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Ever since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was first published in 1818, the story of the scientist and his Creature has been constantly told, discussed, adapted, filmed, and translated, making generations of readers approach the novel in an extraordinary variety of ways and languages. This new collection of nineteen essays brings together a range of international scholars to provide an introduction to, and a series of pathways through, this iconic novel. Chapters explore various topics, from the Bible, mythology, ruins, and human rights, to the sublime, the epistolary, and acoustics. They also place the novel in a wider cultural context, exploring its numerous afterlives, its reception, and adaptations in different media, such as drama, cinema, graphic novels, television series, and computer games. Aimed at both scholars and new readers of Frankenstein, in its different guises, this volume stimulates an informed appreciation of one of the most influential and haunting novels of all time.
Edinburgh, late 1860s. Two young gentlemen, their heads buzzing with ideas and artistic ambitions, hang over North Bridge “watching the trains start southward and longing to start too,” the Walter Scott Monument a short way behind them, but their eyes fixed on the tracks leading South, to London and the Continent. In their Introduction the editors see this scene with his painter cousin as symbolically significant for Robert Louis Stevenson’s writing career. Through his connection with Europe, and especially France, he participated in an international exchange of ideas on art which led him in the 1870s to reinvent his relationship with his national literary tradition by exploring a vari...
Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries reinstates Stevenson at the center of critical debate and demonstrates the sophistication of his writings and the present relevance of his kaleidoscopic achievements. While most young readers know Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) as the author of Treasure Island, few people outside of academia are aware of the breadth of his literary output. The contributors to Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries look, with varied critical approaches, at the whole range of his literary production and unite to confer scholarly legitimacy on this enormously influential writer who has been neglected by critics. As the editors point out in their Introduct...
According to Oscar Wilde, 'the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not'. Through a series of close and often unusual readings, this book endeavours to develop Wilde's remark into a detailed and creative theory of reading. It focuses on a series of neologisms from writing of the period.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2012. The Gothic: Studies in History, Identity and Space offers a critical examination of gothic elements in fiction, film and popular culture texts from the beginnings of the genre to the present. The articles collected in the volume explore questions of identity, space, history and social equilibrium as portrayed through a distinctly Gothic imagery. Tracing a gothic itinerary through different times and places - from the English classic Gothic novels and their Italian counterpart to postcolonial and postmodern fiction and to contemporary film and fashion - it presents a persuasive account of how and why the Gothic continues to fascinate readers and critics alike.
In his travel narrative Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson declares, "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. " Taking up the concepts of time, place, and memory, the contributors to this collection explore in what ways the dynamic view of life suggested by this quotation permeates Stevenson's work. The essays adopt a wide variety of critical approaches, including post-colonial theory, post-structuralism, new historicism, art history, and philosophy, making use of the vast array of literary materials that Stevenson left across a global journey that began in Scotland in 1850 and ended in Samoa in 1894. ...
Although Robert Louis Stevenson was a late Victorian, his work--especially Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde--still circulates energetically and internationally among popular and academic audiences and among young and old. Admired by Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges, Stevenson's fiction crosses the boundaries of genre and challenges narrow definitions of the modern and the postmodern. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," provides an introduction to the writer's life, a survey of the criticism of his work, and a variety of resources for the instructor. In part 2, "Approaches," thirty essays address such topics as Stevenson's dialogue with James about literature; his verse for children; his Scottish heritage; his wanderlust; his work as gothic fiction, as science fiction, as detective fiction; his critique of imperialism in the South Seas; his usefulness in the creative writing classroom; and how Stevenson encourages expansive thinking across texts, times, places, and lives.
"From 1874 to 1882, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) produced more than 200 paintings and water-colours aside from portraiture that chart his development as an artist. The breadth of his achievement includes figures in landscape settings, architectural studies, seascapes, subject paintings, and studies after old masters. From his powerful studies of models in Paris in the mid-1870s to his compelling paintings set in Venice in the early 1880s, the works published in this volume of the catalogue raisonne show the variety of his aesthetic responses." "Working in the studio and en plein air, Sargent travelled widely during the eight years covered in this volume, painting in Paris, Brittany, Capri...
Meanwhile, by assimilating the Other into our own modes of representation of reality and imagination, twentieth-century female writers of the fantastic show how alternative identities can be shaped and social constituencies can be challenged."--BOOK JACKET.
In this volume you will find stories about hyperactive relics, ghosts in spiritual or bodily form, as well as accounts of the dead being conjured, resurrected, and brought back to life from decomposing matter. This is not so much for the purpose of assembling a kind of Neapolitan Wunderkammer, but rather to allow these bodies – in physical or spiritual form, or sometimes both at the same time – to speak as protagonists, and to offer their own contribution to the historical anthropology of the Kingdom of Naples. This volume explores the boundaries between body and spirit, life and death, as well as the natural, preternatural, and supernatural in the long early modern era in southern Italy.