An ever-expanding critical library on fantasy fiction requires an analysis of why the genre is so ubiquitous, enduring and beloved. This work analyzes the mythic elements in foundational fantasy texts, arguing that mythopoeic fantasy reveals timeless truths that link human cultures past and present. Through close readings of works like Phantastes, The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Neverending Story, A Wrinkle in Time and Out of the Silent Planet, this book explores how mythopoeic fantasy speaks to the deepest concerns of the human heart. It investigates the genre's use of an imagination that is sometimes atrophied by the demands of contemporary life, and explores how fantasy provides restoration, consolation and hope within a cultural context that too often decries such ideas. Each chapter focuses on a representative text, providing author background and engaging relevant scholarship on a variety of relevant thematic issues. Offering new insights on these classic texts by drawing upon post-secular critical approaches, this work is suitable for both new and seasoned students of fantasy.

To coincide with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, this anthology celebrates the depth and diversity of one of the most important figures in literature. Compiled by multi-award winning editor, Ellen Datlow, it presents some of the foremost talents of the genre, who have come together to reimagine tales inspired by Poe. Sharyn McCrumb, Lucius Shepard, Pat Cadigan, M. Rickert, and more, have lent their craft to this anthology, retelling such classics as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Masque of the Red Death," exploring the very fringes of the genre.

Throughout the history of the United States, a commitment to both democratic political ideals and to capitalist realities has made privacy a persistently controversial issue. Only rarely, however, has privacy attracted the attention of American literary criticism. In his ingeniously argued new study, Louis A. Renza extends the idea of privacy beyond the received wisdom of its popular legal and psychological conceptions and, iconoclastically, beyond its conception in postmodern literary theory to show that the public-private paradigm has import for American literary texts past and present. It is a truism of cultural studies that the interior space of imagination is socially constructed and thus that the private is ineluctably political. But Renza shows, through a brilliantly original analysis of works by Edgar Allan Poe and Wallace Stevens, that as an effect of reading and writing, a real or “radical” privacy continually resists appropriation. In admirably close readings of Poe’s tales, his long essay Eureka, and Stevens’s Harmonium poems, Renza demonstrates that both writers ground the concept of privacy in the possibility of multiple interpretations of their texts. Neither Poe nor Stevens resists meaning or sense, but by thematically engaging in their work the inescapable public/private dichotomy of artistic creation, they create a highly personal idiom that, like Poe’s “purloined letter,” allows them to “hide in plain sight” and in that way to finesse public constructions of meaning. Thus, surprisingly, privacy can always be conceived as something more than what current social-cultural codes urge us to believe. The poetics Renza compellingly elucidates does not deny the insights of current theory but offers a refreshing alternative that allows for the “radical” autonomy of authorship without resorting to vague elitist claims of individual genius. His thoughtful readings are a major contribution to traditional Poe and Stevens scholarship, and his challenging thesis will provoke new investigations into the privacy issue in American literature as a whole.

Presents a collection of critical essays on Poe's novel, The tell-tale heart, arranged chronologically in the order of their original publication.

Each volume in this series provides an introduction tracing the subject author's critical reputation, trends in interpretation, developments in textual and biographical scholarship, and reprints of selected essays and reviews, beginning with the author's contemporaries and continuing through to current scholarship. Many volumes also feature new essays by leading scholars and critics, specially commissioned for the series.

Direk, a collection of essays on Filipino filmmakers, presents an accessible and provocative introduction to Philippine cinema. Notable Filipino critics write on the canonical Filipino film directors: Ronald Baytan on Ishmael Bernal; Patrick F Campos on Kidlat Tahimik; Clodualdo Del Mundo, Jr. on Manuel Silos, Eddie Romero, and Lamberto Avellana; Vicente Garcia Groyon on Peque Gallaga; Shirley O. Lua on Fernando Poe, Jr; Gil Quito on Marilou Diaz-Abaya and Lav Diaz; Anne Frances N Sangil on Mike de Leon; Agustin Sotto on Gerardo de Leon; Nicanor G Tiongson on Manuel Conde; Rolando B Tolentino on Lino Brocka; Noel Vera on Mario OHara; and Lito B Zulueta on Brillante Ma Mendoza. A compelling work, the first of its kind, it is filled with insight and critical provocation. The work is essential reading for all who are interested in film making in all its multiple aspects, and provides hitherto unavailable information on Philippine filmmakers and cinema.