Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters

Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters
Author: John Langan
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2009
Genre: Horror tales
ISBN: 0809572494

From award-nominated writer John Langan comes a collection of uneasy meetings. A frustrated professor and his graduate student assistant accompany a group of soldiers to a remote Scottish island to learn what is buried there. A man plays an audiotape left for him by his late father and is initiated into a family story of monstrous deeds. A student learns frightening lessons in a surreal tutoring center. A young couple struggles to make their stand against a group of inhuman pursuers in a ravaged landscape. And, in a new story, an artist discovers a mysterious statue whose completion becomes his obsession.

Lost Souls

Lost Souls
Author: Lisa Jackson
Publisher: A Bentz/Montoya Novel
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2023-03-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1496739108

A #1 "New York Times"-bestselling author delivers the harrowing story of a young woman's determined hunt for a serial killer that draws her into the twisted world of a psychopath and his unspeakable crimes.

Bewilderments of Vision

Bewilderments of Vision
Author: Oliver Tearle
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2014-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 183764179X

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.

Stephen King's Modern Macabre

Stephen King's Modern Macabre
Author: Patrick McAleer
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2014-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476617457

As Stephen King has continued to publish numerous works beyond one of the many high points of his career, in the 1980s, scholarship has not always kept up with his output. This volume presents 13 essays (12 brand new) on many of King's recent writings that have not received the critical attention of his earlier works. This collection is grouped into three categories--"King in the World Around Us," "Spotlight on The Dark Tower" and "Writing into the Millennium"; each examines an aspect of King's contemporary canon that has yet to be analyzed.

Horror Literature through History [2 volumes]

Horror Literature through History [2 volumes]
Author: Matt Cardin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1065
Release: 2017-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1440842027

This two-volume set offers comprehensive coverage of horror literature that spans its deep history, dominant themes, significant works, and major authors, such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anne Rice, as well as lesser-known horror writers. Many of today's horror story fans—who appreciate horror through movies, television, video games, graphic novels, and other forms—probably don't realize that horror literature is not only one of the most popular types of literature but one of the oldest. People have always been mesmerized by stories that speak to their deepest fears. Horror Literature through History shows 21st-century horror fans the literary sources of their favorite entertainment and the rich intrinsic value of horror literature in its own right. Through profiles of major authors, critical analyses of important works, and overview essays focused on horror during particular periods as well as on related issues such as religion, apocalypticism, social criticism, and gender, readers will discover the fascinating early roots and evolution of horror writings as well as the reciprocal influence of horror literature and horror cinema. This unique two-volume reference set provides wide coverage that is current and compelling to modern readers—who are of course also eager consumers of entertainment. In the first section, overview essays on horror during different historical periods situate works of horror literature within the social, cultural, historical, and intellectual currents of their respective eras, creating a seamless narrative of the genre's evolution from ancient times to the present. The second section demonstrates how otherwise unrelated works of horror have influenced each other, how horror subgenres have evolved, and how a broad range of topics within horror—such as ghosts, vampires, religion, and gender roles—have been handled across time. The set also provides alphabetically arranged reference entries on authors, works, and specialized topics that enable readers to zero in on information and concepts presented in the other sections.

Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel

Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel
Author: Yvonne Liebermann
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2021-09-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030794423

This book offers an overview on the growing field of nonhuman studies in relation to Anglophone novels. It illuminates the variety of nonhuman actors that take centre stage in the twenty-first-century novel and the formal changes that the Anthropocene, the digital turn, the animal rights movement, and research into plant consciousness have brought to the novel as a form. The book is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different aspect of twenty-first-century literature that engages with the nonhuman. The collection investigates how the environmental changes and the increasing use of AI technologies have fostered the flourishing of genres like the New Weird, Climate Fiction, and speculative fiction, how it makes us embrace new perceptions of life in relation to genetic engineering, and how it forces us to engage with newly emerging political contexts.

May Sinclair

May Sinclair
Author: Michele K. Troy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351919067

May Sinclair was a central figure in the modernist movement, whose contribution has long been underacknowledged. A woman of both modern and Victorian impulses, a popular novelist who also embraced modernist narrative techniques, Sinclair embodied the contradictions of her era. The contributors to this collection, the first on Sinclair's career and writings, examine these contradictions, tracing their evolution over the span of Sinclair's professional life as they provide insights into Sinclair's complex and enigmatic texts. In doing so, they engage with the cultural and literary phenomena Sinclair herself critiqued and influenced: the evolving literary marketplace, changing sexual and social mores, developments in the fields of psychology, the women's suffrage movement, and World War I. Sinclair not only had her finger on the pulse of the intellectual and social challenges of her time, but also she was connected through her writing with authors located in diverse regions of literary modernism's social web, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Charlotte Mew, and Dorothy Richardson. The volume is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the political, social, and literary currents of the modernist period.

The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic

The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic
Author: Clive Bloom
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 867
Release: 2021-02-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030408663

By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic—the literature of disturbance and uncertainty—now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Contributors also examine the fin-de-siècle dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen, M P Shiel and Vernon Lee and their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants, ghostly apparitions and cosmic annihilation. This volume explores the period through the prism of architectural history, urban studies, feminism, 'hauntology' and much more. 'Horror', as Poe teaches us, 'is the soul of the plot'.

Ghost Stories by British and American Women

Ghost Stories by British and American Women
Author: Lynette Carpenter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2015-01-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317943538

Originally published in 1998 and covering a tradition ignored by most critics, this bibliography assembles and documents a large body of supernatural fiction written by women in English from the end of the 18th century to the present. These stories, the work of women whose literary reputations, personal histories, and bodies of work vary widely, challenge the narrow way in which supernatural literature has traditionally been regarded: they indicate a much richer and more complex set of literary responses to the supernatural than has been hitherto acknowledged. The writers included range from Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic novelists to Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Gilman, and Edith Wharton to such modern writers as Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, and A.S. Byatt. The volume will be of interest to literary and cultural historians and of particular importance to women's studies scholars.