A published version has been keenly awaited ever since the lectures were given, and Berlin had always hoped to complete a book based on them. But despite extensive further work this hope was not fulfilled, and the present volume is an edited transcript of his spoken words.For Berlin, the Romantics set in motion a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity's view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notions of objective truth and validity in ethics with incalculable, all-pervasive results. As he said of the Romantics elsewhere: The world has never been the same since, and our politics and morals have been deeply transformed by them. Certainly this has been the most radical, and indeed dramatic, not to say terrifying, change in men's outlook in modern times.In these brilliant lectures Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define Romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how its lasting legacy permeates our own outlook. Combining the freshness and immediacy of the spoken word with Berlin's inimitable eloquence and wit, the lectures range over a cast of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, Schlegel, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. Berlin argues that the ideas and attitudes held by these and other figures helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals, individual self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art. This is the record of an intellectual bravura performance--of one of the century's most influential philosophers dissecting and assessing a movement that changed the course of history.

    Nicholas became Tsar at the age of 26. Though a conscientious man who was passionate in his devotion to his country, he was weak, sentimental, dogmatic and indecisive. Ironically he could have made an effective constitutional monarch, but these flaws rendered him fatally unsuited to be the sole ruler of a nation that was in the throes of painful modernisation. That he failed is not surprising, for many abler monarchs could not have succeeded. Rather to be wondered at is that he managed, for 23 years, to hold on to power despite the overwhelming force of circumstances. Though Nicholas was exasperating, he had many endearing qualities. A modern audience, aware - as contemporaries were not - of the private pressures under which he lived, can empathise with him and forgive some of his errors of judgement. To some readers he seems a fool, to others a monster, but many are touched by the story of a well-meaning man doing his best under impossible conditions. He is, in other words, a biographical subject that engages readers whatever their viewpoint. His family was of great importance to Nicholas. He and his wife, Alexandra, married for love and retained this affection to the end of their lives. His four daughters, all different and intriguing personalities, were beautiful and charming. His son, the family's - and the nation's - hope for the future, was disabled by an illness that had to be concealed from Russia and from the world. It was this circumstance that made possible the nefarious influence of Rasputin, which in turn hastened the end of the dynasty.This story has everything: romance and tragedy, grandeur and misery, human frailty and an international catastrophe that would not only bring down the Tsar but put an end to the glittering era of European monarchies.

    In Bakhtin's view, the spirit of laughter and irreverence prevailing at carnival time is the dominant quality of Rabelais's art. The work of both Rabelais and Bakhtin springs from an age of revolution, and each reflects a particularly open sense of the literary text. For both, carnival, with its emphasis on the earthly and the grotesque, signified the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture and the assertion of popular renewal. Bakhtin evokes carnival as a special, creative life form, with its own space and time.Written in the Soviet Union in the 1930s at the height of the Stalin era but published there for the first time only in 1965, Bakhtin's book is both a major contribution to the poetics of the novel and a subtle condemnation of the degeneration of the Russian revolution into Stalinist orthodoxy. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

    Tolkien and C. S. Lewis C.S. Lewis is the twentieth century’s most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis’s Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times.In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings’ lives and works. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis's favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow's chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of "supernatural shockers," and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant.Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years--and did so in dazzling style.

    She delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject.

    Rare book dealer, academic, publisher, critic, bibliographer, and broadcaster, his BBC Radio series Rare Books, Rare People was acclaimed by The Daily Telegraph as 'one of the gems of Radio 4'. In Tolkien's Gown, a book based loosely on that hugely successful radio series, he discusses twenty great works of modern literature as both texts and objects. At once erudite and funny, the essays give a publishing biography of each book, together with comments about the author's involvement with first editions of the works. 'What is the value of a book?' he asks. The answers are both critical and financial, involving appraisals of the literary qualities of the works, together with an account of their (sometimes surprising) value in the rare book trade. His stories are fascinating and diverse, and involve memorable encounters with, among others, Graham Greene, William Golding, J.D. Salinger, Ted Hughes, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes and Harold Pinter. Relations between book dealers and authors can be uneasy: J.D. author, Ted Hughes thinks he has been overcharged. While Graham Greene is simply delighted to have done business. For anyone who loves books, Tolkien's Gown offers a wealth of amusement and instruction, and enough literary anecdotes to last a lifetime.

    Arnold seeks to find out what culture really is, what good it can do, and if it is really necessary. He contrasts culture, which he calls the study of perfection, with anarchy, the mood of unrest and uncertainty that pervaded mid-Victorian England. This edition reproduces the original book version, revealing the immediate historical context and controversy of the piece. The introduction and notes broaden out the interpretative approach to Arnold's text, elaborating on the complexities of the religious context. The book also reinforces the continued importance of Arnold's ideas its influences in the face of the challenges of multi-culturalism and post-modernism.

    In 1981, years before he sat down to tackle On Writing, Stephen King decided to address the topic of what makes horror horrifying and what makes terror terrifying. Here, in ten brilliantly written chapters, King delivers one colorful observation after another about the great stories, books, and films that comprise the horror genre—from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Exorcist, The Twilight Zone, and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.With the insight and good humor his fans appreciated in On Writing, Danse Macabre is an enjoyably entertaining tour through Stephen King’s beloved world of horror.

    He insists that such a move could bring new luster to a tired field, one that in some respects is among “the most backwards disciplines in the academy.” Literary study, he argues, has been random and unsystematic. For any given period scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture.Moretti offers bar charts, maps, and time lines instead, developing the idea of “distant reading,” set forth in his path-breaking essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, where the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres—the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel—as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.

    It once appeared on the Berlin Wall, and symbolizes the subversive nature of 2000AD that changed so many readers’ lives and influenced generations of film directors, actors, rock bands, novelists and even school headmasters.Everything you’ve always wanted to know about Judge Dredd, Slaine, Nemesis, ABC Warriors, Flesh, Bill Savage and more, is in this book. Plus the writers and artists who created them and the real-life people and events they drew on for inspiration. The scandals, the back-stabbing and the shocking story that was regarded as “too sensitive” to ever see the light of day is finally told.Pat relates the dark story of the maths teacher who inspired his version of Judge Dredd, the creators’ angry battles with the censors and each other, why certain writers, stories and even readers have been banished from the comic, a step-by-step account of how Judge Dredd was created, and how to write or draw for 2000AD too.There are new insights on the 2000AD creators' invasion of American comics, their failed French invasion, the Judge Dredd films, the forthcoming Judge Dredd TV series, other possible films featuring 2000AD heroes, the unusual secret of the comic’s current success, the tough challenges it faces today, and its exciting future.From the hilarious origins when Judge Dredd writer-creator John Wagner and Pat began their careers writing together in a garden shed by paraffin lamp, to the tragic stories of legendary comic artists who have passed, and the challenges as 2000AD fought for survival against The Suits determined to destroy it, this is a unique, personal, and passionate account by the man who made 2000AD happen.Funny, sad, angry, defiant, and outrageous: it’s the Comic Book memoir of the year!

    Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text.Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television."We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect.The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance.These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination.In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

    Going beyond previous traditional biographies which have traced Austen's daily life from Steventon to Bath to Chawton to Winchester, Byrne's portrait-organized thematically and drawn from the most up-to-date scholarship and unexplored sources-explores the lives of Austen's extended family, friends, and acquaintances. Through their absorbing stories we view Austen on a much wider stage and discover unexpected aspects of her life and character. Byrne transports us to different worlds-the East Indies and revolutionary Paris-and different events-from a high society scandal to a petty case of shoplifting, She follows Austen on her extensive travels, setting her in contexts both global and English, urban and rural, political and historical, social and domestic-wider perspectives of vital and still under-estimated importance to her creative life.Literary scholarship has revealed that letters and tokens in Austen's novel's often signal key turning points in the unfolding narrative. This groundbreaking biography explores Jane's own story following the same principle. As Byrne reveals, small things in the writer's world-a scrap of paper, a simple gold chain, an ivory miniature, a bathing machine-hold significance in her emotional and artistic development. The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things introduces us to a woman deeply immersed in the world around her, yet far ahead of her time in her independence and ambition; to an author who was an astute commentator on human nature and the foibles of her own age. Rich and compelling, it is a fresh, insightful, and often surprising portrait of an artist and a vivid evocation of the complex world that shaped her.

    One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon.For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."

    She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

    Get swept back to a time when sheriffs did their best to keep order in a lawless land. Read about the likes of Tom Horn, the “Apache Kid,” “Bucky” O’Neill, Tom Nickson, and many more!  Famous Sheriffs and Western Outlaws is a classic for everyone interested in history and what is was like in the Old West. The detail of every story grabs the attention of the reader and doesn't let go. Learn the early stories of famous foes like Billy the Kid and what he was like from both a personal and business standpoint. If you like stories of heroes and the people who tried to take them down, then you are in for a wild ride.  Novelist William MacLeod Raine recalls standoffs, shootouts, rowdy saloons, brave men who protected innocent townspeople, and villains who put the “wild” in Wild West. Famous Sheriffs and Western Outlaws is a sure shot for anyone interested in the history and romance of the Old West.