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This book shows just how closely late nineteenth-century American women's ghost stories engaged with objects such as photographs, mourning paraphernalia,… wallpaper and humble domestic furniture. Featuring uncanny tales from the big city to the small town and the empty prairie, it offers a new perspective on an old genre.
This book is a collection of essays on ghostly fiction by Henry James. The contributors analyze James's use of the ghost story… as a subgenre and the difficult theoretical issues that James's texts pose.
Stories of ghostly spirits who return to this world to warn of danger, to prophesy, to take revenge, to request… proper burial, or to comfort the living fascinated people in ancient times just as they do today. In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, the author combines a modern folkloric perspective with literary analysis of ghost stories from classical antiquity to shed new light on the stories' folk roots. The author begins by examining ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about death and the departed and the various kinds of ghost stories which arose from these beliefs. She then focuses on the longer stories of Plautus, Pliny, and Lucian, which concern haunted houses. Her analysis illuminates the oral and literary transmission and adaptation of folkloric motifs and the development of the ghost story as a literary form. In her concluding chapter, the author also traces the influence of ancient ghost stories on modern ghost story writers, a topic that will interest all readers and scholars of tales of hauntings.
In Earthsong, the trilogy's long-awaited finale, the Aliens have abandoned Earth, taking their technologies with them and plunging the planet… into economic and ecological disaster. Devastated, the women decide to take their failed Láadan project back underground, desperately seeking guidance from their long-dead foremothers. The women discover an ingenious solution to the problem of human violence and seek to spread their knowledge--but has their final solution come too late?
Ghost stories are always in conversation with novelistic modes with which they are contemporary. This book examines examples fromSir Walter… Scott, Charles Dickens, Henry James andRudyard Kipling, amongst others, to the end of the twentieth century, looking at how they address empire, class, property, history and trauma. "
Filmmakers have long been drawn to the Gothic with its eerie settings and promise of horror lurking beneath the surface.… Moreover, the Gothic allows filmmakers to hold a mirror up to their own age and reveal society's deepest fears. Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet are just a few examples of film adaptations of literary Gothic texts. In this ground-breaking study, Lisa Hopkins explores how the Gothic has been deployed in these and other contemporary films and comes to some surprising conclusions. For instance, in a brilliant chapter on films geared to children, Hopkins finds that horror resides not in the trolls, wizards, and goblins that abound in Harry Potter, but in the heart of the family. <P><P> Screening the Gothic offers a radical new way of understanding the relationship between film and the Gothic as it surveys a wide range of films, many of which have received scant critical attention. Its central claim is that, paradoxically, those texts whose affiliations with the Gothic were the clearest became the least Gothic when filmed. Thus, Hopkins surprises readers by revealing Gothic elements in films such as Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, as well as exploring more obviously Gothic films like The Mummy and The Fellowship of the Ring. Written in an accessible and engaging manner, Screening the Gothic will be of interest to film lovers as well as students and scholars.
Two young women, with intertwined fates centuries apart, must protect the secret of the powerful, all-healing mushroom known as amakuna… • The gripping story includes mystical visions, shamanic rituals, past lives, an ancient lineage of medicine women, love, betrayal, conspiracies, and murder • Set concurrently in modern times and in 1492 during the Conquistadors’ takeover of the Canary Islands 1492: For millennia, the medicine women of the Guanches, the indigenous people on the Canary Island of La Palma, have used a psychotropic mushroom to look into the past and the future. But the mushroom has other sacred powers: It can cure disease or injury and it links the fate of those who consume it across all eternity. These secret powers are closely guarded by the medicine women, for they can foresee the destructive forces that would be unleashed if the sacred mushroom fell into the wrong hands. Present day: Romy, a young doctor at a biomedical research company, sets out alone on a rock-climbing trek near her home in Germany. Halfway through her climb, an unusual panic overtakes her and she blacks out as she falls more than 25 feet from the face of a cliff . . . Coming to, hours later, she finds herself in a cave, remarkably unscathed, with a strange taste in her mouth as well as a vivid recollection of an ancient ritual centered on a sacred mushroom called “amakuna.” Plagued by visions from the amakuna ceremony, including the death of an old medicine woman under a peculiar looking tree and the appointment of a young apprentice, Iriomé, to take her place, Romy begins to feel as if Iriomé is trying to contact her across the centuries. Identifying the tree from the visions as a Canarian Dragon Tree, she heads to the Canary Island of La Palma to discover the truth behind her visions and her and Iriomé’s intertwined fates. In the heart of the island’s volcanic crater, she discovers the reality of the strange mushroom and its magical, all-healing, all-seeing powers. She brings some of the mushroom back to Germany and experiments with it, leading to repeated flashbacks of Iriomé’s life. But pharmaceutical mega-corporations are already in hot pursuit of her and will stop at nothing to take possession of the amakuna--not even murder. As Romy and Iriomé’s lives continue to parallel across the centuries, they both find themselves in love with powerful men, pregnant, far from home, and in danger. But while Iriomé’s fate is in the past and sealed, Romy’s has not yet been decided, nor has the fate of the mushroom, which she learns has the power to either destroy life or preserve it. Will Romy be able to protect the powerful amakuna secret, as generations of medicine women have done before her? Or will she fall victim to betrayal as Iriomé did, and be forced to destroy the sacred mushroom before it can destroy the planet?
Goethe is the most famous German author, and the poetic drama Faust, Part I (1808) is his best-known work, one… that stands in the company of other leading canonical works of European literature such as Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is the first new translation into English since David Constantine’s 2005 version. Why another translation when there are several currently in print? To invoke Goethe’s own authority when speaking of his favorite author, Shakespeare, Goethe asserts that so much has already been said about the poet-dramatist “that it would seem there’s nothing left to say,” but adds, “yet it is the peculiar attribute of the spirit that it constantly motivates the spirit.” Goethe’s great dramatic poem continues to speak to us in new ways as we and our world continually change, and thus a new or updated translation is always necessary to bring to light Faust’s almost inexhaustible, mysterious, and enchanting poetic and cultural power. Eugene Stelzig’s new translation renders the text of the play in clear and crisp English for a contemporary undergraduate audience while at the same time maintaining its leading poetic features, including the use of rhyme. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
What kinds of critical insights are made possible only or especially via creative strategies? This volume examines how creative modes… of writing might facilitate or inform new ways to critically engage with Shakespeare. Creative writing, demonstrated in a series of essays, reflections, stories and scenes, operates as a vehicle for exploring and articulating critical and theoretical ideas. In doing so, Shakespeare’s enduring creative and critical appeal is newly understood and critiqued.
When Tobe Hooper’s low-budget slasher film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, opened in theaters in 1974, it was met in equal… measure with disgust and reverence. The film—in which a group of teenagers meet a gruesome end when they stumble upon a ramshackle farmhouse of psychotic killers—was outright banned in several countries and was pulled from many American theaters after complaints of its violence. Despite the mixed reception from critics, it was enormously profitable at the domestic box office and has since secured its place as one of the most influential horror movies ever made. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Its Terrifying Times, cultural critic Joseph Lanza turns his attentions to the production, reception, social climate, and impact of this controversial movie that rattled the American psyche. Joseph Lanza transports the reader back to the tumultuous era of the 1970s defined by political upheaval, cultural disillusionment, and the perceived decay of the nuclear family in the wake of Watergate, the onslaught of serial killers in the US, as well as mounting racial and sexual tensions. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Its Terrifying Times sets the themes of the film against the backdrop of the political and social American climate to understand why the brutal slasher flick connected with so many viewers. As much a book about the movie as the moment, Joseph Lanza has created an engaging and nuanced work that grapples with the complications of the American experience.