The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. The Weird and the Eerie both fundamentally concern the outside and the unknown, which are not intrinsically horrifying, even if they are always unsettling. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie. These two modes will be analysed with reference to the work of authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christoper Nolan.

    "If America has a folksinger today he is Carl Sandburg, a singer who comes out of the prairie soil... who can hand back to the people a creation that has scraps of their own insight, humor, and imagination" (Padraic Colum).

    This selection of De Quincey's writings includes the title piece - his most famous work - as well as On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, The English Mail-Coach, and the Suspiria de Profundis.

    Here is the green and carefree world of a boy who delights in the possibilities of each day, of a child who wrings from every moment a feeling as intensely magical as it is profoundly innocent.

    In addition to its importance to the history of ideas, this 1795 essay remains relevant to our own time.Beginning with a political analysis of contemporary society — in particular, the French Revolution and its failure to implement universal freedom — Schiller observes that people cannot transcend their circumstances without education. He conceives of art as the vehicle of education, one that can liberate individuals from the constraints and excesses of either pure nature or pure mind. Through aesthetic experience, he asserts, people can reconcile the inner antagonism between sense and intellect, nature and reason.Schiller’s proposal of art as fundamental to the development of society and the individual is an enduringly influential concept, and this volume offers his philosophy’s clearest, most vital expression.

    Following the huge success of her previous book, Experimental Flowers in Watercolour, she now explores ways to interpret landscape. Packed with stunning examples of her colourful, expressive work, this book encourages you to experiment with the same techniques in your own watercolour painting to develop a personal style. Techniques covered include combining water-based paint and ink with other media such as gesso and collage to create dramatic effects; manipulating paint with materials such as plastic wrap (clingfilm); tearing, layering and reassembling paintings into watercolour collages; and developing textures and marks made using fabrics and other found objects. Throughout the book Ann offers her personal commentary on how her paintings were created, giving us a unique insight into the mind of the artist.Both practical and inspirational, this glorious book is the ideal companion for watercolour painters who want to take their work a step further.

    Johnson had in his friend Boswell the ideal biographer.Notoriously and self-confessedly intemperate, Boswell shared with Johnson a huge appetite for life and threw equal energy into recording its every aspect in minute but telling detail. This irrepressible Scotsman was 'always studying human nature and making experiments', and the marvelously vivacious Journals he wrote daily furnished him with first-rate material when he came to write his biography.The result is a masterpiece that brims over with wit, anecdote and originality. Hailed by Macaulay as the best biography ever written and by Carlyle as a book 'beyond any other product of the eighteenth century', The Life of Samuel Johnson today continues to enjoy its status as a classic of the language.This shortened version is based on the 1799 edition, the last in which the author had a hand.

    In this startling new edition of his work, Whitman biographer Gary Schmidgall presents over two hundred poems in their original pristine form, in the chronological order in which they were written, with Whitman's original line breaks and punctuation. Included in this volume are facsimilies of Whitman's original manuscripts, contemporary-- and generally blistering-- reviews of Whitman's poetry (not surprisingly Henry James hated it), and early pre-Leaves of Grass poems that return us to the physical Whitman, rejoicing-- sometimes graphically-- in homoerotic love.Unlike the many other available editions, all drawn from the final authorized or "deathbed" Leaves of Grass, this collection focuses on the exuberant poems Whitman wrote during the creative and sexual prime of his life, roughly between 1853 and 1860. These poems are faithfully presented as Whitman first gave them to the world-- fearless, explicit, and uncompromised-- before he transformed himself into America's respectable, mainstream Good Gray Poet through thirty years of revision, self-censorship, and suppression.Whitman admitted that his later poetry lacked the "ecstasy of statement" of his early verse. Revealing that ecstasy for the first time, this edition makes possible a major reappraisal of our nation's first great poet.

    This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . . . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses."This brooding, provocative, and almost unbearably lovely book displays one of the great writers of our time at his freest and most direct, addressing the themes that run beneath the surface of all his work, from Ways of Seeing to his Into Their Labours trilogy.In an extraordinary distillation of his gifts as a novelist, poet, art critic, and social historian, John Berger reveals the ties between love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality and the steady backward tug of time. He re-creates the mysterious forces at work in a Rembrandt painting, transcribes the sensorial experience of viewing lilacs at dusk, and explores the meaning of home to early man and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in our cities today.A work of unclassifiable innovation and consummate beauty, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos reminds us of Nabokov and Auden, Brecht and Lawrence, in its seamless fusion of the political and the personal.

    Lewis' The Discarded Image paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, as historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It describes the image discarded by later ages as the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe. This, Lewis' last book, was hailed as the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind.

    As they move in next door to the radical painter/poet William Blake, and take up work for a near-by circus impresario, the youngest family member gets to know a girl his age. Embodying opposite characteristics — Maggie Butterfield is a dark-haired, streetwise extrovert, Jem Kellaway a quiet blond introvert — the children form a strong bond while getting to know their unusual neighbor and his wife.Set against the backdrop of a city nervous of the revolution gone sour across the Channel in France, Burning Bright explores the states of innocence and experience just as Blake takes on similar themes in his best-known poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

    She learns that her mother has passed on a genetic illness as a parting shot, and she must adjust to growing up with Bipolar Disorder.As she approaches her 30th year, she works hard to pick up the loose threads of her life and tie them into a lifeline for her future. It is a tale of survival, endurance, and acceptance through understanding.

    Arguing that their characters are as strong and their plots as complex as any dreamt up by the great novelists, Tom McCarthy asks a simple question: is Tintin literature?"

    But his penetrating work of political philosophy - now fully revised and with a new introduction for this edition - opened up questions about the nature of statecraft and society that influenced governments across the world.

    A faceless figure. A disturbing, thought-provoking exploration of simple, yet unsettling facts of everyday life. The taboos we, as social beings, have chosen to hide under irrational, complex layers of linguistics.By taking full advantage of their author's lack of identity and extreme levels of introspection, The Unwords cut straight through the pretenses and the fallacies in our language as they unleash a full-scale attack on all fronts of cultural and social decay.Words are meant to be spoken. In a dishonest world, what remains unspoken can only be the truth. In a dishonest world... all words can go to hell.