Just two days after his birth, Matthew Jewel’s life takes a tragic turn when he becomes an orphan, following the assassination of his mother by a Russian agent. In a twist of fate, he is swiftly rescued and adopted by an aristocratic military family, who embrace him as a long-lost son. Matthew’s journey leads him from public school to Persham House, Britain’s exclusive and top-secret spy academy. His training there paves the way for his induction into British Military Intelligence, where he becomes a formidable secret agent, earning his licence to kill. Over the years, he embarks on numerous undercover missions, adeptly adopting various guises to conceal his true identity. As his time as a government agent draws to a close, Matthew, together with an old friend, ventures into the world of finance by acquiring an established firm in Dubai in the tumultuous year of 2008. However, as global financial markets collapse, Dubai’s ruling family, in a desperate move to deflect blame for their financial blunders, targets westerners in the country. Matthew, along with many other innocent westerners, finds himself wrongfully imprisoned in a third-world Dubai police cell, enduring treatment reminiscent of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. Despite his thrilling adventures and professional accomplishments, Matthew continues to grapple with a multitude of personal conflicts and unresolved issues from his past, adding a layer of complexity to his already intriguing life.
Following Oscar Wilde's trials for committing acts of gross indecency with men, he lost his family, his freedom and his will to live. This book sets out to examine how Victorian society could allow, or indeed, need this to happen.
With contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey.
Taking its cue from Baudelaire’s important essay "The Painter of Modern Life," in which Baudelaire imagines the modern artist as a "man of the world," this collection of essays presents Oscar Wilde as a "man of the world" who eschewed provincial concerns, cultural conventions, and narrow national interests in favor of the wider world and other worlds—both real and imaginary, geographical and historical, physical and intellectual—which provided alternative sites for exploration and experience, often including alternative gender expression or sexual alterity. Wilde had an unlimited curiosity and a cosmopolitan spirit of inquiry that traveled widely across borders, ranging freely over space and time. He entered easily and wholly into other countries, other cultures, other national literatures, other periods, other mythologies, other religions, other disciplines, and other modes of representation, and was able to fully inhabit and navigate them, quickly apprehending the conventions by which they operate. The fourteen essays in this volume offer fresh critical-theoretical and historical perspectives not just on key connections and aspects of Wilde’s oeuvre itself, but on the development of Wilde’s remarkable worldliness in dialogue with many other worlds: contemporary developments in art, science and culture, as well as with other national literatures and cultures. Perhaps as a direct result of this cosmopolitan spirit, Wilde and Wilde’s works have been taken up across the globe, as the essays on Wilde’s reception in India, Japan and Hollywood illustrate. Many of the essays gathered here are based on groundbreaking archival research, including some never-seen-before illustrations. Together, they have the potential to open up important new comparative, transnational, and historical perspectives on Wilde that can shape and sharpen our future understanding of his work and impact.
Revised and updated since its first publication in 1990, this acclaimed critical survey covers the classic chillers produced by Universal Studios during the golden age of hollywood horror, 1931 through 1946. Trekking boldly through haunts and horrors from The Frankenstein Monster, The Wolf Man, Count Dracula, and The Invisible Man, to The Mummy, Paula the Ape Woman, The Creeper, and The Inner Sanctum, the authors offer a definitive study of the 86 films produced during this era and present a general overview of the period. Coverage of the films includes complete cast lists, credits, storyline, behind-the-scenes information, production history, critical analysis, and commentary from the cast and crew (much of it drawn from interviews by Tom Weaver, whom USA Today calls "the king of the monster hunters"). Unique to this edition are a new selection of photographs and poster reproductions and an appendix listing additional films of interest.
Heroic man and "the lies of history," the myths that surrounded them, were vital to the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. This study examines the four Anglo-Irish historical figures who dominated his life and art: Oscar Wilde, Charles Stewart Parnell, Jonathan Swift, and Roger Casement. All were creators—whether they conceived their life artistically, conceived an intellectual vision of Ireland free, or made lasting art. Their powers were matched by the magnitude of their defeat, for all, except Swift, were violently crucified by the mob for their irregular private lives. In defeat, however, they revealed transcendent heroism, as they faced their enemies with aristocratic disdain and unfailing bravery. Their constantly recreated heroic images inspired and haunted Yeats in art and politics, showed him ways to remake himself and to reconcile his devotion to art with his duty to Ireland. Yeats's Heroic Figures traces the intersections of the vivid figures in the "human drama" Yeats saw as history from 1883 to 1938, and considers their shaping forces upon Yeats's art, philosophy, and life. It is the first study to consider these four heroes together, and it brings to light much material previously neglected in comprehensive studies of Yeats.
This book examines the topic of excess in modern Irish writing in terms of mysticism, materialism, myth and language. The study engages ideas of excess as they appear in works by major thinkers from Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx through to Nietzsche, Bataille, Derrida and, more recently, Badiou. Poems, plays and fiction by a wide range of Irish authors are considered. These include works by Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, Patrick Pearse, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Louis MacNeice, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Roddy Doyle, Seamus Heaney, Marina Carr and Medbh McGuckian. The readings presented illustrate how Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth-century idea of the excessive character of the Celt is itself exceeded within the modernity of twentieth-century Irish writing.
The Astral Plane, also called the Astral World, thought to be the planes of angelic existence, intermediate between earth and heaven. Populated by angels, spirits or other immaterial beings ....... and certain Germans, acting to supply intelligence to Adolph Hitler. Billy Chen's grandfather, Kwong Chen, the master of all Chen magic, provides Billy with the powers to travel across the Astral Plane; enabling him to fight against those wishing to alter the course of written history. The result of the Second World War must not change.
In 1953, Major (Old Bob) Ferguson, a soldier recently blinded on duty in Kenya, relates his untold story to a ten-year-old village lad, Mike Gilbride. In 2012, Mike, his days fast closing in, is seeking final catharsis as he relates both their colourful tales to Teddy, his only grandson. Family lies, treason and death flourish. Eventually, their lives collide.
On the 100th anniversary of the publication of History and Class Consciousness, a new edition of this indispensable guide to Lukacs's thought and politics The philosophical and political development that converted Georg Lukács from a distinguished representative of Central European aesthetic vitalism into a major Marxist theorist and Communist militant has long remained an enigma. In this this now classic study, Michael Löwy for the first time traced and explained the extraordinary mutation that occurred in Lukács's thought between 1909 and 1929. Utilizing many as yet unpublished sources, Löwy meticulously reconstructed the complex itinerary of Lukács's thinking as he gradually moved towards his decisive encounter with Bolshevism. The religious convictions of the early Lukács, the peculiar spell exercised on him and on Max Weber by Dostoyevskyan images of pre-revolutionary Russia, the nature of his friendships with Ernst Bloch and Thomas Mann, were amongst the discoveries of the book. Then, in a fascinating case-study in the sociology of ideas, Löwy showed how the same philosophical problematic of Lebensphilosophie dominated the intelligentsias of both Germany and Hungary in the pre-war period, yet how the different configurations of social forces in each country bent its political destiny into opposite directions. The famous works produced by Lukács during and after the Hungarian Commune—Tactics and Ethics, History and Class Consciousness and Lenin—were analysed and assessed. A concluding chapter discussed Lukács's eventual ambiguous settlement with Stalinism in the thirties, and its coda of renewed radicalism in the final years of his life. In this new edition, Löwy has added a substantial new introduction which reassess the nature of Lukacs's thought in the light of newly published texts and debates.
This work is a composite index of the complete runs of all mystery and detective fan magazines that have been published, through 1981. Added to it are indexes of many magazines of related nature. This includes magazines that are primarily oriented to boys' book collecting, the paperbacks, and the pulp magazine hero characters, since these all have a place in the mystery and detective genre.
Tragically orphaned at ten, Jamie Purkiss, could never believe where his life, fighting for survival in London's post war hell would lead. Simultaneously, discarded by his Irish mother at birth, Tommy McCready arrives in England, adopted into a life supported by a wealthy Irish family. Jamie's adoptive family, successful financial wizards, act for a family of Irish music producers, moving cash profits to safe offshore havens. Tommy has musical talent bursting from every vein, instantly becoming a rock super star. But horror awaits when a well established rock band ensnare him, sending Tommy away on a nine year jail sentence. Eventually, Jamie becomes suspicious that the cash he's handling could well be illegal. With the CIA and MI6 closing in, Jamie and Tommy, from wildly differing backgrounds, find a secret that bring their lives together.
Biofiction: An Introduction provides readers with the history, origins, evolution, and legitimization of biofiction, suggesting potential lines of inquiry, exploring criticisms of the literary form, and modeling the process of analyzing and interpreting individual texts. Written for undergraduate and graduate students, this volume combines comprehensive coverage of the core foundations of biofiction with contemporary and lively debates within the subject. The volume aims to confront and illuminate the following questions: • When did biofiction come into being? • What forces gave birth to it? • How does it uniquely function and signify? • Why has it become such a dominant aesthetic form in recent years? This introduction will give readers a framework for evaluating specific biofictions from writers as varied as Friedrich Nietzsche, George Moore, Zora Neale Hurston, William Styron, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colm Tóibín, thus enabling readers to assess the value and impact of individual works on the culture at large. Spanning nineteenth-century origins to contemporary debates and adaptations, this book not only equips the reader with a firm grounding in the fundamentals of biofiction but also provides a valuable guide to the uncanny power of the biographical novel to transform cultural attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs.
This volume is the first major study of the papacy as a managerial structure that has evolved over two thousand years. Special emphasis is placed on the environments in which the Church functioned and in which it had to reach uneasy compromises. The volume is both scholarly and very readable.
A collection of beautiful, full-color photographs that capture the beauty of the natural and man-made scenery, and honestly portray the people and their lifestyles.
More than 700 films from the classic period of film noir (1940 to 1959) are presented in this exhaustive reference book--such films as The Accused, Among the Living, The Asphalt Jungle, Baby Face Nelson, Bait, The Beat Generation, Crossfire, Dark Passage, I Walk Alone, The Las Vegas Story, The Naked City, Strangers on a Train, White Heat, and The Window. For each film, the following information is provided: the title, release date, main performers, screenwriter(s), director(s), type of noir, thematic content, a rating based on the five-star system, and a plot synopsis that does not reveal the ending.
Winner of the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association and named one of the best religion books of the year by Publishers Weekly, D. Michael Quinn's Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans has elicited critical acclaim as well as controversy. Using Mormonism as a case study of the extent of early America's acceptance of same-sex intimacy, Quinn examines several examples of long-term relationships among Mormon same-sex couples and the environment in which they flourished before the onset of homophobia in the late 1950s.
Michael O'Brien has masterfully abridged his award-winning two-volume intellectual history of the Old South, Conjectures of Order, depicting a culture that was simultaneously national, postcolonial, and imperial, influenced by European intellectual traditions, yet also deeply implicated in the making of the American mind. Here O'Brien succinctly and fluidly surveys the lives and works of many significant Southern intellectuals, including John C. Calhoun, Louisa McCord, James Henley Thornwell, and George Fitzhugh. Looking over the period, O'Brien identifies a movement from Enlightenment ideas of order to a Romanticism concerned with the ambivalences of personal and social identity, and finally, by the 1850s, to an early realist sensibility. He offers a new understanding of the South by describing a place neither monolithic nor out of touch, but conflicted, mobile, and ambitious to integrate modern intellectual developments into its tense and idiosyncratic social experience.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.