Carmilla is the book that set the text for Dracula, that threw the light on our morbid fascination with the vampire legend. This is Carmilla, J.... Sheridan LeFanu's classic novel of blood, terror -- and a love that dare not speak its name.

Carmilla is the story that created the modern day vampire. The House of White version is the only one to present the original unabridged tale (the real... story) of Countess Carmilla Karnstein in its entirety with original illustrations, a glossary of Victorian terminology used by Le Fanu, and masterpieces of art that deepen one's understanding of who Carmilla was instead of merely relying on a third-hand account of young girl's jaded memory, twenty years lost in passing.Carmilla was the vampire to break the mold of rotting flesh and foul stench. She was the very first romantic vampire, and after inspiring Bram Stoker's Dracula, she has continued with us, always in the shadow, influencing culture with a subtlety that is as alluring as it is elitist. A multi-layered story of love, loss, and a yearning for both a past and a future unobtainable, and finally of great sacrifice. Carmilla ranks as one of the world's great tragedies. A lonely young girl living in a desolate area in Austria is befriended by a young countess after what seems a chance encounter. Laura's innocence and sheltered life prevents her from seeing the obvious, that her new friend Carmilla is a demon of the highest order, and one who has fallen passionately in love with her. Over time, Carmilla's lust for Laura, and her soul, overpower her caution, and the serenity of a life of seclusion becomes a nightmarish existence for Laura as her world unravels in ways that can never be repaired. The tale of Carmilla is enchanting and hypnotic to this day. The prose is pure Victorian, alien but accessible, set in a fashion that forces you to forget your daily existence while you fall down the spiral danse macabre with Carmilla, Laura, and her devoted father. Best read late at night and alone, this story seduces you into a world far from everyday life, a world that extends no further than a day's ride to the next village. This volume contains the original unabridged 1872 tale.

Following a near fatal carriage collision, the beautiful young Carmilla is taken in by the narrator Laura and her father. The two young women become... strangely attracted to each other, but there seems to be more to Carmilla than meets the eye. After her arrival in the village, local peasants begin to die and Laura falls ill and languishes. What is Carmilla's true identity, and can she be to blame? A thrilling Victorian tale of horror and mystery and a major influence on Stoker's Dracula, Carmilla remains one of Sheridan Le Fanu's most enduring works. This Valancourt Books edition, the first-ever scholarly edition of Le Fanu's novella, follows the rare original text as it appeared serially in The Dark Blue in 1871-72 (including the original illustrations) and includes a new introduction and footnotes by Jamieson Ridenhour. Also featured in this edition is a wealth of contextual material, including texts by Yeats, Coleridge, Stoker, Padraig Pearse, and others, and the complete texts of Le Fanu's "The Child that Went with the Fairies" and F.G. Loring's "The Tomb of Sarah."

This work contains a major revision of Douglas Thomson's Catullus: A Critical Edition (1978), with the addition of a full commentary and a wholly new... introduction. For the introduction and for each of the poems there is an extensive and current bibliography.In the introduction, apart from sections on the life of Catullus, on the arrangement of the poems, and on their literary background, there is a lengthy discussion of the history of the text, as well as a review of the progress of Catullan studies from the editio princeps to the present day.There are about seventy changes from the previous edition in the text of the poems. The critical apparatus has also been extensively revised. In addition, the Table of Manuscripts, which has come to be regarded as standard, has been updated without alteration to the numbering sequence.Though this is not primarily intended as a 'school edition,' the commentary includes, in addition to critical judgments, translations and interpretations of words and phrases that may help to illuminate readings in the text.Catullus offers readers a new text of the poems, with a commentary, a codicology of the manuscript tradition, and a thorough review of Catullus scholarship.

Examining nine landmark battles from ancient to modern times--from Salamis, where outnumbered Greeks devastated the slave army of Xerxes, to Cortes’s... conquest of Mexico to the Tet offensive--Victor Davis Hanson explains why the armies of the West have been the most lethal and effective of any fighting forces in the world.Looking beyond popular explanations such as geography or superior technology, Hanson argues that it is in fact Western culture and values–the tradition of dissent, the value placed on inventiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship–which have consistently produced superior arms and soldiers. Offering riveting battle narratives and a balanced perspective that avoids simple triumphalism, Carnage and Culture demonstrates how armies cannot be separated from the cultures that produce them and explains why an army produced by a free culture will always have the advantage.

The French artist Orlan is infamous for performances during which her body is surgically altered. After nine such performance-surgeries, features from... Greek goddesses painted by Botticelli, Gérard, Moreau, and an anonymous School of Fontainebleau artist, as well as from da Vinci's Mona Lisa have been implanted into Orlan's face. During her surgical performances, viewers witness a material tampering with the relationship between the face and individual identity, the original and the constructed, an historical critique of the association of art with beauty and the female body.Responding to Orlan's definition of her performance surgeries as "carnal art," C. Jill O'Bryan considers how the artist's ever-fluctuating reconstructions of her face question idealized beauty and female identity, persuasively arguing that Orlan's surgically reinvented face succeeds in both reinforcing and breaking apart corporeal subjectivity and representation. O'Bryan contextualizes Orlan's surgeries within the centuries-long history of public dissections and surgeries open to the public and of lavish anatomical illustrations created to draw the gaze into the opened anatomy to Artaud's "Theater of Cruelty" in the early twentieth century and contemporary works and performances by Cindy Sherman and Hans Bellman and Annie Sprinkle. A compelling blurring of the line between feminist theory and art criticism, O'Bryan's close examination of Orlan's performance-surgeries complicates and reconfigures the notions of identity--and its relation to the body--at the very core of experience.

"The poems in Carnal Fragrance are straightforward dispatches from the land of grief and mourning. Observant, controlled, and rich with feelings, these... poems take note of the surprising moments, small ironies, odd sensations and quotidian realities of survivorhood. They examine what happens when a loved one dies and you must live on without them, aching to find ways to continue in their absence, surrounded by their lingering presence and yet utterly bereft. Ovid said, Songs have immunity from death. Poems like these, which deal with loss in such a clear eyes way remind us that Ovid was right." description by Amy Gerstler

Beginning with a startling endorsement of the patristic view of Judaism--that it was a "carnal" religion, in contrast to the spiritual vision of the... Church--Daniel Boyarin argues that rabbinic Judaism was based on a set of assumptions about the human body that were profoundly different from those of Christianity. The body--specifically, the sexualized body--could not be renounced, for the Rabbis believed as a religious principle in the generation of offspring and hence in intercourse sanctioned by marriage.This belief bound men and women together and made impossible the various modes of gender separation practiced by early Christians. The commitment to coupling did not imply a resolution of the unequal distribution of power that characterized relations between the sexes in all late-antique societies. But Boyarin argues strenuously that the male construction and treatment of women in rabbinic Judaism did not rest on a loathing of the female body. Thus, without ignoring the currents of sexual domination that course through the Talmudic texts, Boyarin insists that the rabbinic account of human sexuality, different from that of the Hellenistic Judaisms and Pauline Christianity, has something important and empowering to teach us today.

This landmark book tracks matters of intimacy to investigate matters of state in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indonesia, particularly the... critical role played by sexual arrangements and affective attachments in creating colonial categories and distinguishing the ruler from the ruled. Arguing that social classification is not a benign cultural act but a potent political one, Ann Laura Stoler's essays focus on parents and parenting, nursing mothers, servants, orphanages, and abandoned children to reveal why they were understood as so essential to imperial governance and why they have been so consistently absent from its historiography. In a new preface, Stoler takes up a broad range of problematics raised in the first edition, including the analytics of comparison, the treatment of the intimate, and more.

Jason Bredle's poems approach the world like a haunted cat approaches a glacier, curious and itchy with strangeness. In Carnival, he skates... paratactically between states of being: levity, heart-holes, licks of darkness, lovesickness and werewolfishness. Bredle's gift as a poet is to traverse and re-traverse one looking glass in ten different moods. When he goes through it, we are taken. -Melissa Broder

Starting from the days of slavery and following through to the first decades of the twentieth century, this book traces the evolution of Carnival and... secular black music in Trinidad and beyond. Calypso emerged as the preeminent Carnival song form at the end of the nineteenth century and its association with the festival is investigated, as are the first commercial recordings by Trinidad performers. Considerable use is made of contemporary newspaper reports, colonial documents, travelogues, oral history and folklore, providing an authoritative treatment of a fascinating story in popular cultural history.

Carnival Music in Trinidad is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music... Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional materials to accompany each study. Home to the most elaborate Carnival celebration in the Caribbean, Trinidad is the birthplace of the steelband and a hub for calypso and soca, musical genres that have been influential throughout the world. Collectively, these and other performance genres constitute the dynamic event of Carnival, which for more than a century has been an occasion for an intense exchange of ideas about society, culture, and tradition in Trinidad. Carnival Music in Trinidad examines the history and aesthetics of calypso, steelband, soca, and other genres, relating musical structure, lyrics, sound, and style to the major roles they play in Trinidadian culture. It also analyzes how the instruments, sounds, and lyrics of Carnival music provide a sense of national and ethnic identity. Author Shannon Dudley describes calypso's traditional role as a voice for the common people, acknowledging the tensions between this history and calypso's ties to modern commercial music markets. He also presents the story of the steelband--an art form born in the most downtrodden neighborhoods of Port of Spain--as both a parable of the nation's struggles and successes and as a continuous process of musical exploration. Written in a lively style accessible to both students and general readers, Carnival Music in Trinidad features vivid eyewitness accounts and illustrations of performances. The book is packaged with a 40-minute CD containing examples of the music discussed in the text.