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Noontide toll : stories
\"The driver's job is to stay in control behind the wheel and that is all. The past is what you leave as you go. There is nothing more to it. Vasantha retired early, bought himself a van with his savings, and now works as a driver for hire. As he drives through Sri Lanka, carrying aid workers, businessmen and families, meeting lonely soldiers and eager hoteliers, he engages them with self-deprecating wit and folksy wisdom, and reveals for us their uncertain, difficult lives. On his journey from the army camps in northern Jaffna to the moonlit ramparts of Galle, in the south, he begins to discover the depth of the problems of the past--his own and his country's--and the promise the future might hold. From the writer praised by The Guardian for the \"vivid originality\" of his vision, here is a wonderful collection--perceptive, somber, finely tuned--which draws a potent portrait of postwar Sri Lanka and the ghosts of civil war\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Dangerous bodies
Through an investigation of the body and its oppression by the church, the medical profession and the state, this book reveals the actual horrors lying beneath fictional horror in settings as diverse as the monastic community, slave plantation, operating theatre, Jewish ghetto and battlefield trench. The book provides original readings of canonical Gothic literary and film texts including The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula and Nosferatu. This collection of fictionalised dangerous bodies is traced back to the effects of the English Reformation, Spanish Inquisition, French Revolution, Caribbean slavery, Victorian medical malpractice, European anti-Semitism and finally warfare, ranging from the Crimean up to the Vietnam War. The endangered or dangerous body lies at the centre of the clash between victim and persecutor and has generated tales of terror and narratives of horror, which function to either salve, purge or dangerously perpetuate such oppositions. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to academics and students of Gothic studies, gender and film studies and especially to readers interested in the relationship between history and literature.
eBook
Woes of the true policeman
\"An unfinished masterpiece from the author of THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES and 2666\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Industrial Gothic
This volume carves out a new area of study, the 'industrial
Gothic', placing the genre in dialogue with the literature of the
Industrial Revolution. The book explores a significant subset of
transatlantic nineteenth-century literature that employs the
tropes, themes and rhetoric of the Gothic to portray the real-life
horrors of factory life, framing the Industrial Revolution as a
site of Gothic excess and horror. Using archival materials from the
nineteenth century, localised incidences of Gothic
industrialisation (in specific cities like Lowell and Manchester)
are considered alongside transnational connections and comparisons.
The author argues that stories about the real horrors of factory
life frequently employed the mode of the Gothic, while nineteenth
century writing in the genre (stories, novels, poems and stage
adaptations) began to use new settings - factories, mills, and
industrial cities - as backdrops for the horrors that once
populated Gothic castles.
eBook
In the memorial room
\"Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship; a living memorial to the poet, Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the small French village of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write. But the Memorial Room is not suitable-it has no electricity or water. Hurndell never wrote here, though it is expected of Harry. Janet Frame's previously unpublished novel draws on her own experiences in Menton, France as a Katherine Mansfield Fellow. It is a wonderful social satire, a send-up of the cult of the dead author, and-in the best tradition of Frame-a fascinating exploration of the complexity and the beauty of language.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Gothic and death
The Gothic and death offers the first ever published study
devoted to the subject of the Gothic and death across the
centuries. It investigates how the multifarious strands of the
Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning and
memorialisation ('the Death Question') - have intersected and been
configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth
century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in such
fields as Gothic Studies, film theory, Women's and Gender Studies
and Thanatology Studies, this interdisciplinary collection of
fifteen essays by international scholars combines an attention to
socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close
reading of works, both classic and lesser known. This area of
enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as
corpses, ghosts, zombies and vampires, and across various cultural
and literary forms such as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry,
Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian
literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young
Adult fiction and Bollywood film noir.
eBook
Up the down staircase
\"Our Vintage reissue of Bel Kaufman's classic 1964 novel, which Time has called \"the most popular book about U.S. public schools in history\": narrated through a collection of memos, doodles, notes between teachers, and papers from desk drawers and wastebaskets, Up the Down Staircase timelessly depicts the shambolic joys and frustrations of a young teacher. With an introduction by Diane Ravitch. Sylvia Barrett arrives at New York City's Calvin Coolidge High fresh from earning literature degrees at Hunter College and eager to shape young minds. Instead she encounters broken windows, a lack of supplies, a stifling bureaucracy, and students with no interest in Chaucer. Her bumpy yet ultimately rewarding journey is depicted through an extraordinary collection of correspondence--sternly worded yet nonsensical administrative memos, furtive notes of wisdom from teacher to teacher, \"polio consent slips,\" and student homework assignments that unwittingly speak from the heart. Up the Down Staircase stands as the seminal novel of a beleaguered public school system that is redeemed by teachers who love to teach and students who long to be recognized. It is poignant, devastating, laugh-out-loud funny, and--in our current moment of debate around the future of American education--more relevant than ever\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Women and the Gothic
This collection of newly commissioned essays brings together major scholars in the field of Gothic studies in order to re-think the topic of 'Women and the Gothic'.
eBook
Among strange victims : a novel
\"\"His tools are brilliant syntax, the ability to achieve highly powerful, recurrent images, a set of relationships between the plot strands that are more than a forced structure, and humor, a corrosive humor that never leads to laughter, but is present in every phrase of the book, charged with relentless sardonic irony.\"-FactorcriticoRodrigo likes his vacant lot, its resident chicken, and being left alone. But when passivity finds him accidentally married to Cecilia, he trades Mexico City for the sun-bleached desolation of his hometown and domestic life with Cecilia for the debauched company of a poet, a philosopher, and Micaela, whose allure includes the promise of time travel. Earthy, playful, and sly, Among Strange Victims is a psychedelic ode to the pleasures of not measuring-- Provided by Publisher
Book
Monstrous media/spectral subjects
Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised. In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of Tom Waits, world horror cinema and the TV series Doctor Who, this book finds fresh and innovative contexts for the study of Gothic. Combining essays by well-established and emerging scholars, it should appeal to academics and students researching both Gothic literature and culture and the cultural impact of new technologies.
eBook