The bestselling Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms provides clear and concise definitions of the most troublesome literary terms, from abjection to zeugma. It is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language. Now expanded and in its fourth edition, it includes increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, and...

As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river banks. When she receives letters from her husband, they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a scandal among their friends and neighbours. Instead, they hurtle towards tragedy.

`Upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein: - to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, "a Vampyre, a Vampyre!"' John Polidori's classic tale of the vampyre was a product of the same ghost-story competition that produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Set in Italy, Greece, and London, Polidori's tales is a reaction to the dominating presence of his employer Lord Byron, and transfo...

Sentimental Education begins with the hero - Frederic Moreau - leaving Paris and returning to the provinces and his mother. Part love story, part historical novel and satire it tells of how Moreau is driven by passion for an unattainable older woman. His 'sentimental education' turns out to be more of an anxious quest than a happy one, echoing Flaubert's own life experience of unrequited love. Packed with vivid detail and characterised by its historical authenticity, the book was described...

**"No one who has ever read this remarkable novel and looked at human life through Barbusse's peephole can ever forget the experience."—Robert Baldick"It is Barbusse, not Gide, not Proust and not Malroux whose work marks the great turning point in French twentieth-century literature."—Jean Favrille**Hell is the most highly focused study of voyeurism ever written. A young man staying in a Paris boarding house finds a hole in the wall above his bed. Through this he o...

Austronesia is the vast oceanic region which stretches from Madagascar to Taiwan to New Zealand. Encompassing both scattered archipelagos and major landmasses, Austronesia - derived from the Latin australis,'southern',and Greek nesos,'island' - is used primarily as a linguistic term, designating a family of languages spoken by peoples with a shared heritage. Julian Baldick, a celebrated historian of ancient religion, here argues that the diverse inhabitants of the Philippines, Taiwan, Indo...

Downstream, the shortest and most autobiographical of Huysmans’ novels, is the perfect example of what the French naturalists wanted a novel to be. This dark and mordantly comic masterpiece of everyday pessimism about a Parisian clerk seeking spiritual contentment is the perfect introduction to the pleasures of Joris Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), whose exquisite style is ironically the most perfect remedy for any reader’s taedium vitae.

Like Froude's biography of Carlyle, Holroyd's Shaw, and Ellmann's Joyce, Robert Baldick's Life of J.-K. Huysmans has become not just a standard reference work, to be consulted as regularly as the writing of the author whose life it chronicles, but a work of literature in its own right. First published fifty years ago, Baldick's classic biography presents a compelling narrative of Huysmans' life and work in all its various phases - from the Naturalism of the 1870s to the Decadence of the 18...

Definitive biography of one of the great late 19th century novelists

Sufism is Islam's principal mystical tradition. To its followers it provides the inner, esoteric or purely spiritual dimension of the faith. It is a centuries-old path to spirituality with devotees throughout the Islamic world, fundamentally influencing Muslim belief. To non-Muslim observers it remains exotic, mysterious and little-understood. Mystical Islam is an accessible introduction that encompasses the history of the Sufi spiritual tradition, ranging from the great Mughal and Safavid...

What common features can be found in the ancient customs and native religions of the vast Eurasian landmass? In this unique and invaluable survey of the indigenous pre-Christian and pre-Muslim religions of Central Asia, Julian Baldick - one of the foremost authorities on global comparative religion - describes a common inheritance among the beliefs of the various peoples who have lived in central Asia or have migrated from there: Scythians, Mongols, Manchus, Finns and Hungarians. Shamans -...

The starting point in the formulation of any numerical problem is to take an intuitive idea about the problem in question and to translate it into precise mathematical language. This book provides step-by-step descriptions of how to formulate numerical problems and develops techniques for solving them. A number of engineering case studies motivate the development of efficient algorithms that involve, in some cases, transformation of the problem from its initial formulation into a more trac...