It is goodbye to a Berlin wild, wicked, breathtaking, decadent beyond belief and already -- in the years between the wars -- welcoming death in through the door, though more with a wink than a whimper.~from the back cover

    By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is - just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

    Lovecraft (1890-1937), the most important American supernaturalist since Poe, has had an incalculable influence on all the horror-story writing of recent decades. Altho his supernatural fiction has been enjoying an unprecedented fame, it's not widely known that he wrote a critical history of supernatural horror in literature that has yet to be superceded as the finest historical discussion of the genre. This work is presented in this volume in its final, revised text. With incisive power, Lovecraft here formulates the esthetics of supernatural horror & summarizes the range of its literary expression from primitive folklore to the tales of his own 20th-century masters. Following a discussiom of terror-literature in ancient, medieval & renaissance culture, he launches on a critical survey of the whole history of horror fiction from the Gothic school of the 18th century (when supernatural horror found its own genre) to the time of De la Mare & M.R. James. The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, Vathek Charles Brockden Brown, Melmoth the Wanderer, Frankenstein, Bulwer-Lytton, Fouqué's Undine, Wuthering Heights, Poe (full chapter), The House of the Seven Gables, de Maupassant's The Horla, Bierce, The Turn of the Screw , M.P. Shiel, W.H. Hodgson, Machen, Blackwood & Dunsany are among those discussed in depth. He also notices a host of lesser writers--enough to draw up an extensive reading list. By charting so completely the background for his own concepts of horror & literary techniques, Lovecraft throws light on his own fiction as well as on the horror-literature which has followed. For this reason this book will be especially intriguing to those who've read his fiction as an isolated phenomenon. Any searching for a guide thru the inadequately marked region of literary horror, need search no further. Unabridged & corrected republication of 1945 edition. New introduction by E.F. Bleiler.

    Have you read 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place'?... It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written..."

    Pater was shocked at the reaction his book inspired: 'I wish they would not call me a hedonist, it gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know Greek.'.The book had begun as a series of idiosyncratic, impressionistic critical essays on those artists that embodied for him the spirit of the Renaissance; by collecting them and adding his infamous Conclusion, Pater gained a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. But The Renaissance survives as one of the most innovative pieces of cultural criticism to emerge from the nineteenth century.

    The names of characters recur throughout the stories, and the stories reference each other (for example, "everything continues as in 'A'"), challenging narrative conventions. In addition, the story explores themes of domesticity, welfare, and success.

    The owls, hen, larks, and their nests in his beard, are among the fey fauna and peculiar persons inhabiting the uniquely inspired nonsense rhymes and drawings of Lear (20th child of a London stockbroker), whose Book of Nonsense, first published in 1846, stands alone as the ultimate and most loved expression in English of freewheeling, benign, and unconstricted merriment.

    The heart of this collection is Gaskell's novella Cousin Phillis, a lyrical masterpiece that depicts a vanishing way of life and a girl's disappointment in love: deceptively simple, its undercurrent of feeling leaves an indelible impression. The other five stories in this selection range from a quietly original tale of urban poverty and a fallen woman to an historical tale in which echoes of the French Revolution, the bleakness of winter in Westmorland, and a tragic secret are brought vividly to life. Heather Glen's illuminating introduction is the first to offer extended consideration of Gaskell as a writer of short stories, discussing Gaskell's pre-eminent role in developing the genre and setting each story in the context of their original periodical publication. The volume includes a chronology, bibliography, and invaluable notes. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

    It relates the tale of Grettir, an eleventh-century warrior struggling to hold on to the values of a heroic age becoming eclipsed by Christianity and a more pastoral lifestyle. Unable to settle into a community of farmers, Grettir becomes the aggressive scourge of both honest men and evil monsters - until, following a battle with the sinister ghost Glam, he is cursed to endure a life of tortured loneliness away from civilisation, fighting giants, trolls and berserks. A mesmerising combination of pagan ideals and Christian faith, this is a profoundly moving conclusion to the Golden Age of the saga writing.

    One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth."The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself." —From the new Preface

    An invaluable resource for scholars and students of all backgrounds, and especially to Muslims who want to deepen their understanding of their own tradition, The Study Quran is a much-needed guide in a time when confusion about the Quran and Islam is so prevalent.

    -- Alan Dundes. Propp's work is seminal...[and], now that it is available in a new edition, should be even more valuable to folklorists who are directing their attention to the form of the folktale, especially to those structural characteristics which are common to many entries coming from even different cultures. -- Choice

    The close relationship between theater and society during the period continues to be the focus of Contexts. The editor offers contemporary discussions of the following topics: On Wit, Humour, and Laughter: 1660 1775, The Collier Controversy: 1698, Steele and Dennis: On The Man of Mode and The Conscious Lovers, and Stages, Actors, and Audiences. Criticism has been revised to reflect approaches in scholarly interpretations. Two seminal essays from the First Edition have been retained Charles Lamb s appreciation of the period s comedy and L. C. Knights s condemnation of it. New essays by Jocelyn Powell, Harriet Hawkins, Elin Diamond, Martin Price, and Laura Brown have been added."

    The text of Leaves of Grass is again that of the indispensable "Reader's Comprehensive Edition," edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, which is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations. New to this edition is the full text of the celebrated 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass, as well as generous excerpts from Whitman's two prose masterpieces, Democratic Vistas and Specimen Days.Following the texts is an album of portraits of Whitman, as well as "Whitman on His Art," a collection of Whitman's statements about his role as a poet taken from his notebooks, letters, conversations, and newspaper articles.While continuing to provide leading commentary on Whitman by major twentieth-century poets and critics, among them D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Randall Jarrell, this revised edition adds important commentary by Whitman contemporaries Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Fern, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde, among others. An entirely new section of recent criticism includes six essays--by David S. Reynolds, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, John Irwin, Allen Grossman, Betsy Erkkila, and Michael Moon--that reflect both the continuing historicist mainstream of Whitman literary interpretation and influential recent work in gender and sexuality studies.The volume also includes a Chronology, a Selected Bibligraphy, and an Index of Titles.