Elaborate analogies between Irish and Jewish history, between Irish and Jewish subjectivities, occur with surprising frequency throughout American literature. They recall James Joyce's Leopold Bloom and episodes of Ulysses, Douglas Hyde's analogies during the Celtic Revival between learning Hebrew and learning Irish, and a myriad of claims of an unusual relationship between these peoples that goes beyond comparisons of their respective diasporic histories. But how does one describe this uncanny relationship, one often marked by hostility, affinity, and ambivalence, without essentializing people whose origins, class affiliation, educations, life experiences, and so on are enormously different? "Something Dreadful and Grand": American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious describes a complex allosemitism and allohibernianism through a variety of cultural texts with which immigrant Irish and Jewish Americans were most engaged: popular music of the Tin Pan Alley era, tenement literature from Anzia Yezierska and James T. Farrell through the posthumous publication of Henry Roth's An American Type, and proletarian and socialist-inflected drama by Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets, Eugene O'Neill, and Arthur Miller as they engaged the Irish drama of such writers as Bernard Shaw and Sean O'Casey. In an effort to trace both the genealogy and more recent trajectory of immigrant drama and fiction, chapters explore both the post-Famine melodramatic stage of the nineteenth century and a host of more contemporary texts from newer generations of immigrants. Throughout, the book argues for a "circum-North Atlantic" culture in which texts from Ireland, Britain, Irish America, and Jewish America contribute substantially to both a modern American literature and to understandings of the terms "Irish" and "Jewish." How can we really know what these terms mean as they delimit or erase totally the differences inherent to them? Borrowing a term from psychoanalytic and political theory, "Something Dreadful and Grand" explores the larger dimensions of this Irish-Jewish unconscious underlying cultural production in America, arguing for the centrality of these two diasporic groups to the development of American popular music, fiction, and especially drama.

An in-depth look at the lives of the women murdered by the infamous, 19th-century London serial killer. Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly are inextricably linked in history. Their names might not be instantly recognizable, and the identity of their murderer may have eluded detectives and historians throughout the years, but there is no mistaking the infamy of Jack the Ripper. For nine weeks during the autumn of 1888, the Whitechapel Murderer brought terror to London’s East End, slashing women’s throats and disemboweling them. London’s most famous serial killer has been pored over time and again, yet his victims have been sorely neglected, reduced to the simple label: prostitute. The lives of these five women are rags-to-riches-to-rags stories of the most tragic kind. There was a time in each of their lives when these poor women had a job, money, a home and a family. Hardworking, determined, and fiercely independent individuals, it was bad luck or a wrong turn here or there that left them wretched and destitute. Ignored by the press and overlooked by historians, it is time their stories were told. “Hume presents us with clear and concise biographies of the Ripper’s victims, and while it is tempting to think of them as all being prostitutes . . . their backgrounds, gone into in this much detail, shows them as something completely different. You will have to, you must read this brilliant book, it puts a whole new perspective into the canon of literature about the most infamous murderer of the last two centuries.” —Books Monthly

Internal Conflict in Nineteenth-century Literature: Reading the Jungian Shadow” examines the genealogy of the Jungian shadow in Romantic and post-Romantic literature. Ştefan Bolea analyzes the way the crisis of identity in nineteenth-century literature prefigures our contemporary “inner discord” by means of the philosophy of literature, combining literary criticism with psychoanalytical phenomenology. This book provides a deep analysis of the connection between this “inner discord” and the century that brought us industrialization, nationalism, modernity, and the unconscious by comparing Jung’s theory of the shadow with Nietzche’s and Cioran’s versions of Antihumanism in a highly interdisciplinary landscape. Scholars of psychology, philosophy, literature, media studies, and history will find this book particularly useful.

From spooky stories and real-life ghost hunting, to shows about murder and serial killers, we are fascinated by death - and we owe these modern obsessions to the Victorian age. Death and the Victorians explores a period in history when the search for the truth about what lies beyond our mortal realm was matched only by the imagination and invention used to find it. Walk among London’s festering graveyards, where the dead were literally rising from the grave. Visit the Paris Morgue, where thousands flocked to view the spectacle of death every single day. Lift the veil on how spirits were invited into the home, secret societies taught ways to survive death, and the latest science and technology was applied to provide proof of the afterlife. Find out why the Victorian era is considered the golden age of the ghost story, exemplified by tales from the likes of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde and Henry James. Discover how the birth of the popular press nurtured our taste for murder and that Jack the Ripper was actually a work of pure Gothic horror fiction crafted by cynical Victorian newspapermen. Death and the Victorians exposes the darker side of the nineteenth century, a time when the living were inventing incredible ways to connect with the dead that endure to this day.

Often seen as the host nation's largest ever logistical undertaking, accommodating the Olympics and its attendant security infrastructure brings seismic changes to both the physical and social geography of its destination. Since 1976, the defence of the spectacle has become the central feature of its planning, one that has assumed even greater prominence following the bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Games and, most importantly, 9/11. Indeed, the quintupled cost of securing the first post-9/11 summer Games in Athens demonstrates the considerable scale and complexity currently implicated in these operations. Such costs are not only fiscal. The Games stimulate a tidal wave of redevelopment ushering in new gentrified urban settings and an associated investment that may or may not soak through to the incumbent community. Given the unusual step of developing London's Olympic Park in the heart of an existing urban milieu and the stated commitments to 'community development' and 'legacy', these constitute particularly acute issues for the 2012 Games. In addition to sealing the Olympic Park from perceived threats, 2012 security operations have also harnessed the administrative criminological staples of community safety and crime reduction to generate an ordered space in the surrounding areas. Of central importance here are the issues of citizenship, engagement and access in urban spaces redeveloped upon the themes of security and commerce. Through analyzing the social and community impact of the 2012 Games and its security operation on East London, this book concludes by considering the key debates as to whether utopian visions of legacy can be sustained given the demands of providing a global securitized event of the magnitude of the modern Olympics.

Danny Dodo uncovers the mystery behind the disappearances of iconic endangered and extinct species. Danny Dodo is a detective on a mission. Over the years, thousands of amazing animals have disappeared. Where did they go? What happened to them? And why did they vanish? It’s Danny’s job to find out—and he needs readers to help him! Danny Dodo’s Detective Diary includes stories about missing animals like Skye the passenger pigeon, whose flock was so big it could block out the sun; Lily the tree snail, muse of Hawaii whose shimmering shell inspired poetry; and Mayleen the Baiji river dolphin, known to many as the “Goddess of the Yangtze.” But Danny doesn’t only want to celebrate his extinct buddies, he’s going to help everyone get to know some of his endangered friends too—and he’s counting on his readers to keep a helpful eye on them. Featuring the charming illustrations of Rob Hodgson, Danny Dodo’s Detective Diary stands apart with its colorful creatures and humorous approach to zoology based on the latest scientific research, and it includes handy tips for young children on what they can do to help the planet.