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        Literature & Literary Studies
        December 2023

        Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism

        by Helen Dell

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        Teaching, Language & Reference
        January 2016

        The fantasy fiction formula

        by Deborah Chester

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        Children's & YA

        The Candy Guild (1). The Magic Pact

        by Tanja Voosen/ Viktoria Gavrilenko

        The most magical adventure since the discovery of chocolate! Do you believe in magic and miracles? Everyone in the little town of Belony takes magic and miracles for granted – everyone except Elina, who thinks it’s all a load of nonsense. That is, until her nervous neighbour Charlie happens to get hold of a bar of chocolate that has a very strange effect on her. Suddenly Elina is convinced that Charlie has fallen under a spell. Of all people, it’s shy Robin who comes to the girl’s rescue. He is a member of a Candy Guild family – people who have the ability to create magic sweets that will help others. This is how he knows that only the mysterious Candy Guild can lift the curse on Charlie. With a suitcase full of magic sweets, the three of them set out on a dangerous quest. Because not everyone keeps to the pact that magic sweets should only be used to do good… The Candy Guild. The Magic Pact is the first in a new series of magic-fantasy books for children of 9+ - as enchanting as chocolate and as wild as a Christmas cracker!

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2018

        Clive Barker

        Dark imaginer

        by Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

        Clive Barker: Dark imaginer explores the diverse literary, film and visionary creations of the polymathic and influential British artist Clive Barker. In this necessary and timely collection, innovative essays by leading scholars in the fields of literature, film and popular culture explore Barker's contribution to gothic, fantasy and horror studies, interrogating his creative legacy. The volume consists of an extensive introduction and twelve groundbreaking essays that critically reevaluate Barker's oeuvre. These include in-depth analyses of his celebrated and lesser known novels, short stories, theme park designs, screen and comic book adaptations, film direction and production, sketches and book illustrations, as well as responses to his material from critics and fan communities. Clive Barker: Dark imaginer reveals the breadth and depth of Barker's distinctive dark vision, which continues to fascinate and flourish.

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        The Arts
        June 2017

        Terry Gilliam

        by Peter Marks

        Terry Gilliam presents a sustained examination of one of cinema's most challenging and lauded auteurs, proposing fresh ways of seeing Gilliam that go beyond reductive readings of him as a gifted but manic fantasist. Analysing Gilliam's work over nearly four decades, from the brilliant anarchy of his Monty Python animations through the nightmarish masterpiece Brazil to the provocative Gothic horror of Tideland, it critically examines the variety and richness of Gilliam's sometimes troubled but always provocative output. The book situates Gilliam within the competing cultural contexts of the British, European and American film industries, examining his regular struggles against aesthetic and commercial pressures. He emerges as a passionate, immensely creative director, whose work encompasses a dizzying array of material: anarchic satire, childhood and adult fantasy, dystopia, romantic comedy, surrealism, road movie, fairy tale and the Gothic. The book charts how Gilliam interweaves these genres and forms to create magical interfaces between reality and the illuminating, frightening but liberating worlds of the imagination. Scrutinising the neglected importance of literature and adaptation in Gilliam's career, this study also observes him through the lenses of auteurism, genre, performance, design and national culture, explaining how someone born in Minnesota and raised in California came to be one of British television and film's most compelling figures.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        November 2024

        Women and madness in the early Romantic novel

        Injured minds, ruined lives

        by Deborah Weiss

        Women and madness in the early Romantic novel returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism through an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie. This book argues that these early Romantic-period novelists revised medical and popular sentimental models for female madness that made inherent female weakness and the aberrant female body responsible for women's mental afflictions. The book explores how the more radical authors-Wollstonecraft, Fenwick and Hays-blamed men and patriarchal structures of control for their characters' hysteria and melancholia, while the more mainstream writers-Edgeworth and Opie-located causality in less gendered and less victimized accounts. Taken as a whole, the book makes a powerful case for focusing on women's mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literary criticism.

      • May 1987

        Dracula

        by Bram Stoker

        Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. It introduced Count Dracula, and established many conventions of subsequent vampire fantasy. The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and a woman led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.

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        April 2014

        Die Illusion des Getrenntseins

        by Claudia Feldmann, Simon Van Booy

        Eine kleine Bäckerei in Paris, mitten in den Wirren des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Ein unbekannter Soldat übergibt einer jungen Frau ein Neugeborenes ohne Namen und verschwindet. Mit sieben Jahren erfährt Martin von seinen Zieheltern, dass er ihnen in den Unruhen des Krieges von einem Fremden anvertraut wurde. Von nun an lässt ihn die Frage nach seiner Herkunft nicht mehr los. Er braucht Jahre, um sein Schicksal zu begreifen – und er braucht sein ganzes Leben, um dem Mann zu begegnen, der ihn einst gerettet hat. In einer wunderbar zarten, eleganten Prosa erzählt Simon Van Booy davon, wie unsere Leben untrennbar miteinander verbunden sind. Davon, dass die Welt nur scheinbar ein fremder Ort ist und die Menschen darin uns näher sind, als wir ahnen.

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        The Arts
        June 2021

        The new pornographies

        Explicit sex in recent French fiction and film

        by Victoria Best, Martin Crowley

        The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this study of a very significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        The new pornographies

        Explicit sex in recent French fiction and film

        by Victoria Best, Martin Crowley

        The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this, the first study of this significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.

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        The Arts
        June 2017

        Contemporary Australian cinema

        An introduction

        by Jonathan Rayner

        Provides an introduction to the products and context of the new Australian film industry which arose toward the end of the 1960s. Traces the development of Australian film, in terms of prominent directors and stars, consistent themes, styles and evolving genres. The evolution of the film genres peculiar to Australia, and the adaptation of conventional Hollywood forms (such as the musical and the road movie) are examined in detail through textual readings of landmark films. Films and trends discussed include: the period film and Picnic at Hanging Rock; the Gothic film and the Mad Max trilogy; camp and kitsch comedy and the Adventures of Pricilla, Queen of the Desert. The key issue of the revival (the definition, representation and propagation of a national image) is woven through analysis of the new Australian cinema.

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        The Arts
        June 2021

        Contemporary French cinema

        An introduction (revised edition)

        by Guy Austin

        Contemporary French cinema is an essential introduction to popular French film of the last 35 years. It charts recent developments in all genres of French cinema with analyses of over 120 movies, from Les Valseuses to Caché. Reflecting the diversity of French film production since the New Wave, this clear and perceptive study includes chapters on the heritage film, the thriller and the war movie, alongside the 'cinéma du look', representations of sexuality, comedies, the work of women film makers and le jeune cinéma. Each chapter introduces the public reception and critical debates surrounding a given genre, interwoven with detailed accounts of relevant films. Confirmed as a major contribution to both Film Studies and French Studies, this book is a fascinating volume for students and fans of French film alike.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Contemporary French cinema

        An introduction (revised edition)

        by Guy Austin

        Contemporary French cinema is an essential introduction to popular French film of the last 35 years. It charts recent developments in all genres of French cinema with analyses of over 120 movies, from Les Valseuses to Caché. Reflecting the diversity of French film production since the New Wave, this clear and perceptive study includes chapters on the heritage film, the thriller and the war movie, alongside the 'cinéma du look', representations of sexuality, comedies, the work of women film makers and le jeune cinéma. Each chapter introduces the public reception and critical debates surrounding a given genre, interwoven with detailed accounts of relevant films. Confirmed as a major contribution to both Film Studies and French Studies, this book is a fascinating volume for students and fans of French film alike.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2021

        Old Fortunatus

        By Thomas Dekker

        by David McInnis

        With its fantasy of magical travel and inexhaustible riches, Thomas Dekker's Old Fortunatus is the quintessential early modern journeying play. The adventures of Fortunatus and his sons, aided by a magical purse and wishing-hat, offers the period's most overt celebration of the pleasures of travel, as well as a sustained critique of the dangers of intemperance and prodigality. Written following a period of financial difficulty for Dekker, the play is also notable for its fascination with the symbolic, mercantile and ethical uses of gold. This Revels Plays edition is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Old Fortunatus. It offers scholarly discussion of the play's performance and textual history, including attention to the German version printed and performed in the early seventeenth century. It provides a long overdue critical reappraisal of this unjustly neglected play.

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