Promising spine-tingling delights and sleepless nights, this annotated edition of Tales and Sketches is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike, confirming Edgar Allan Poe's status as one of literary art's "most brilliant but erratic stars". This volume is the first of two, edited by the consummate Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, collecting all the tales of a master of the uncanny, the unnerving, and the terrifying. Each volume is enriched with Mabbott's detailed and authoritative notes on sources, the history and collation of all known texts authorized by Poe, and variants of Poe's "final" version. Marrying grotesque inventiveness with superb plot construction, Poe's strikingly original tales often use only one main character and one main incident. In many of them, horror and suspense, revenge and torture, are laced with hilarious satire. Volume I includes "Ms. Found in a Bottle", the horrific "Berenice", "Ligeia" (which Poe considered his finest tale), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", and one of his most famous stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher".
"This is that rare audiobook that truly makes the print version come alive. The sound effects alone are priceless, with homage to Grammy Award-winner Bobby McFerrin. If you've ever wondered what punctuation marks sound like, Beach provides hilarious voices and sound effects for each one. A masterful, creative, amusing, must-have production that simplifies the rules of punctuation." -School Library Journal
Beyond its importance as a literary work of unvarnished genius, Geoffrey Chaucer’s unfinished epic poem is also one of the most beloved works in the English language–and for good reason: It is lively, absorbing, perceptive, and outrageously funny. But despite the brilliance of Chaucer’s work, the continual evolution of our language has rendered his words unfamiliar to many of us. Esteemed poet, translator, and scholar Burton Raffel’s magnificent new unabridged translation brings Chaucer’s poetry back to life, ensuring that none of the original’s wit, wisdom, or humanity is lost to the modern reader. This Modern Library edition also features an Introduction by the widely influential medievalist and author John Miles Foley that discusses Chaucer’s work as well as his life and times.
Part Twenty Of all Chaucer’s tales in the Canterbury Group, The Prioress’s Tale of the Virgin Mary and the murdered child ranks among the most popular and surely the most admired for its artistry. Nonetheless, it has encountered its fair share of somewhat hostile criticism on purely social and cultural grounds, owing in part to a negative evaluation of the Prioress herself (she is seen by some as a shallow person who does not recognize the harmful implications of her utterances), in part to the anti-Semitic cast of the tale. Beverly Boyd’s tough-minded, crisp approach to the tale enables her to present an overview of the great diversity of scholarship in both the sympathetic and hostile approaches to the work; to examine its strongest ingredients, the liturgical borrowings that form a kind of subtext; and thus to offer a balanced view of one of Chaucer’s most carefully crafted poems. Her examination of the sources and analogues, of Miracles of the Virgin, of considerations of style and structure, along with a full treatment of the textual tradition of the Prioress’s Sequence and an unusually full corpus of explanatory notes, taken together, provide a rich and complete edition of the tale, one that will prove to be of exceptional value for the teacher and the scholar.
Dealing with the most translated work of German literature, the Tales of the brothers Grimm (1812-1815), this book discusses their history, notably in relation to Denmark and subsequently other nations from 1816 to 1986. The Danish intelligentsia responded enthusiastically to the tales and some were immediately translated into Danish by a nobleman and by the foremost Romantic poet. Their renditions remained in print for a century and embued the tales with high prestige. This book discusses translators, approaches, and other parameters such as copyright, and changes in target audiences. The tales’ social acceptability inspired Hans Christian Andersen to write his celebrated fairytales. Combined, the Grimm and Andersen tales came to constitute the ‘international fairytale’.This genre was born in processes of translation and, today, it is rooted more firmly in the world of translation than in national literatures. This book thus addresses issues of interest to literary, cross-cultural studies and translation.