In the summer of 1970, 18-year-old Travis Monday joined the U.S. Army and volunteered for Airborne School and for Vietnam. Thirty-five years later he wrote his own story -- Nineteen Jumps and a Prayer. His adventures as an Army paratrooper and as a Vietnam veteran also serve as a platform for telling the stories of others -- including other war veterans. And they enable him to explain how he overcame Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) through faith in God.

This anthology brings together twenty-eight lively and readable short stories by nineteenth-century women writers, including gothic tales to romances, detective fiction and ghost stories. Containing short fiction by well-known authors such as: * Maria Edgeworth * Mary Shelley * Elizabeth Gaskell * Margaret Oliphant Nineteenth-Century Short Stories by Women also includes: * a scholarly introduction * biographies for each of the authors * full explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading * a critical commentary, publication details and historical context * a full and wide-ranging bibliography The bibliography of resources and further reading will enable those interested in pursuing research on any author or topic to do so with ease, and a thematic index will enable teachers to select material best suited to their courses.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Christians carried on an intense debate concerning the doctrine of prayer. This ideological revolution affected not only the ways that they interpreted the Bible but also how they prayed. In this book, Rick Ostrander explores the attempts of American Christians to articulate a convincing and satisfying ethic of prayer amidst these changing circumstances.

A study of the ways landscape was perceived in nineteenth-century Britain and France, this book draws on evidence from poetry, landscape gardens, spectacular public entertainments, novels and scientific works as well as paintings in order to develop its basic premise that landscape and the processes of perceiving it cannot be separated. Vision embraces panoramic seeing from high places, but also the seeing of ghosts and spectres when madness and hallucination impinge upon landscape. The rise of geology and the spread of empires upset the existing comfortable orders of comprehension of landscape. Reverie and imagination produced powerful interpretive actions, while landscape in French culture proved central to the rejection of conservative classicism in favour of perceptual questioning of experience. The experience of subjectivity proved central to the perception of landscape while the visual culture of landscape became of paramount importance to modernity during the period in question.

Bestsellers in Nineteenth Century America seeks to produce for students novels, poems and other printed material that sold extremely well when they first appeared in the United States. Many of the most famous American works of the nineteenth century that we know today — such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick — were not widely read when they first appeared. This collection seeks to offer its readers a glimpse at the literature that lit up the literary horizon when the works were first published, leading to insights on key cultural aspects of the nineteenth-century United States and its literary culture.

Nineteenth-century Paris attracted foreign musicians like a magnet. The city boasted a range of theatres and of genres represented there, a wealth of libretti and source material for them, vocal, orchestral and choral resources, to say nothing of the set designs, scenery and costumes. All this contributed to an artistic environment that had musicians from Italian- and German-speaking states beating a path to the doors of the Académie Royale de Musique, Opéra-Comique, Théâtre Italien, Théâtre Royal de l'Odéon and Théâtre de la Renaissance. This book both tracks specific aspects of this culture, and examines stage music in Paris through the lens of one of its most important figures: Giacomo Meyerbeer. The early part of the book, which is organised chronologically, examines the institutional background to music drama in Paris in the nineteenth century, and introduces two of Meyerbeer's Italian operas that were of importance for his career in Paris. Meyerbeer's acculturation to Parisian theatrical mores is then examined, especially his moves from the Odéon and Opéra-Comique to the opera house where he eventually made his greatest impact - the Académie Royale de Musique; the shift from Opéra-Comique is then counterpointed by an examination of how an indigenous Parisian composer, Fromental Halévy, made exactly the same leap at more or less the same time. The book continues with the fates of other composers in Paris: Weber, Donizetti, Bellini and Wagner, but concludes with the final Parisian successes that Meyerbeer lived to see - his two opéras comiques.