We join Abby and Xander on their big day, a huge wedding at Hotel Spectre. When the rings go missing, the bridal gown gets tainted with blood and the groom starts a fistfight in the garden, only the efforts of friends and creatures can make Abby have the wedding day she deserves. Whatever fate had in mind, this will be the happiest damned bride that ever animated her lawn ornaments. Or else.

Tacitus' account of Nero's principate is an extraordinary piece of historical writing. His graphic narrative (including Annals XV) is one of the highlights of the greatest surviving historian of the Roman Empire. It describes how the imperial system survived Nero's flamboyant and hedonistic tenure as emperor, and includes many famous passages, from the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64 to the city-wide party organised by Nero's praetorian prefect, Tigellinus, in Rome. This edition unlocks the difficulties and complexities of this challenging yet popular text for students and instructors alike. It elucidates the historical context of the work and the literary artistry of the author, as well as explaining grammatical difficulties of the Latin for students. It also includes a comprehensive introduction discussing historical, literary and stylistic issues.

Elly has known she was going to become the phoenix for twelve years. She just didn�t want it to happen quite yet. When she meets Terric in person for the first time, there is no going back. Her transformation is underway. Her body is becoming fire and there is nothing she can do to stop it. Terric has been looking for the phoenix since he felt the first stirrings of her power in the world around him. When he meets Elly and they dance, he knows that she is the one he has been waiting for, but his patience is running out. She demands a proper courtship, and he complies. After all, how long had he already waited?

In his legendary novel The Jungle (1905 and 1906), Upton Sinclair included a conspicuous number of Lithuanian words, phrases and surnames. This volume is the first attempt to analyze aspects of Lithuanian linguistic and historical data from The Jungle. Sinclair discovered the Lithuanian language in Chicago and explored it with pleasure. He even confessed to having sang in Lithuanian. If you look for “a Lithuanian linguist” working in field-research conditions in Chicago’s Back of the Yards—there is Upton Sinclair! The book targets Sinclair’s motives for choosing Lithuanian characters, his sources and his work methods in “field-research” conditions in Chicago. Some real-life individuals—Lithuanian name-donors for the protagonists of The Jungle—are presented in this volume. Certain details of the turn-of-the-century Chicago depicted in The Jungle are also revealed—for example, the saloon where the actual Lithuanian wedding feast took place and its owner. This volume is of interest to American literary historians, sociolinguists, language historians, and those interested in the history of Lithuanian immigration to America and the immigrant experience in Chicago.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

Originally published as Negotiating Language, Constructing Race, 1998, in the series titled Contributions to the Sociology of Language, 79, sociologist Nirmala Srirekam PuruShotam discusses language as a social phenomenon, focusing specifically on the configuration of nation in Singapore. Annotat

This Guide steers students through the critical writing on Shakespeare’s tragedies from the sixteenth century to the present day. Guides students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare’s tragedies. Covers both significant early views and recent critical interventions. Substantial editorial material links the articles and places them in context. Annotated suggestions for further reading allow students to investigate further.

A groundbreaking anthology that probes the disposition towards the visually different Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal. Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits. Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.

Bob Brawley is thumbing through the newspaper one Sunday afternoon, looking for something to distract his mind from the freefall that has left his marriage with Shelly in near shambles. He comes across an article that describes the Amish lifestyle and its customs and passes the paper to Shelly, beckoning her to read the article. Agreeing to remove themselves, if only for a weekend, from the toxic, pernicious air that has filled their home, Bob and Shelly locate the Amish community and soon find themselves in the home of Jacob and Katie Beiler, where they learn about the Amish persecution, their relocation to America, their traditions, their beliefs, plain dress, and methods of farming. When Bob asks Jacob about the possibility of his family living in the Amish settlement, he learns that he would need the bishops approval as well as a sponsor. Returning to Oklahoma City, Bob and his family miss their Amish friends and feel led to return to the quaint, pastoral Missouri settlement. After Jacob locates a vacant, two-story, dilapidated farmhouse for Bob and his family, they pack a travel trailer. Join them as they discover what it means to live a simpler life in Adopted by the Amish.