When Oscar Wilde said he had "seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime," his joke played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously--both in Wilde's day and in our own. In Fateful Beauty, Douglas Mao recovers the lost intellectual, social, and literary history of the belief that the beauty--or ugliness--of the environment in which one is raised influences or even determines one's fate. Weaving together readings in literature, psychology, biology, philosophy, education, child-rearing advice, and interior design, he shows how this idea abetted a dramatic rise in attention to environment in many discourses and in many practices affecting the lives of the young between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. Through original and detailed analyses of Wilde, Walter Pater, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, and W. H. Auden, Mao shows that English-language writing of the period was informed in crucial but previously unrecognized ways by the possibility that beautiful environments might produce better people. He also reveals how these writers shared concerns about environment, evolution, determinism, freedom, and beauty with scientists and social theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, and W.H.R. Rivers. In so doing, Mao challenges conventional views of the roles of beauty and the aesthetic in art and life during this time.

She Offered Her Body. . . Jimmy Joste was a powerhouse in the oil and gas industry, but he was a weakling when it came to his gorgeous, athletic, longtime lover, Rhonda Glover. Addicted to her sexual prowess and madly in love, Joste gave her homes, cars, cash, and a $350,000 engagement ring. . . .But Left Him As A Corpse Their fifteen years of passion and excess ended the day Rhonda drove directly from a shooting range to the Austin home they once shared. After pumping ten bullets into him from a Glock 9mm, she stood over Joste's blood-splattered body and shot him six more times--twice below the waist. The Ultimate Girl Gone Wild According to Rhonda, Joste was violent, abusive, and threatened her life. Here, for the first time, are Rhonda Glover's shocking stories of drug-crazed devil worship and sexual perversity. But in a packed courtroom, prosecutors presented shocking evidence that beautiful Rhonda didn't act in self-defense--it was hot-blooded murder! Includes 16 Pages Of Shocking Photos

The first major literary and cultural history of color in America, 1880–1930 Chromographia tells the story of how color became modern and how literature, by engaging with modern color, became modernist. From the vivid pictures in children’s books to the bold hues of abstract painting, from psychological theories of perception to the synthetic dyes that brightened commercial goods, color concerned both the material stuff of modernity and its theoretical and artistic formulations. Chromographia spans these diverse practices to reveal the widespread effects on U.S. literature and culture of the chromatic revolution that unfolded at the turn of the twentieth century. In analyzing color experience through the lens of U.S. writers (including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, L. Frank Baum, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and William Carlos Williams), Chromographia argues that modern aesthetic techniques are inseparable from the theories and technologies that drove modern color. Nicholas Gaskill shows how literature registered the social worlds within which chromatic technologies emerged, and also experimented with the ideas about perception, language, and the sensory environment that accompanied their proliferation. Chromographia is the only study of modern color in U.S. literature. It presents a new reading of perception in literature and a theory of experience that uses color to move beyond the usual divisions of modern thought.

Eighteen-year-old maid Tess Davies is determined to escape the wealthy, troubled family she serves. It’s 1912, and Tess has been trapped in the employ of the Lisles for years, amid painful memories and twisted secrets. But now the Lisle family is headed to America, with Tess in tow. Once the ship they’re sailing on—the RMS Titanic—reaches its destination, Tess plans to strike out and create a new lifefor herself. Her single-minded focus shatters when she meets Alec, a handsome first-class passenger who captivates her instantly. But Alec has secrets of his own. He’s in a hurry to leave Europe, and whispers aboard the ship say it’s because of the tragic end of his last affair with the French actress who died so gruesomely and so mysteriously. . . . Soon Tess will learn just how dark Alec’s past truly is. The danger they face is no ordinary enemy: werewolves exist and are stalking him—and now her, too. Her growing love for Alec will put Tess in mortal peril, and fate will do the same before their journey on the Titanic is over. In Fateful, New York Times bestselling author Claudia Gray delivers paranormal adventure, dark suspense, and alluring romance set against the opulent backdrop of the Titanic’s first—and last—voyage.

If art is our bid to make sense of the senseless, there is hardly more fertile creative ground than that of the twentieth century. From the trench poetry of World War I and Holocaust memoirs by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel to the post-colonial novels of southern Asia and the anti-apartheid plays of the South African Market Theater, writers have married beauty and horror. This "century of trauma" produced writing at once saturated in political violence and complicated by the ethics of aesthetic representation. Stretching across genres and the globe, Terrible Beauty charts a course of aesthetic reconciliation between empathy and evil in the great literature of the twentieth century. The "violent aesthetic"—a category the author traces back to Plato and Nietzsche—accommodates the pleasure people take not only in destruction itself but also in its rendering. As readers, we oscillate between a fascination with atrocity and an ethical imperative to bear witness. Arguing for the immersive experience of literature as particularly conducive to ethical contemplation, Marian Eide plumbs the aesthetic power and ethical purpose of this creative tension. By invoking the reader as complicit—both stricken witness and enthralled voyeur— Terrible Beauty sheds new light on the relationship between violence, literature, and the moral burdens of art.

The darkness of the tenth century is dissipated by no contemporary historian. Monkish chronicles alone shed a faint light over the discordant chaos of the Italian world. Rome was no longer the capital of the earth. The seat of empire had shifted from the banks of the Tiber to the shores of the Bosporus, and the seven hilled city of Constantine had assumed the imperial purple of the ancient capital of the Cæsars. Centuries of struggles with the hosts of foreign invaders had in time lowered the state of civilization to such a degree, that in point of literature and art the Rome of the tenth century could not boast of a single name worthy of being transmitted to posterity. Even the memory of the men whose achievements in the days of its glory constituted the pride and boast of the Roman world, had become almost extinct. A great lethargy benumbed the Italian mind, engendered by the reaction from the incessant feuds and broils among the petty tyrants and oppressors of the country. Together with the rest of the disintegrated states of Italy, united by no common bond, Rome had become the prey of the most terrible disorders. Papacy had fallen into all manner of corruption. Its former halo and prestige had departed. The chair of St. Peter was sought for by bribery and controlling influence, often by violence and assassination, and the city was oppressed by factions and awed into submission by foreign adventurers in command of bands collected from the outcasts of all nations. From the day of Christmas in the year 800, when at the hands of Pope Leo III, Charlemagne received the imperial crown of the West, the German Kings dated their right as rulers of Rome and the Roman world, a right, feebly and ineffectually contested by the emperors of the East. It was the dream of every German King immediately upon his election to cross the Alps to receive at the hand of the Pope the crown of a country which resisted and resented and never formally recognized a superiority forced upon it. Thus from time to time we find Rome alternately in revolt against German rule, punished, subdued and again imploring the aid of the detested foreigners against the misrule of her own princes, to settle the disputes arising from pontifical elections, or as protection against foreign invaders and the violence of contending factions. Plunged in an abyss from which she saw no other means of extricating herself, harassed by the Hungarians in Lombardy and the Saracens in Calabria, Italy had, in the year 961, called on Otto the Great, King of Germany, for assistance. Little opposition was made to this powerful monarch. Berengar II, the reigning sovereign of Italy, submitted and agreed to hold his kingdom of him as a fief. Otto thereupon returned to Germany, but new disturbances arising, he crossed the Alps a second time, deposed Berengar and received at the hands of Pope John XII the imperial dignity nearly suspended for forty years.

In A Question of Tradition, Kathryn Hellerstein explores the roles that women poets played in forming a modern Yiddish literary tradition. Women who wrote in Yiddish go largely unrecognized outside a rapidly diminishing Yiddish readership. Even in the heyday of Yiddish literature, they were regarded as marginal. But for over four centuries, women wrote and published Yiddish poems that addressed the crises of Jewish history—from the plague to the Holocaust—as well as the challenges and pleasures of daily life: prayer, art, friendship, nature, family, and love. Through close readings and translations of poems of eighteen writers, Hellerstein argues for a new perspective on a tradition of women Yiddish poets. Framed by a consideration of Ezra Korman's 1928 anthology of women poets, Hellerstein develops a discussion of poetry that extends from the sixteenth century through the twentieth, from early modern Prague and Krakow to high modernist Warsaw, New York, and California. The poems range from early conventional devotions, such as a printer's preface and verse prayers, to experimental, transgressive lyrics that confront a modern ambivalence toward Judaism. In an integrated study of literary and cultural history, Hellerstein shows the immensely important contribution made by women poets to Jewish literary tradition.

The beautiful Maerlin lives in a house by the sea. One stormy night, she manages to rescue a beautiful stranger who is shipwrecked. The young man is persecuted by demons, because he is the crown prince of the country on which the curse fell. Now Maerlin has to travel to a distant kingdom and attend a magnificent ball at which every mortal guest becomes a victim. Already on the way, a terrible danger awaits, but what you will not go for love!