya, Frankenstein's monster, Edgar Allan Poe, Jackson Pollock, David Lynch, The Terminator, and The Cure.

Jessica Milner Davis

Martin S. Day

Guy Dicks

Michael Dirda

Umberto Eco Please add bar code

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco

Peter David Edwards

Benita Eisler

T.S. Eliot

Julie. Ellison

Malcolm Elwin

William Empson

Martin Esslin

Mary Evans

N.N. Feltes

Ruth Anita Firor, Thomas Hardy

Juliann E. Fleenor (ed.)

James G. Frazer Before Joseph Campbell became the world's most famous practitioner of comparative mythology, there was Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was originally published in two volumes in 1890, but Frazer became so enamored of his topic that over the next few decades he expanded the work sixfold, then in 1922 cut it all down to a single thick edition suitable for mass distribution. The thesis on the origins of magic and religion that it elaborates "will be long and laborious," Frazer warns readers, "but may possess something of the charm of a voyage of discovery, in which we shall visit many strange lands, with strange foreign peoples, and still stranger customs." Chief among those customs—at least as the book is remembered in the popular imagination—is the sacrificial killing of god-kings to ensure bountiful harvests, which Frazer traces through several cultures, including in his elaborations the myths of Adonis, Osiris, and Balder.

While highly influential in its day, The Golden Bough has come under harsh critical scrutiny in subsequent decades, with many of its descriptions of regional folklore and legends deemed less than reliable. Furthermore, much of its tone is rooted in a philosophy of social Darwinism—sheer cultural imperialism, really—that finds its most explicit form in Frazer's rhetorical question: "If in the most backward state of human society now known to us we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of the world have also at some period of their history passed through a similar intellectual phase?" (The truly civilized races, he goes on to say later, though not particularly loudly, are the ones whose minds evolve beyond religious belief to embrace the rational structures of scientific thought.) Frazer was much too genteel to state plainly that "primitive" races believe in magic because they are too stupid and backwards to know any better; instead he remarks that "a savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural." And he certainly was not about to make explicit the logical extension of his theories——"that Christian legend, dogma, and ritual" (to quote Robert Graves's summation of Frazer in The White Goddess) "are the refinement of a great body of primitive and barbarous beliefs." Whatever modern readers have come to think of the book, however, its historical significance and the eloquence with which Frazer attempts to develop what one might call a unifying theory of anthropology cannot be denied. —Ron Hogan

Peter Freyer

Robert Garis

Rick Gekoski

Robert Giddings

Sophie Gilmartin

homer goldberg

S. L. Goldberg

Robert Graves

H. M. Green

Guinevere L. Griest

Suman Gupta

MARION HARLAND

Susan Hill This is a year of reading from home, by one of Britain's most distinguished authors. Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life. Wandering through her house that day, Hill's eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored in her home, neglected for years. "Howard's End is on the Landing" charts the journey of one of the nation's most accomplished authors as she revisits the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past that have informed a lifetime of reading and writing.

Louis James

John D. Jump

Peggy Kamuf

FREDERICK R. KARL

Frederick R. Karl

Robert Kiely

Graham Law

Q. D. Leavis

Valerie Lester

PHILIPPA LEVINE

Lawrence Lipking

Boyd Litzinger, Donald Smalley

Janet Malcolm

Philip W. Martin

F.O. Matthiessen

Jerome J. McGann

David F. Mitch

Masao Miyoshi

Ellen Moers

Toril Moi

Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody, Nicole Matthews, Nickianne Moody How do books attract their readers? This collection takes a closer look at book covers and their role in promoting sales and shaping readers' responses. "Judging a Book by Its Cover" brings together leading scholars, many with experience in the publishing industry, who examine the marketing of popular fiction across the twentieth century and beyond. Using case studies, and grounding their discussions historically and methodologically, the contributors address key themes in contemporary media, literary, publishing, and business studies related to globalisation, the correlation between text and image, identity politics, and reader reception.Topics include book covers and the internet bookstore; the links between books, the music industry, and film; literary prizes and the selling of books; subcultures and sales of young adult fiction; the cover as a signifier of literary value; and the marketing of ethnicity and lesbian pulp fiction. This exciting collection opens a new field of enquiry for scholars of book history, literature, media and communication studies, marketing, and cultural studies.

PERCY MUIR

Philip Nel

Deborah O'Keefe In this fascinating book, O'Keefe discusses more than eighty writers mostly from the past half century, and shows why their tales have proved so compelling, particularly in recent years. O'Keefe examines a wide range of children's fantasy books, and draws on her own experiences as a sympathetic reader as well as on the views of psychologists and social theorists, all in a writing style that has been described by Jane Yolen as "powerful and convincing." Readers in Wonderland ranges from William Steig's small picture books to J.R.R. Tolkien's epic series; from Utopias like L. Frank Baum's Oz to dystopias like Virginia Hamilton's Dustland; from less known works like Patricia Wrightson's to the phenomenon that is J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter; from time travel to parallel worlds; and from magical transformations and wishes that come true to lonely journeys and huge battles of good and evil. O'Keefe explains why the Harry Potter books are so popular, and why William Nicholson is the first great fantasy writer to start publishing in the twenty-first century. Writing in an informal style, she introduces the reader to many wonderful books, and provides insights into plot, character, theme and texture. In sum, she presents original ideas about individual books, about types of books, and about the world of what Dr. Seuss called "outlandish tales."

J.A. Sutherland Cedric Watts Stephen Orgel

Ronald Pearsall

Alice Hall Petry

Stephen Prickett

David Punter

Lyn Pykett

Charles R.Acland In Screen Traffic, Charles R. Acland examines how, since the mid-1980s, the U.S. commercial movie business has altered conceptions of moviegoing both within the industry and among audiences. He shows how studios, in their increasing reliance on revenues from international audiences and from the ancillary markets of television, videotape, DVD, and pay-per-view, have cultivated an understanding of their commodities as mutating global products. Consequently, the cultural practice of moviegoing has changed significantly, as has the place of the cinema in relation to other sites of leisure. Acland explores this transformation by investigating the generation and dissemination of a new understanding of Hollywood movies.

Through an innovative integration of film and cultural theory, and with close examination of promotional materials, entertainment news, trade publications, and economic reports, Acland presents an array of evidence for the new understanding of movies and moviegoing that has developed within popular culture and the entertainment industry. In particular, he dissects a key development: the rise of the megaplex, characterized by large auditoriums, plentiful screens, and consumer activities other than film viewing. He traces its genesis from the re-entry of studios into the movie exhibition business in 1986 through to 1998, when reports of the economic destabilization of exhibition began to surface, just as the rise of so-called "e-cinema" signaled another wave of change. Documenting the current tendency toward an accelerated cinema culture, one that appears to arrive simultaneously for everyone, everywhere, Screen Traffic unearths and critiques the corporate and cultural forces contributing to the "felt internationalism" of our global era.

Jean Radford

Kimberley Reynolds, Kevin McCarron, Geraldine Brennan

DeMaria, Robert Jr.

Pat Rogers

J. Dan Rothwell

Edward W. Said

Roger Sales In Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England, Roger Sales looks at Jane Austen's entire oeuves, and views her historically as a Regency writer voicing concerns on the condition of England. Examining Austen's literary works and her letters, in the context of those of other Regency women, as well as contemporary texts such as television adaptations of her work, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England reconstructs the breadth Jane Austen's writing. It also examines her representations of dandyism and masculine identities, the events of the Regency crisis of 1810-12, and the way in which Austen engaged in topical debates such as healthcare in both Emma and Persuasion.

Andrew Sanders

Jennifer Schacker

Simon Schama

Joanne Shattock

Charles J. Shields “A fine, well-rounded portrait of Harper Lee. Mockingbird is good reading.”—Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)
To Kill a Mockingbird—the twentieth century’s most widely read American novel—has sold thirty million copies and still sells a million yearly. Yet despite her book’s perennial popularity, its creator, Harper Lee, has become a somewhat mysterious figure. Now, after years of research, Charles J. Shields brings to life the warmhearted, high-spirited, and occasionally hardheaded woman who gave us two of American literature’s most unforgettable characters—Atticus Finch and his daughter, Scout.
At the center of Shields’s evocative, lively book is the story of Lee’s struggle to create her famous novel, but her colorful life contains many highlights—her girlhood as a tomboy in overalls in tiny Monroeville, Alabama; the murder trial that made her beloved father’s reputation and inspired her great work; her journey to Kansas as Truman Capote’s ally and research assistant to help report the story of In Cold Blood. Mockingbird—unique, highly entertaining, filled with humor and heart—is a wide-ranging, idiosyncratic portrait of a writer, her dream, and the place and people whom she made immortal.

Elaine Showalter

Carole G. Silver

Michael Slater

Helen Small

Robert Lance Snyder

Dale Spender

Leslie Stephen

Margaret Stonyk Many of the greatest writers in English literature lived in the nineteenth century: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Carlyle, Dickens, the Brontes, Thackeray, Shaw and Kipling are just a few. This volume provides a comprehensive chronological outline of the period with biographical information of each writer, an assessment of their works, and a discussion of literary genres or movements to which they belonged. The author shows how the great aesthetic achievements of the Romantic poem and the Victorian novel were overtaken by the complexities of a new social and industrial order, which left their status secure, but their reproduction in succeeding years impossible.

Jennifer Summit

J.A. Sutherland

Janet Todd

J. M. S. Tompkins

John Rowe Townsend

Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, Aeron Haynie Mary Elizabeth Braddon, journal editor and bestselling author of more than eighty novels during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a key figure in the Victorian literary scene. This volume brings together new essays from a variety of perspectives that illuminate both the richness of Braddon's oeuvre and the variety of critical approaches to it.

Best known as the author of Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, Braddon also wrote penny dreadfuls, realist novels, plays, short stories, reviews, and articles. The contributors move beyond her two most famous works and reflect a range of current issues and approaches, including gender, genre, imperialism, colonial reception, commodity culture, and publishing history.

George Holbert Tucker

Simon Varey

Amy Villarejo With hair slicked back and shirt collar framing her young patrician face, Katharine Hepburn’s image in the 1935 film Sylvia Scarlett was seen by many as a lesbian representation. Yet, Amy Villarejo argues, there is no final ground upon which to explain why that image of Hepburn signifies lesbian or why such a cross-dressing Hollywood fantasy edges into collective consciousness as a lesbian narrative. Investigating what allows viewers to perceive an image or narrative as "lesbian," Villarejo presents a theoretical exploration of lesbian visibility. Focusing on images of lesbians in film, she analyzes what these representations contain and their limits. She combines Marxist theories of value with poststructuralist insights to argue that lesbian visibility operates simultaneously as an achievement and a ruse, a possibility for building a new visual politics and a way of rendering static and contained what lesbian might mean.

Integrating cinema studies, queer and feminist theory, and cultural studies, Villarejo illuminates the contexts within which the lesbian is rendered visible. Toward that end, she analyzes key portrayals of lesbians in public culture, particularly in documentary film. She considers a range of films—from documentaries about Cuba and lesbian pulp fiction to Exile Shanghai and The Brandon Teena Story—and, in doing so, brings to light a nuanced economy of value and desire.

John Vincent

Geoff Ward

Marina Warner Having previously examined the role of women in fairy tales in From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner now sets out on an equally eclectic study that was originally supposed to be about men, but instead became a treatise on the grotesque. Taking on everything from Zeus to Bluebeard, from Punch to the Teletubbies, she examines the ways in which we give voice to our fears in order to master—and even mock—them. In that light, her sections on the modern cultural transformation of children themselves into "little monsters" should prove quite interesting to readers of Joseph Campbell and other scholars who take erudite approaches to pop and folk culture.

George Watson

J.R. Watson

Ian Watt

Elizabeth Webby

Norman F. Cantor and Michael S. Werthman

Raymond Wiliams

Raymond Williams

George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate (eds)

James Wood