With their rakish characters, sensationalist plots, improbable adventures and objectionable language (like swell and golly), dime novels in their heyday were widely considered a threat to the morals of impressionable youth. Roundly criticized by church leaders and educators of the time, these short, quick-moving, pocket-sized publications were also, inevitably, wildly popular with readers of all ages. This work looks at the evolution of the dime novel and at the authors, publishers, illustrators, and subject matter of the genre. Also discussed are related types of children's literature, such as story papers, chapbooks, broadsides, serial books, pulp magazines, comic books and today's paperback books. The author shows how these works reveal much about early American life and thought and how they reflect cultural nationalism through their ideological teachings in personal morality and ethics, humanitarian reform and political thought. Overall, this book is a thoughtful consideration of the dime novel's contribution to the genre of children's literature. Eight appendices provide a wealth of information, offering an annotated bibliography of dime novels and listing series books, story paper periodicals, characters, authors and their pseudonyms, and more. A reference section, index and illustrations are all included.

What do we mean by the term 'Gothic'? How does it differ from such classifications as 'terror' and 'horror' and where do its parameters lie? In an attempt to define such an elusive term, this A-Z unearths the terminologies associated with Gothic through a variety of short essays written by leading scholars. Not only does it plot the national characteristics of Gothic as in the French school of terror, Frenetique to American Gothic, but it also spans the period from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice.

Presents an alphabetical reference guide detailing the lives and works of authors associated with Gothic literature.

For a hundred years, from about the 1850s to the 1950s, schoolboy stories were voraciously read by the vast majority of boys and a high proportion of girls. A huge proportion of these ‘ripping yarns’ were school-based stories – and cricket was an invariable element, From Tom Brown’s Schooldays to the ‘Red Circle’ tales of the Hotspur comic, older children of all classes were inducted into a culture in which cricket was admired as the ideal sport. Inevitably, this led to generations of parents and, importantly, teachers inculcating this concept into their offspring and pupils respectively. The chief relevant authors were self-proclaimed protagonists of the faith of Muscular Christianity; there was no accident about the creed they preached in their stories, inclusive of the righteous role of cricket in pursuit of their ideals. This text describes the sheer weight and longevity of cricket in this type of literature and the background and beliefs of its major progenitors. That also analyses the cultural and social impact of this intense volume of schoolboy cricket tales. The author’s controversial conclusion is that, in brief, it was good for cricket but bad for the nation’s education system. Here is a book, then, that will appeal not only to cricket fans but to those interested in children’s literature, social history and the development of today’s schools.

An important and unique work about Gothic fiction, by"the major anthologist of supernatural and Gothic fiction", Montague Summers.

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South--global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South--that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of Southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum Southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth-century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of Southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical Southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.

This collection, inspired by the folklore of the Royal County, contains a plethora of tales robustly retold for a contemporary audience. The exploits of well-known figures such as Herne the Hunter and Dick Turpin feature alongside many of the county's lesser-known legends. From a cruel ordeal by fire and historical trials by combat, to the lore of dragons and witches, Berkshire Folk Tales is a heady mix of bloodythirsty, funny, passionate and moving stories. But this is not only a book of folk tales. It is also a gazetteer to guide you, allowing you to make the same journey as the antiquaries and discover this land and its stories for yourself.

This second volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic provides a rigorous account of the Gothic in British, American and Continental European culture, from the Romantic period through to the Victorian fin de siècle. Here, leading scholars in the fields of literature, theatre, architecture and the history of science and popular entertainment explore the Gothic in its numerous interdisciplinary forms and guises, as well as across a range of different international contexts. As much a cultural history of the Gothic in this period as an account of the ways in which the Gothic mode has participated in the formative historical events of modernity, the volume offers fresh perspectives on familiar themes while also drawing new critical attention to a range of hitherto overlooked concerns. From Romanticism, to Penny Bloods, Dickens and even the railway system, the volume provides a compelling and comprehensive study of nineteenth-century Gothic culture.