Essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theater, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film, the struggles between high and popular culture, and changing attitudes towards human identity, life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

    The beauty of these stories and poems lies in their readability: ideal for sharing aloud around the campfire or for a quick, thrilling dip . . . under the covers with a flashlight. The writing itself sends as many awe-inspired shivers down the spine as do the ghosts and goblins on these pages.Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the horror story and the chiming lyric poem, opens the volume with his best-loved stories: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Black Cat," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Premature Burial," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Berenice," and "Ligeia." Every bit as chilling now as on the day they were written, these tales retain their power to stir the reader again and again. Poe, who was as well known for his poems as for his stories, is also represented by such verse standards as "The Raven," "Lenore," "To Helen," "Ulalume," and "Annabel Lee," among others.Numerous other practitioners of the supernatural story are included: Edith Wharton, with her gripping "Afterward"; Charles Dickens and his famed ghost story "The Signalman"; W. W. Jacobs, with this compilation's inspiration, "The Monkey's Paw." Also here are Saki's engrossing "Sredni Vashtar"; O. Henry's story of love lost and hopes dashed, "The Furnished Room"; Wilkie Collins's lively "A Terribly Strange Bed"; and "The Boarded Window," Ambrose Bierce's tale of the bizarre. A year-round collection for reading aloud--and frightening your friends--The Raven and the Monkey's Paw will gratify all manner of thrill-seekers.The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

    80 photos, 30 in color.

    But this was not always the popular response to murder. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen explores the changing view of murder from early New England sermons read at the public execution of murderers, through the nineteenth century, when secular and sensational accounts replaced the sacred treatment of the crime, to today's true crime literature and tabloid reports.The early narratives were shaped by a strong belief in original sin and spiritual redemption, by the idea that all murders were natural manifestations of the innate depravity of humankind. In a dramatic departure from that view, the Gothic imagination--with its central conventions of the fundamental horror and mystery of the crime--seized upon the murderer as a moral monster, separated from the normal majority by an impassable gulf. Halttunen shows how this perception helped shape the modern response to criminal transgression, mandating criminal incarceration, and informing a social-scientific model of criminal deviance.The Gothic expression of horror and inhumanity is the predominant response to radical evil today; it has provided a set of conventions surrounding tales of murder that appear to be natural and instinctive, when in fact they are rooted in the nineteenth century. Halttunen's penetrating insight into her extraordinary treasure trove of creepy popular crime literature reveals how our stories have failed to make sense of the killer and how that failure has constrained our understanding and treatment of criminality today.

    Among the self-satisfied group were: Mrs Merriam, the sanctimonious shrew who was turning her husband into a nonentity and her daughter into a bigoted spinster; Mr Roberts, who found relief from the street's unending propriety in shoddy side-street amours; Miss Fielding, who considered it more important to boil an egg properly than to save a disturbed girl from destruction. It took the gruesome act of a desperate boy who lived among them to pierce the shell of their complacency and force them to see their own ugliness. HANGSAMAN is Miss Jackson's second novel. The story is a simple one but the overtones are immediately present. "Natalie Waite who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight, past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions." In a few graphic pages, the family is before us—Arnold Waite, a writer, egotistical and embittered; his wife, the complaining martyr; Bud, the younger brother who has not yet felt the need to establish his independence; and Natalie, in the nightmare of being seventeen. The Bird's Nest: Elizabeth is a demure twenty-three-year-old wiling her life away at a dull museum job, living with her neurotic aunt, and subsisting off her dead mother’s inheritance. When Elizabeth begins to suffer terrible migraines and backaches, her aunt takes her to the doctor, then to a psychiatrist. But slowly, and with Jackson’s characteristic chill, we learn that Elizabeth is not just one girl—but four separate, self-destructive personalities. The Bird’s Nest, Jackson’s third novel, develops hallmarks of the horror master’s most unsettling work: tormented heroines, riveting familial mysteries, and a disquieting vision inside the human mind.

    Each neatly laid out plot, each lichen-dotted headstone, each lovingly crafted monument, is a representation of a personal history. While each cemetery has its own collection of stories to tell, Bonaventure Cemetery has more stories than most. For more than 150 years, citizens of Savannah have buried their loved ones at Bonaventure Cemetery. Among its grounds, monuments bearing the names of such famous people as Johnny Mercer lie alongside markers bearing names of those known only to their family. Bonaventure's stately beauty seems the perfect setting for a cemetery. Historic Bonaventure Cemetery illustrates the development of Bonaventure as a Victorian-style cemetery and the transformation from a private estate to a public cemetery. Historic Bonaventure Cemetery, the first book solely about Bonaventure, includes images of Bonaventure and Greenwich--the two plantations that became Bonaventure--and provides information about the people and the monuments there.

    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.

    . . .If you're interestedin birds, trees, rivers,try reference books.Don't read my poems.I'm no indexed bird,tree or river,just a registered Self.

    But what exactly does Gothic mean? How does it differ from terror or horror, and where do its parameters lie? Through a wide and eclectic range of brief essays written by leading scholars, The Handbook to Gothic Literature provides a virtual encyclopedia of things Gothic. From the Demonic to the Uncanny, the Bronte sisters to Melville, this volume plots the characteristics of Gothic's vastly different schools and manifestations, offering a comprehensive guide of Gothic writing and culture.Among the many topics and literary figures discussed are: American Gothic, Ambrose Bierce, the Bronte Sisters, Angela Carter, the Demonic, Female Gothic, the Frenetique School, Ghost Stories, Gothic Film, the Graveyard School, Horror, Imagination, Washington Irving, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, Madness, Herman Melville, Monstrosity, Occultism, Orientalism, Post-Colonial Gothic, Anne Radcliffe, Anne Rice, Romanticism, Sado-Masochism, Mary and P. B. Shelley, Bram Stoker, the Sublime, the Uncanny, Vampires, Werewolves, Oscar Wilde, and Zerrissenheit.

    Intent on reclaiming his past and the home he no longer knows, the determined earl finds that every shadow hides a secret and every face a falsehood--until he finds the truth in the eyes, and the kiss, of the governess, Miss Travers.

    However, the twelve stories in this collection well justify a place alongside those written by E. F. Benson, A. M. Burrage, H. R. Wakefield, and Eleanor Scott, and their author, Margery Lawrence, possessed a story-telling skill comparable to each of those more famous writers.The collection is formed by the narrations of members of a dining club, hosted by Saunderson, a man who undoubtedly had a liking for congenial, interesting company. Lawrence writes that 'the one unspoken rule, the Open Sesame to dine at Fat Frank Saunderson's, was to come armed with a story worth hearing . . . The rarer and more curious the better.' Prior to the Ash-Tree Press edition in 1998, these 'rare and curious' tales last appeared in print in 1947, and readers can now once more share and enjoy the stories of Hellier, Vesey, Lutyens, Otway, Ponting, Denison, and all the others who shared the hospitality of Saunderson.Margery Lawrence's narrative style will transport the reader to the comfortable, club-style atmosphere of a dining club of the 1920s. Her stories entertain, chill, even horrify—for here are twelve strange tales, undeservedly neglected tales, that deserve their place alongside the very best that the genre has to offer.

    This story involves a mysterious suicide; a power-mad Tory MP; a sinister, hidden laboratory; hints of child sexual abuse; and the legend of Everard Trevellyan, a medieval ogre whose spirit still seems to be abroad in the parish.

    Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Brontes to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class.Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as "victim feminism," arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that "professional femininity"--a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions--best prepared them for social survival. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters--and readers--fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system.Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.

    Through an analysis of the work of Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin and Woolf, Carolyn Dever discusses this apparent paradox. She shows how the idealized dead mother is fundamental to the Victorians' idea of origins, and later becomes the central figure of Freudian psychoanalysis. Dever demonstrates that Victorian literature and psychoanalysis have much to teach us about each other.