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"My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him." -- Neil Gaiman I knew full well, when the Chinaman stopped me in the street that night and coolly asked me for a light for his cigarette, that a light for his cigarette was the last thing in the world that he really wanted! I knew, in short, that he was up to something!" So begins one of the most convoluted webwork mysteries ever devised by the arcane mind of Harry Stephen Keeler. Many Keeler stories have a skull in them but in this one the skull has a starring role! And watch out for those Chinamen!
This book shows how, in his enormously influential 'Essay concerning Human Understanding' (1689), John Locke embraces the new rhetoric of seventeenth-century natrual philosophy, adopting the strategies of his scientific contemporaries to create a highly original natural history of the human mind. With the help of Locke's notebooks, letters and journals, Peter Walmsley reconstructs Locke's scientific career, including his early work with the chemist Robert Boyle and the physician Thomas Sydenham. He also shows how the 'Essay' embodies in its form and language many of the preoccupations of the science of its day, from the emerging discourses of experimentation and empirical taxonomy to developments in embryology and the history of trades. The result is a new reading of Locke, one that shows both his brilliance as a writer and his originality in turning to science to effect a radical reinvention of the study of the mind.
Inventing the Gothic Corpse shows how a series of bold experiments in eighteenth-century British realist and Gothic fiction transform the dead body from an instructive icon into a thrill device. For centuries, vivid images of the corpse were used to deliver a spiritual or political message; today they appear regularly in Gothic and horror stories as a source of macabre pleasure. Yael Shapira’s book tracks this change at it unfolds in eighteenth-century fiction, from the early novels of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, through the groundbreaking mid-century works of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Horace Walpole, to the Gothic fictions of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre and ...
Here for the first time it is now possible to enjoy in full the lively first-hand descriptions of eighteenth-century theater from the papers of philosopher and musician, James Harris (1709-80). These contain many new anecdotes about Handel and his music, exchanges of letters with famous performers (including David Garrick) and engaging reports of concerts, plays, and operas in London, Salisbury, Durham, Madrid, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, all of which contribute to fascinating insights into contemporary eighteenth-century musical life.
This book explores the links between self-harm and suicide and presents international approaches to training in suicide prevention for professionals. It debates the legality and morality of assisted self-harm and analyse the rate and causes of suicide among specific groups, people in custody and people with mental illnesses.
As eighteenth-century scholarship expands its range, and disciplinary boundaries such as Enlightenment and Romanticism are challenged, novels published during the rich period from 1750 to 1832 have become a contested site of critical overlap. In this volume, scholars who typically write under the rubric of either the long eighteenth century or Romanticism examine novels often claimed by both scholarly periods. This shared enterprise opens new and rich discussions of novels and novelistic concerns by creating dialogue across scholarly boundaries. Dominant narratives, critical approaches, and methodological assumptions differ in important ways, but these differences reveal a productive tension...
The Spectator: Emerging Discourses brings together a distinguished coterie of international scholars who take a fresh look at this influential eighteenth-century English periodical. Taking advantage of the insights provided by such critical perspectives as new historicism, postcolonialism, psychology, postmodernism and cultural studies, and by such theorists as Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas, the scholars represented herein offer new insights into The Spectator's relation to the changing society that influenced it-and that it in turn influenced.
Is plot a line, an arc, or a shape? None of these. Rather than thinking of plot as a sequence of events or actions put into place solely through human agency against the backdrop of setting, this book questions why we should distinguish between plot and setting—and indeed, whether we can make such a distinction. After all, plot, Yoon Sun Lee contends, cannot be disentangled from the material setting in which it takes place. In The Natural Laws of Plot, Lee connects the history of the novel and the history of science to show how plot in the realist novel is given shape by the characteristics of the physical world—and how in turn, plot serves as the avenue through which the realist novel p...
A pathbreaking introduction to eighteenth-century metaphors of the mind that recasts the grand narrative of the Enlightenment in terms of its tropes and figures. An encyclopedic dictionary along the lines of Voltaire’s classic Dictionnaire Philosophique, Metaphors of Mind provides an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which Enlightenment writers used figures of speech to characterize the mind. Drawn from Brad Pasanek’s massive online archive, http://metaphorized.net, this volume constitutes a veritable treasury of mental metaphorics. Dividing the book into eleven broad metaphorical categories—Animals, Coinage, Court, Empire, Fetters, Impressions, Inhabitants, Metal, Mirror, Rooms, and...