This "vigorous, witty look at the undead as cultural icons in 19th- and 20th-century England and America" examines the many meanings of the vampire myth ( Kirkus Reviews).From Byron's Lord Ruthven to Anne Rice's Lestat to the black bisexual heroine of Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories, vampires have taken many forms, capturing and recapturing our imaginations for centuries. In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach explores the rich histo...

Nina Auerbach shows how every age embraces the vampire it needs, and gets the vampire it deserves. Working with a wide range of texts, as well as movies and television, Auerbach locates vampires at the heart of our national experience and uses them as a lens for viewing the last two hundred years of Anglo-American cultural history.“[Auerbach] has seen more Hammer movies than I (or the monsters) have had steaming hot diners, encountered more bloodsuckers than you could shake a stick ...

This interdisciplinary book honors Columbia professor and New York intellectual Carl Woodring. Chapters on Romantic and Victorian literary culture written by leading scholars in the field join in conversation with Woodring’s teachings on literature and visual art and his commentaries on American culture. A multiple-authored chapter of postscripts on the aesthetic range of Woodring’s intellectual interests across cultural disciplines, his contributions to English studies and his informing i...

As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one startlingly subversive of the society that fostered it. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s adaptations of “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” to Christina Rossetti’s unsettling antifantasies in Speaking Likenesses, these are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, the...

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA'Daphne du Maurier has no rival' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH'du Maurier is a magician, a virtuouso' GOOD HOUSEKEEPING'A storyteller of cunning and genius' SALLY BEAUMAN'I tell you your mine will be in ruins and your home destroyed and your children forgotten . . . but this hill will be standing still to confound you.' So curses M...

This "darkly entertaining" story collection is "a significant contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, and especially feminist studies" ( United Press International).In the 1870s and 1880s, children's literature saw some astonishingly bold and innovative writing by women authors. As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one that was startlingly subversive for its...