The thrill and chill of the ghost story is displayed in all its variety and vitality through this marvellous anthology. Ranging from the early 19th century to the 1960s, the collection reveals the development of the genre, and showcases many of its greatest expositors - from Sir Walter Scott, H. G. Wells, M. R. James, T. H. White, Walter de la Mare, and Elizabeth Bowen in the UK to Edith Wharton in America. Though its heyday coincided with the golden age of Empire in the nineteenth century, the ghost story enjoyed a second flowering between the two World Wars and its popularity is as great as ever.
Bringing together the work of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Eudora Welty, Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, Isak Dinesen, and Joyce Carol Oates, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales presents 37 sinister and unsettling tales for all lovers of ghost stories, fantasy, and horror.
Ireland has always been a nation of story-tellers. This magnificent anthology chronicles the development of a rich literary tradition, from the earliest folk-tales to James Joyce, Liam O'Flaherty, and the rising stars of the new generation.
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, edited by A. S. Byatt, who has published several collections of short stories, is the first anthology to take the English short story as its theme. The thirty-seven stories featured here are selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, byauthors ranging from Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan, though many draw ingeniously from the richness of earlier English literary writing. There are all sorts of threads of connection and contrast running through these stories. Their subjects vary from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the momentous to the trivial, from the grim to the farcical. There is English empiricism, English pragmatism, English starkness, English humour,English satire, English dandyism, English horror, and English whimsy. There are examples of social realism, from rural poverty to blitzed London; ghost stories and tales of the supernatural; surreal fantasy and science fiction. There are stories of sensibility, precisely delineated, from Hardy'sreluctant bride to the shocked heroine of Elizabeth Taylor's The Blush, from H. E. Bates's brilliant fusion of class, sex, death, and landscape, to D. H. Lawrence's exploration of a consciousness slowly detaching itself from its world. There are exuberant stories by Saki and Waugh, Wodehouse andFirbank, with a particularly English range from high irony to pure orchestrated farce. The very range and scope of the collection celebrates the eccentric differences and excellences of English short stories Some of A. S. Byatt's choices clearly take their place in the grand tradition of story-telling, while others are more unusual.Many break all the rules of unity of tone andnarrative, appearing to be one kind of story before unexpectedly turning into another. They pack together comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque, with language as various as the subject-matter. As A. S. Byatt explains: 'My only criterion was that those stories I selectedshould be startling and satisfying, and if possible make the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement, aesthetic or narrative.'
"Book and Verse is guide to the variety and extent of biblical literature in England, exclusive of drama and the Wycliffite Bible, that appeared between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Entries provide detailed information on how much of what parts of the Bible appear in Middle English and where this biblical material can be found."--BOOK JACKET.
