"[Terry Castle is] the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today." —Susan SontagFrom one of America's most brilliant critics and cultural commentators, Terry Castle, comes The Professor and Other Writings: a collection of startling, gorgeously-written autobiographical essays and a new, long-form piece about the devastation and beauty of early love. James Wolcott, contributing writer to Vanity Fair, calls Terry Castle a "Jedi knight of liter...

`Her present life appeared like the dream of a distempered imagination, or like one of those frightful fictions, in which the wild genius of the poets sometimes delighted. Rreflections brought only regret, and anticipation terror.' Such is the state of mind in which Emily St. Aubuert - the orphaned heroine of Ann Radcliffe's 1794 gothic Classic, The Mysteries of Udolpho - finds herself after Count Montoni, her evil guardian, imprisions her in his gloomy medieval fortress in the Appenines. ...

A new collection of essays on literature and sexuality by one of the wittiest and most iconoclastic critics writing today.

Victorine is thirteen, and she can’t get the unwanted surprise of her newly sexual body, in all its polymorphous and perverse insistence, out of her mind: it is a trap lying in wait for her at every turn (and nowhere, for some reason, more than in church). Meanwhile, Victorine’s older brother Costello is struggling to hold his own against the overbearing, mean-spirited, utterly ghastly Hector L’Hommedieu, a paterfamilias who collects and discards mistresses with scheming abandon even as Al...

“[Terry Castle is] the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” —Susan SontagFrom one of America’s most brilliant critics and cultural commentators, Terry Castle, comes The Professor and Other Writings: a collection of startling, gorgeously-written autobiographical essays and a new, long-form piece about the devastation and beauty of early love. James Wolcott, contributing writer to Vanity Fair, calls Terry Castle a “Jedi knight of liter...

As Samuel Richardson's 'exemplar to her sex,' Clarissa in the eponymous novel published in 1748 is the paradigmatic female victim. In Clarissa's Ciphers, Terry Castle delineates the ways in which, in a world where only voice carries authority, Clarissa is repeatedly silenced, both metaphorically and literally. A victim of rape, she is first a victim of hermeneutic abuse. Drawing on feminist criticism and hermeneutic theory, Castle examines the question of authorit...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune).One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The A...

Set against the backdrop of the Inquisition, this Gothic romance from British novelist Ann Radcliffe is sure to please fans of the genre. Protagonists Vincentio di Vivaldi and Ellena di Rosalba fall in love at first sight and attempt to escape the siege of religious persecution and marry. Will they succeed, or will their romance fall prey to the hysteria and senseless destruction that defines the era?

Featuring an appendix of discussion questions, the Diversion Classics edition is ideal for use in book groups and classrooms.When an unfortunate accident kills the son of Manfred, lord of the castle of Otranto, on the boy’s wedding day, his father is not just stricken with grief, but with fear. Terrified of an ancient prophecy fortelling the end of Manfred’s family line, the lord attempts to trump fate by divorcing his own wife and marrying his son Conrad’s intended bride.I...

Scarcely had the Abbey Bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the Church of the Capuchins thronged with Auditors. Do not encourage the idea that the Crowd was assembled either from motives of piety or thirst of information. But very few were influenced by those reasons; and in a city where superstition reigns with such despotic sway as in Madrid, to seek for true devotion would be a fruitless attempt. The Audience now assembled in the Capuchin Church was collected by various causes,...

After being abandoned by the man she believes to be her father, Adeline St. Pierre finds precarious refuge with Pierre de la Motte and his family. Although La Motte is himself fleeing Paris to escape imprisonment, he agrees to take Adeline with them. Circumstances force La Motte and the others to settle in a remote, desolate abbey within the depths of the forest of Fontanville.The travelers' initial relief is disturbed by the arrival of the Marquis de Montalt, owner of the forest. ...

This early work by Anna Katharine Green was originally published at the turn of the 20th century and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'Room Number 3' is one of Green's novels of crime and mystery. Anna Katharine Green was born in Brooklyn, New York, USA in 1846. She aspired to be a writer from a young age, and corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson during her late teens. When her poetry failed to gain recognition, Green produced her first and best-known novel, The L...