Infernal Desires

They say there’s no rest for the wicked, and New Orleans never knew how true that was until I came to town. Nobody told me that when I entered the transition, the very gifts of my demonic lineage would be used against me. Nobody warned me that the flames of Hell would burn from within. Or that I’d be driven to lust and madness, my chaotic magic becoming more wild and unruly than ever before. The only way to save myself—and the world—was to give the beast what she wanted: control. As if transitioning wasn’t enough, my presence was now known, and my enemies were mounting. While the beast was intent on claiming our Four Horsemen, there were things to be done. People to find. Demons to kill. And when they make a deal with the devil—let’s just say that neither world will ever be the same again. Long live the Queen. If I can survive becoming immortal, that is.

Drawing on many aspects of contemporary feminist theory, this lively collection of essays assesses Angela Carter's polemical fictions of desire. Carter, renowned for her irreverent wit, was one of the most gifted, subversive, and stylish British writers to emerge in the 1960s.

Angela Carter's 'The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman' was first published in 1972, and is a magical, satirical adventure.

In The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction, Richard van Leeuwen challenges conventional perceptions of the development of 20th-century prose by arguing that Thousand and One Nights, as an intertextual model, has been a crucial influence on authors who have contributed to shaping the main literary currents in 20th-century world literature, inspiring new forms and concepts of literature and texts.

The Encylopedia of the Gothic features a series of newly-commissioned essays from experts in Gothic studies that cover all aspects of the Gothic as it is currently taught and researched, along with the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture. Comprises over 200 newly commissioned entries written by a stellar cast of over 130 experts in the field Arranged in A-Z format across two fully cross-referenced volumes Represents the definitive reference guide to all aspects of the Gothic Provides comprehensive coverage of relevant authors, national traditions, critical developments, and notable texts that define, shape, and inform the genre Extends beyond a purely literary analysis to explore Gothic elements of film, music, drama, art, and architecture. Explores the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture

By reading key Carter texts alongside their Decadent intertexts, Tonkin interrogates the claim that Carter was in thrall to a fetishistic aesthetic antithetical to her feminism. Through historical contextualization of the woman-as-doll, muse and femme fatale, Tonkin tests Carter's own description of her fiction as a form of literary criticism.

This book explores how contemporary fantastic fiction by women writers responds to the past and imagines the future. The first two chapters look at revisionist rewritings of fairy tales and historical texts; the third and fourth focus on future-oriented narratives including dystopias and space fiction. Writers considered include Margaret Atwood, Octavia E. Butler, Angela Carter, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Jeanette Winterson, among others. The author argues that an analysis of how past and future are understood in women's fantastic fictions brings to light an "ethics of becoming" in the texts--a way of interrupting, revising and remaking problematic power structures that are tied to identity markers like class, gender and race. The book reveals how fantastic fiction can be read as narratives of disruption that enable the creation of an ethics of becoming.

Contributing to the conversation regarding Angela Carter's problematic relationship with what she viewed as the interrelated traditions of surrealism and psychoanalysis, Scott Dimovitz explores the intricate connections between Carter's private life and her public writing. He begins with Carter's assertion that it was through her "sexual and emotional life" that she was radicalized, drawing extensively on the British Library's recently archived collection of Carter's private papers, journals, and letters to show how that radicalization happened and what it meant both for her worldview and for her writings. Through close textual analysis and a detailed study of her papers, Dimovitz analyzes the ways in which this second-wave feminist's explorations of sexuality merged with her investigations into surrealism and psychoanalysis, an engagement that ultimately led to the explosively surreal allegories of Carter's later, more complex, and more accomplished work. His study not only offers a new way to view Carter's oeuvre, but also makes the case for the importance of Angela Carter's vision in understanding the transformations in feminist thinking from the postwar to the postfeminist generation.

Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians, who raid and pillage in order to survive. Marianne is strictly forbidden to leave her civilized world but, fascinated by these savage outsiders, decides to escape. There, beyond the wire fences, she will discover a decaying paradise, encounter the tattooed Barbarian boy Jewel and go beyond the darkest limits of her imagination. Playful, sensuous, violent and gripping, Heroes and Villains is an ambiguous and deliriously rich blend of post-apocalyptic fiction, gothic fantasy, literary allusion and twisted romance.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1866. With a View of their Contemporaries. To which are added Jottings about Ireland Seventy Years ago.

When novels, plays and poems refer to food, they are often doing much more than we might think. Recent critical thinking suggests that depictions of food in literary works can help to explain the complex relationship between the body, subjectivity and social structures. A History of Food in Literature provides a clear and comprehensive overview of significant episodes of food and its consumption in major canonical literary works from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. This volume contextualises these works with reference to pertinent historical and cultural materials such as cookery books, diaries and guides to good health, in order to engage with the critical debate on food and literature and how ideas of food have developed over the centuries. Organised chronologically and examining certain key writers from every period, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, this book's enlightening critical analysis makes it relevant for anyone interested in the study of food and literature.

In this, the first book on English fantasy, Colin Manlove shows that for all its immense diversity, English fantasy can best be understood in terms of its strong national character, rather than as an international genre. Showing its development from Beowulf to Blake, the author describes English fantasy's modern growth through secondary world, metaphysical, emotive, comic, subversive, and children's fantasy. In them all England has led the world, with authors as different as Chaucer, Lewis Carroll, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Salman Rushdie.

Based on the award-winning The Elder Scrolls, The Infernal City is the first of two exhilarating novels following events that continue the story from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, named 2006 Game of the Year. Four decades after the Oblivion Crisis, Tamriel is threatened anew by an ancient and all-consuming evil. It is Umbriel, a floating city that casts a terrifying shadow—for wherever it falls, people die and rise again. And it is in Umbriel’s shadow that a great adventure begins, and a group of unlikely heroes meet. A legendary prince with a secret. A spy on the trail of a vast conspiracy. A mage obsessed with his desire for revenge. And Annaig, a young girl in whose hands the fate of Tamriel may rest . . . .

"One of the first great events in Christian history was the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, convened to organize Christian sects and beliefs into a unified doctrine. The great Christian clergymen who wrote before this famous event are referred to as the Ante-Nicenes and the Apostolic Fathers, and their writings are collected here in a ten-volume set. The Ante-Nicenes lived so close to the time of Christ that their interpretations of the New Testament are considered more authentic than modern voices. But they are also real and flawed men, who are more like their fellow Christians than they are like the Apostles, making their words echo in the ears of spiritual seekers. In Volume V of the 10-volume collected works of the Ante-Nicenes first published between 1885 and 1896, readers will find the writings of: Hippolytus, who during his time was considered an antipope because of his conflicts with the Church Cyprian, a bishop of Carthage, who greatly supported the establishment of the Church Caius, who supposedly wrote the Muratorian Canon, the oldest list of the books in the New Testament Novatian, an antipope who founded a sect of Christianity that endured a few hundred years after his death."