In The Dark Thread, scholars examine a set of important and perennial narrative motifs centered on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. Over fourteen essays, contributors highlight the connections between works from early modernity and subsequent texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, in which incidents such as murder, cannibalism, poisoning, the burial of the living, the failed burial of the de...

The history of science is replete with women getting little notice for their groundbreaking discoveries. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a tireless innovator who correctly theorized the substance of stars, was one of them.It was not easy being a woman of ambition in early twentieth-century England, much less one who wished to be a scientist. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin overcame prodigious obstacles to become a woman of many firsts: the first to receive a PhD in astronomy fr...

The Night before Christmas, originally published as A Visit from St. Nicholas, is one of the formative texts of modern Christmas imagination. In brisk anapestic verse, Clement Clarke Moore transforms a domestic nocturnal scene into a miniature epic of wonder, movement, and affectionate comedy. Its vivid catalogues—reindeer, sleigh, stockings, chimney, and the genial, pipe-smoking saint—helped codify the American image of Santa Claus. This edition, with Jessie Willcox Smith's original illus...

First published anonymously in 1919, these letters from a dying woman to her doctor display an attitude to death which is fiercely independent of religion but full of hope. The book will appeal to diverse readers: it is a picture of family life and love, interspersed with clear-headed musings on the nature of illness, loss and death; it illuminates the development of rationalist thought, humanism and liberal education and the history of adoption; and it providescomfort for those who...

It was not easy being a woman of ambition in early twentieth–century England, much less one who wished to be a scientist. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin overcame prodigious obstacles to become a woman of many firsts: the first to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, the first promoted to full professor at Harvard, the first to head a department there. And, in what has been called "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy," she was the first to describe what stars are...