Born a Slave: Anthology gathers a wide-ranging archive of testimony on enslavement, resistance, flight, family separation, literacy, religion, labor, and emancipation. Its selections move among autobiography, dictated narrative, spiritual reflection, political address, recollection, and abolitionist-inflected life writing, revealing both the formal variety and evidentiary force of Black testimony. Accounts of escape, self-emancipation, and the struggle to reclaim kinship stand beside narra...

Born in Chains—Collected Slave Narratives assembles a capacious archive of bondage, flight, resistance, emancipation, and memory. Spanning autobiography, dictated testimony, spiritual reflection, political argument, and documentary recollection, the volume reveals the formal range of slave narrative traditions across the Atlantic world. Accounts of escape, family separation, literacy, labor, violence, and self-emancipation stand beside meditations on religion, citizenship, and the unfinish...

Dion Boucicault was a witty, selfish and deceitful charmer, a bigamist, a profligate spendthrift and the author of dozens of successful plays, only a handful of which endure. Among these his early comedies influenced Oscar Wilde, and his Irish melodramas Shaw, Synge, and O'Casey. London Assurance was his first success, a 'modern comedy' which opened at Covent Garden in 1841 and was the hit of the season.This is the first fully-annotated edition of the play, and it includes...

First published in 1973, this book explores the genre of melodrama. After discussing the defining characteristics of melodrama, the book examines the dramatic structures of the two major and contrasting emotions presented in melodrama: triumph and defeat. It concludes with a reflection on the ways in which elements of melodrama have appeared in protest theatre.

This entertaining guide reveals the unusual origins of typical contemporary terms, from A-OK to Top Dog and beyond.So many of the phrases we use day-to-day seem perfectly clear to us despite having no idea where they came from. But in Common Phrases, Max Cryer gives us a deeper understanding of contemporary English by tracing their journeys from new concept to common coinage.The former host of Today, Jane Pauley, claims to have coined the ...

Contents: The Decay of Lying Pen, Pencil And Poison The Critic As Artist The Truth of Masks

“Johnson emphasizes the rarity of truly visionary artists . . . his approach is unfailingly generous. . . . Genuinely revealing.” —Publishers WeeklyFrom celebrated journalist and historian Paul Johnson, an enlightening look at the imagination and drive of visionaries who have changed our world.Paul Johnson believes that creation is a mysterious business which cannot be satisfactorily analyzed. But it can be illustrated in such a way as to bring out its salient characteristi...

“It is Johnson’s gift that he can make his subjects human and fallible enough that we would…recognize them instantly, while also illuminating what made them heroes.” —Washington Post Book World on Heroes“Johnson is a clear, intelligent, forceful writer, and nothing if not thorough.” —Wall Street JournalPaul Johnson, the acclaimed author of Creators, Heroes, and the New York Times bestseller Intellectuals, returns with a captivating collection of biographical portraits of th...

In this beautiful reissue, the author of 'Footsteps' collects the biographical curiosities he discovered while researching the romantic poets, creating a captivating mixture of biography and memoir.‘Sidetracks' is a sister book to 'Footsteps', conjured up from decades of 'wanderings from the straight and narrow' of his major biographies of Shelley and Coleridge. As Holmes himself says, 'to be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and m...

“A thoroughly engaging compendium of literary arcadia.” —Nicholas Basbanes, author of A Gentle MadnessWhen did cigarettes start making an appearance in English literature? Which author’s heart was purportedly eaten by a cat? One of our best-known and best-loved literary critics turns his attention to the more bizarre areas of literature in this miscellany of fact and trivia. Which author had the heaviest brain? What was the original title of 1984?...

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, 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. In The Novel: A Biography,...

This bold undertaking covers Western theatre from ancient Greece to the present day. It traces the development of dramatic art through the miracle plays, the great Shakespearean period, Molière and Racine in France, Goethe in Germany, through the nineteenth century and the main movements in the twentieth century. It is written by David Timson, the British actor and director who features extensively on Naxos AudioBooks in both roles.