Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New Mexico

The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World

In the twenty-first century, religion remains the single greatest influence in the world. But, argues religion scholar Stephen Prothero, persistent attempts to portray all religions as different paths to the same God overlook the distinct human problem that each seeks to solve. For example: Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God God Is Not One is an indispensable guide to the questions human beings have asked for millennia—and to the disparate paths we are taking to answer them today.

God Is Not One

17488655-0431-41f1-b213-8998819d4471-1

Dust jacket wear & tear and fading. #dickens #victorian #british

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

This long-awaited biography, twenty years after the last major account, uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. Drawing on a lifetime’s study of this prodigiously brilliant figure, Michael Slater explores the personal and emotional life, the high-profile public activities, the relentless travel, the charitable works, the amateur theatricals and the astonishing productivity. But the core focus is Dickens’ career as a writer and professional author, covering not only his big novels but also his phenomenal output of other writing--letters, journalism, shorter fiction, plays, verses, essays, writings for children, travel books, speeches, and scripts for his public readings, and the relationships among them.

Slater’s account, rooted in deep research but written with affection, clarity, and economy, illuminates the context of each of the great novels while locating the life of the author within the imagination that created them. It highlights Dickens’ boundless energy, his passion for order and fascination with disorder, his organizational genius, his deep concern for the poor and outrage at indifference towards them, his susceptibility towards young women, his love of Christmas and fairy tales, and his hatred of tyranny.

Richly and precisely illustrated with many rare images, this masterly work on the complete Dickens, man and writer, becomes the indispensable guide and companion to one of the greatest novelists in the language.

Charles Dickens

693c5b6d-b9d0-4716-8f45-36cbb69ac859-1

#victorian #literature #british #history #culture
Contains underlining and/or highlighting.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

English

Thirty leading Victorianists from around the world collaborate here in a multidimensional analysis of the breadth and sweep of modern Britain's longest, unruliest literary epoch.

A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture

70de9044-4d54-4cd5-90a9-6ee8cc280c77-1

Travel Writing and Transculturation

Updated and expanded throughout with new illustrations and new material, this is the long- awaited second edition of a highly acclaimed and interdisciplinary book which quickly established itself as a seminal text in its field.

Imperial Eyes

14dab600-8001-4a91-9f6f-5dabd29c060b-1

Dust jacket wear and tear. #victorian #literature #criticism

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Queen and Victorian Writers

Queens, by definition, embody a historical contradiction between femininity and power. Queen Victoria, whose strength and longevity defined an age, possessed immense cultural as well as political power, even becoming a writer herself.

This cultural sovereignty, argues Gail Turley Houston, in the hands of a female monarch troubled writers, especially men, who worked during a reign that viewed women as domestic angels. By exploring a wide range of representations of the queen by significant Victorian writers, Houston points out the complexity of Victorian constructions of gender, representation, authority, and identity. She works to demystify such canonized authors as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Margaret Oliphant by examining the ways they encounter Victoria in their writings. The queen's feminine power seems to be at odds with the masculine profession of author, which was also coming to be viewed as a significant representative of the culture.

Part of the recent movement by feminist scholars to recuperate and analyze Queen Victoria's important meanings in nineteenth-century British culture, Royalties dissects the anomaly of the queen and her effect on dominant cultural attitudes about gender.

Royalties

7136ff02-8f9e-44ce-a95f-4a436cbcfa2a-1

Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction

Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horror of Dracula, Gail Turley Houston examines the ways in which the language and imagery of economics, commerce and banking are transformed in Victorian Gothic fiction, and traces literary and uncanny elements in economic writings of the period. Houston shows how banking crises were often linked with ghosts or inexplicable non-human forces and financial panic was figured through Gothic or supernatural means. In Little Dorrit and Villette characters are literally haunted by money, while the unnameable intimations of Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are represented alongside realist economic concerns. Houston pays particular attention to the term 'panic' as it moved between its double uses as a banking term and a defining emotion in sensational and Gothic fiction. This stimulating interdisciplinary book reveals that the worlds of Victorian economics and Gothic fiction, seemingly separate, actually complemented and enriched each other.

From Dickens to Dracula

2bad1674-2285-49c2-a5da-8586eefce59f-1

Dust jacket is torn (see photos). #literature #victorian #criticism

Gender, Class, and Hunger in Dicken's Novels

In this remarkable study, Gail Turley Houston examines the rich interplay of consumption as alimental process, medical entity, psychological construct, and economic practice in order to explore Charles Dickens s fictional representations of Victorian culture as he presents it in his novels. Drawing from medical, historical, economic, psychoanalytic, and biographical materials from the Victorian period, Houston anchors her work in the belief that if class and gender are fictional constructions, real people s lives are affected in complex and coercive ways by such constructions.

Proceeding chronologically, Houston traces particular patterns throughout ten of Dickens s major novels: "The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, "and "Our Mutual Friend. "Houston maintains that Victorian codes of behavior prescribed for gender and class regarding sexual and alimental appetites were so extreme and complicated that numerous consequent eating disorders and related diseases developed. Ideologies about consumption translated into medically defined consumptions, such as anorexia. Using anorexia and its etiology as representative of an underlying cultural dynamics of consumption, Houston examines anorexia as a deep structure of the Victorian period.

Further, consumption as economic process is reflected in the expansion of individual material desires at the expense of the designated body politic. In other words, extravagant consumption occurs in society only if certain groupsusually consisting of lower-class men and women and, in Dickens s novels, women in generalare severely limited in their consumption.

To support her approach, Houston turns to Rita Felski s "Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, "agreeing with Felski s argument that it is necessary to recognize the complex dialectics that take place between the individual and society. Not only does culture construct human beings, but human beings also construct culture. Felski s theory aids Houston in emphasizing that Dickens not only influenced but was also greatly influenced by the Victorian dynamics of consumption. In fact, Houston argues that while Dickens dismantles Victorian ideologies about class and hunger by demonstrating the unnaturalness of expecting one class to starve so that another might gluttonize, he nevertheless accepts and perpetuates the Victorian identification of woman as the self-sacrificing, always-nurturing "angel in the house" without need of nurture herself.

This extraordinary book will appeal to literary scholars, as well as to scholars in the social sciences, history, humanistically oriented medicine, and women s studies."

Consuming Fictions

5c21cc74-6782-4cf9-8376-4feb50d7f32c-1

Dust jacket has some wear and tear. #literature #victorian #criticism

Gender and Victorian Literary Canonization

In Lost Saints Tricia Lootens argues that parallels betwee literary and religious canons are far deeper than has yet been realized. She presents the ideological underpinnings of Victorian literary canonization and the general processes by which it occurred and discloses the unacknowledged traces of canonization at work today. Literary legends have accorded canonicity to women writers such as Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti, she contends, but often at the cost of discounting their claims as serious poets.

Through case studies of the canonization of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, Lootens demonstrates how nineteenth-century literary legends simultaneously glorified women poets and opened the way for critical neglect of their work. The author draws on a wide range of sources: histories of literature, religion, and art; medieval studies and folklore; and nineteenth-century poetry, essays, conduct books, textbooks, and novels.

Lost Saints

e1827be2-9b18-49a2-addf-21f930254fb4-1

May contain underlining and/or highlighting. #british #literature #romanticism

This Companion offers a unique introduction, guide, and reference work for students and readers of Romantic literature. The age of British Romanticism was a period of turbulent transition between the professed stability of the Enlightenment before it and the Victorian middle-class culture which succeeded it. Against a background of international warfare, the Romantic age embodied in its greatest literature a sense of competing values and ideals explored sceptically in the creative process, rather than dogmatic certainties fulfilled in its completion. Recent scholarship has led to the rejection of the easy categories once used to label Romanticism, but until now there has been no concerted attempt to represent to students of the period the full range of conflicting forces responsible for its dynamic literature. The eleven original essays which make up this volume make a significant contribution to our understanding of the period, providing readers with clear and coherent access to the historical roots, intellectual ferment, and cultural range of British Romanticism. It includes a chronology of major publications and events, and an extensive guide to further reading.

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism

5638d47f-ee74-4a41-bcb7-eb6b2fb48127-1

Contains underlining and/or highlighting. #Victorian #CharlesDickens #criticism

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens contains fourteen specially-commissioned chapters by leading international scholars, who together provide diverse but complementary approaches to the full span of Dickens's work, with particular focus on his major fiction. The essays cover the whole range of Dickens's writing, from Sketches by Boz through The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Separate chapters address important thematic topics: childhood, the city, and domestic ideology. Others consider formal features of the novels, including their serial publication and Dickens's distinctive use of language. Three final chapters examine Dickens in relation to work in other media: illustration, theatre, and film. Each essay provides guidance to further reading. The volume as a whole offers a valuable introduction to Dickens for students and general readers, as well as fresh insights, informed by recent critical theory, that will be of interest to scholars and teachers of the novels.

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens

a4ddee7c-4c55-46f5-ac3b-974e3708e029-1

May contain highlighting and/or underlining. #literary #criticism #Victorian 

This Companion to Victorian Poetry provides an introduction to many of the pressing issues that absorbed the attention of poets from the 1830s to the 1890s. It introduces readers to a range of topics - including historicism, patriotism, prosody, and religious belief. The thirteen specially-commissioned chapters offer insights into the works of well-known figures such as Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and the writings of women poets - like Michael Field, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster - whose contribution to Victorian culture has in more recent years been acknowledged by modern scholars. Revealing the breadth of the Victorians' experiments with poetic form, this Companion also discloses the extent to which their writings addressed the prominent intellectual and social questions of the day. The volume, which will be of interest to scholars and students alike, features a detailed chronology of the Victorian period and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry

7f2cb94f-e9a0-43bc-94ad-95c8c90e6a8e-1

May contain some underlining and highlighting. Light shelfware . #psychology

Social Studies

The Secret Seducer

"Smell: The Secret Seducer is a cultural history, a compendium of odd facts, and a kind of tribute to the sense of smell, which, of the five senses, is the one we most commonly take for granted." "Piet Vroon is a psychologist in the Netherlands, and in this odd and surprising book he demonstrates that the sense of smell is vital to our experience of the world, which would be much less interesting and intelligible without its odors, fragrances, aromas, and scents. Imagine being overcome unexpectedly by poison gas, being unable to smell the slyly fruity bouquet of a fine wine, or having no idea what one's lover smells like. A world without smell would be a sadly diminished place." "How we smell is Vroon's subject and his metier. In a brief history of smelling, Vroon shows how over time some cultures have exalted strong smells (associating them with passion, virility, and excitement), while others have considered them the evidence of decadence and barbarism. In Vroon's view, Western culture has been so thoroughly cleansed of unpleasant odors and stenches that we take the olfactory sense for granted."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Smell

80fc5c5d-595f-4a57-967d-4dbe9c97454a-1

Contains some underlining and highlighting. #science

And the Remarkable Nature of Smell

Smell is our most seductive and provocative sense, invading every domain of our lives. We can identify our relatives, detect the availability of a potential mate, sniff out danger, and distinguish between good and bad food just with our noses.

In this surprising and delightful book, Lyall Watson rescues our most unappreciated sense from obscurity. He brings to light new evidence concerning Jacobson's Organ: an anatomical-feature discovered high in the nose in 1811 and dismissed for centuries as a vestigial ghost. Yet recent research has shown Jacobson's Organ to be an incredibly influential pheromonal mechanism that feeds the area of the brain affecting our awareness, emotional states, and sexual behavior.

Following the seven classes of smell devised by the pioneering botanist Carolus Linnaeus in his Odores Medicamentorum, Watson examines the roles of smell and pheromones in humans, plants, and animals. He reveals the curious ways in which trees communicate their distress, the olfactory abilities of feral children, the bond we have with our offspring, the psychosexual effects of perfume, and the link between smell and memory formation. Jacobson's Organ unlocks the door to the strange world of this mysterious sense.

Jacobson's Organ

cf4f8a04-e07c-4e30-a544-9c1106af977b-1

Contains some underlining and highlighting. #victorian

Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction

Who smells? Surveying nearly eighty novels written in the 1860s to answer that impolite question, Common Scents provides a new reading of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative merits of men and women, spirit and matter. In depictions of comparative encounters, the commonplace meetings of everyday life, such fiction often registers the inequalities that distinguish one individual from another by marking one of them with a smell. In a surprisingly consistent fashion, these references constitute what cultural anthropologists call an osmology, a system of differentiations that reveals the status within a particular culture of the persons and things associated with specific odors. Featuring often innocuous and even potentially pleasing aromas emanating from food, flowers, and certain kinds of labor, novels of the 1860s array their characters into distinct categories, finding in some rather than others olfactory proof of their materiality. Central to this osmology
is the difference between characters who give off odors and those who do not, and this study draws upon the work of Victorian psychophysiologists and popular commentators on the senses to establish the subtlety with which fictional representations make that distinction. By exploring the far-reaching implications of this osmology in specific novels by Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Oliphant, Trollope, and Yonge, Common Scents argues that the strikingly similar plots and characterizations typical of the 1860s, responding as they do to the economic and political concerns of the decade, reconfigure conventional understandings of the relations between men and women. Determining who smells reveals what Victorian culture at its epitome takes for granted as a deeply embedded common sense, the recognition of whose self-evident truth seems to be as instinctive and automatic as a response to an odor.


Common Scents

87dd3d67-97a5-4507-be88-ff5c83d9c743-1

Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and Letters

An original and highly unusual psycholinguistic study of American literature and culture from 1584 to 1860, this volume focuses on the metaphor of 'land-as-woman.' It is the first systematic documentation of the recurrent responses to the American continent as a feminine entity (as Mother, as Virgin, as Temptress, as the Ravished), and it is also the first systematic inquiry into the metaphor's implications for the current ecological crisis.



The Lay of the Land

f6872729-c1bd-435d-86d1-78433c86ef14-1

#dystopian #handmaidstale #paperback #margaretatwood 

A Novel

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE The Testaments is a modern masterpiece, a powerful novel that can be read on its own or as a companion to Margaret Atwood's classic, The Handmaid's Tale. More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results. Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third: Aunt Lydia. Her complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways. With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.

The Testaments

76d5eae5-0d16-4f89-a209-d9ec8b74ae9e-1

A chilling look at the near future presents the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, once the United States, an oppressive world where women are no longer allowed to read and are valued only as long as they are viable for reproduction. Reissue.

The Handmaid's Tale

42ebea54-6404-4fe5-b910-5cfd4f565597-1

No highlighting or underlining found. #theory #literature

The Romantic Aesthetics of Individuation

As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they had significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism.

Solitude and the Sublime

2c4205f9-221d-40e1-94fb-1a583ed52da4-1

#theory #literature Highlighting and/or underlines and some general shelf wear and such.

What Utilitarianism Did to Action

Pornography first developed in western Europe during the late eighteenth century in tandem with the rise of utilitarianism, the philosophical position that stresses the importance of something's usefulness over its essence. Through incisive readings of Sade, Flaubert, Lawrence, and Bret Easton Ellis, Frances Ferguson here shows how pornography--like utilitarian social structures--diverts our attention from individual identities to actions and renders more clearly the social value of such actions through concrete literary representations.

Pornography, the Theory

e1457d63-9fc0-4515-bbf0-745deabc5cde-1

The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

"Wolf restores our awe of the human brain--its adaptability, its creativity, and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles." -- San Francisco Chronicle

How do people learn to read and write--and how has the development of these skills transformed the brain and the world itself ? Neuropsychologist and child development expert Maryann Wolf answers these questions in this ambitious and provocative book that chronicles the remarkable journey of written language not only throughout our evolution but also over the course of a single child's life, showing why a growing percentage have difficulty mastering these abilities.

With fascinating down-to-earth examples and lively personal anecdotes, Wolf asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians is a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy, in which visual images on the screen are paving the way for a reduced need for written language--with potentially profound consequences for our future.

Proust and the Squid

d46272e6-19a6-495e-bd06-3c4e66d10de2-1

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

An Agatha Raisin Mystery

"Gloria French was a jolly widow with dyed blonde hair, a raucous laugh and rosy cheeks. When she first moved from London to the charming Cotswolds Hills, she was heartily welcomed. She seemed a do-gooder par excellence, raising funds for the church and caring for the elderly. But she had a nasty habit of borrowing things and not giving them back, just small things, a teapot here, a set of silverware there. So it's quite the shock when she is found dead, murdered by a poisoned bottle of elderberry wine. Afraid the murder will be a blight on the small town, Parish councillor, Jerry Tarrant, hires private detective Agatha Raisin to track down the murderer. But the village is secretive and the residents resent Agatha's investigation. Of course that doesn't stop the ever-persistent Agatha from investigating and sticking her nose where no one wants it--especially as the suspect list grows. And, as if it isn't enough that Agatha's ex has reentered the picture, the murderer is now targeting Agatha! With M.C. Beaton's Something Borrowed, Someone Dead the bossy, vain, and absolutely irresistible, Agatha Raisin continues to be a fan favorite"--

Pushing up Daisies

e5518eef-ed0b-4fb7-8c4f-5381f634620e-1

Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House continues the tradition in M. C. Beaton's beloved Agatha Raisin cozy mystery series--now a hit show on Acorn TV and public television.

Just back from an extended stay in London, Agatha Raisin finds herself greeted by torrential rains and an old, familiar feeling of boredom. When her handsome new neighbor, Paul Chatterton, shows up on her doorstep, she tries her best to ignore his obvious charms, but his sparkling black eyes and the promise of adventure soon lure her into another investigation.

Paul has heard rumors about Agatha's reputation as the Cotswold village sleuth and wastes no time offering their services to the crotchety owner of a haunted house. Whispers, footsteps, and a cold white mist are plaguing Mrs. Witherspoon, but the police have failed to come up with any leads, supernatural or otherwise. The neighbors think it's all a desperate ploy for attention, but Paul and Agatha are sure something more devious is going on. Someone's playing tricks on Mrs. Witherspoon, and when she turns up dead under suspicious circumstances, Agatha finds herself caught up in another baffling murder mystery.

Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House

3a296a70-b54d-4863-8d5e-5d348f2f3ced-1

#romance #fantasy#thenightcircus #magic #fiction 

Waging a fierce competition for which they have trained since childhood, circus magicians Celia and Marco unexpectedly fall in love with each other and share a fantastical romance that manifests in fateful ways. A first novel. Reprint.

Browse by categories

Stephen Prothero

God Is Not One

Michael Slater

Charles Dickens

Herbert F. Tucker (Editor)

A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture

Mary Louise Pratt

Imperial Eyes

Gail Turley Houston

Royalties

Gail Turley Houston

From Dickens to Dracula

Gail T. Houston

Consuming Fictions

Tricia A. Lootens

Lost Saints

Stuart M. Curran (Editor)

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism

John O. Jordan (Editor)

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens

Joseph Bristow (Editor)

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry

Piet Vroon; Paul Vincent (Translator)

Smell

Lyall Watson

Jacobson's Organ

Janice Carlisle

Common Scents

Annette Kolodny

The Lay of the Land

Margaret Atwood

The Testaments

Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale

Frances Ferguson

Solitude and the Sublime

Frances Ferguson

Pornography, the Theory

Maryanne Wolf

Proust and the Squid

M. C. Beaton

Pushing up Daisies

M. C. Beaton

Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House

Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus

Get The App