On Goethe contains the full range of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the central figure in modern German culture. The writings in this volume-newly translated, fully annotated, and framed by an extensive introduction-display a variety of styles and cover a vast array of topics. The collection revolves around two strikingly different essays. ......
Rosicrucian Nature of Goethe's "Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily" and the Mystery Dramas of Rudolf Steiner
Places the fairytale against the background of Goethe's life and cultural setting. This title discusses its importance in the development of Steiner's spiritual science. It describes its visual language, mystical insights, and relevance for us.
From Anne Rice's best-selling novels to our recurrent interest in vampires and the occult, the Gothic has an unyielding hold on our imagination. But what exactly does "Gothic" mean? How does it differ from "terror" or "horror," and where do its parameters lie? Through a wide and eclectic range of brief essays written by leading scholars, The ......
Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World
How abolitionists persuaded people of their personal complicity with slavery to advance the cause of freedom Grievous Entanglement explores the most common way that people in the Atlantic world came to understand their personal connection to, and complicity with, slavery in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: consumption. Consumption ......
A darkly alluring plant family and the arrival of modernity Victorian Nightshades tells the story of how one plant family-notorious for centuries in England because of its frequently psychoactive and poisonous properties-rose to social and economic prevalence during the nineteenth century. Beginning with bittersweet and belladonna, the Old World ......
What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot."" Herman Melville wrote these words as he struggled to survive as a failing novelist. Between 1853 and 1856, he did write ""the other way,"" working exclusively for magazines. He earned more money from his stories than from the ......
First published in 1993, this book brings together Muriel Spark’s writings on the Brontë sisters, including a selection of their letters and a selection of Emily Brontë’s poems. Perceptively but unsentimentally, Spark considers the Brontës’ lives and works, including their generally disastrous attempts at teaching, and reflects on her own ......
Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction
Ordinary Masochisms reveals how literary works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently challenged the prevailing view of masochism as a deviant behavior, an opinion supported by many sexologists and psychoanalysts in the 1800s. In these texts, Jennifer Mitchell highlights everyday examples of characters deriving pleasure from pain ......