Having her ship hijacked by space pirates was bad.Getting thrown into a cage sucked.Being sacrificed to a crazed alien beast as some sick form of entertainment for those same pirates?Yeah, that’s the pinnacle of a shitty day.Kessia Donovan of New Terra is on the way to her next job when her life goes sideways. In the space of a few hours she’s been kidnapped, stripped and offered up to the m...

When they say books are an escape, this wasn’t what they meant.Cassidy O’Neill loves books. As a librarian, it’s a requirement. But none of the novels she’s read prepared her to deal with a dirty-minded sex demon appearing in her bed. Especially when he tells her he’s not leaving until he gives her the most intense, toe-curling orgasm of her life.Locked in a dungeon, Verrin prayed for an escape. Being summoned by a woman seemed like a stroke of good luck. U...

How did this nineteenth-century novelist change the way we think? "A fine contribution to the sociology of literature . . . Highly recommended." — ChoiceWhat are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Looking at literary history in relation to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways in which Dick...

For more than twenty years, The Age of Johnson has aspired to present to a wide readership a body of influential Johnsonian scholarship “in the broadest sense,” as founder Paul J. Korshin put it. In keeping with this sentiment, volume 25 contains cant-free scholarly articles and essays written by both leaders in the field and emerging scholars, among them a London barrister and a medical school professor. Featuring lively and penetrating work on Johnson’s medical conditions, his e...

When she became engaged to a friend, Sarah Winters believed she was finally free from her parents’ control and an arranged marriage of their choice. Even better yet, she was certain the life she had read about in fairy tales would now be hers. Unfortunately, she could not have been more wrong. In a poignant narrative, Winters chronicles the chain of events that led her into the darkness of an abusive marriage and the profound eventual realization that she must escape. As she reveals how sh...

Focusing on the transition from political economy to economics, this volume seeks to restore social content to economic abstractions through readings of nineteenth-century British and American literature. The essays gathered here, by new as well as established scholars of literature and economics, link important nineteenth-century texts and histories with present-day issues such as exploitation, income inequality, globalization, energy consumption, property ownership and rent, human capita...

This collection of essays explores the role played by imaginative writing in the Scottish Enlightenment and its interaction with the values and activities of that movement. Across a broad range of areas via specially commissioned essays by experts in each field, the volume examines the reciprocal traffic between the groundbreaking intellectual project of eighteenth-century Scotland and the imaginative literature of the period, demonstrating that the innovations made by the Scottish literat...

What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways in which Dickens’s serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction but also the school subject we now know as “English.”Winter shows how Dickens’s serial ficti...

3000 miles, two strangers, one deadly threat.With an exciting new career on the horizon, Alexis Mitchell assumes the solo trek across the country will be a relaxing scenic drive. She didn't plan on picking up a gorgeous hitchhiker whose mercurial attitude would have her alternating between wanting to kiss him or kick his surly ass. With hundreds of miles before them, it'll take a miracle to arrive without losing her sanity – or her heart.Haunted by recent t...

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap?Shedding new light on novels by Thack...

In the Victorian period, the British novel reached a wide readership and played a major role in the shaping of national and individual identity. As we come to understand the ways the novel contributed to public opinion on religion, gender, sexuality and race, we continue to be entertained and enlightened by the works of Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope and many others. This second edition of the Companion to the Victorian Novel has been updated fully, taking account of new resear...

In this first annotated edition of F. R. Leavis' famous critique of C. P. Snow's influential argument about 'the two cultures', Stefan Collini reappraises both its literary tactics and its purpose as cultural criticism. The edition will enable new generations of readers to understand what was at stake in the dispute and to appreciate the enduring relevance of Leavis's attack on the goal of economic growth. In his comprehensive introduction Collini situates Leavis's critique within the wide...