A brilliant historical mystery series begins: in gaslit Victorian London, writer Thomas De Quincey must become a detective to clear his own name. Thomas De Quincey, infamous for his memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, is the major suspect in a series of ferocious mass murders identical to ones that terrorized London forty-three years earlier. The blueprint for the killings seems to be De Quincey's essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. Desperate to clear his name but crippled by opium addiction, De Quincey is aided by his devoted daughter Emily and a pair of determined Scotland Yard detectives. In Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell plucks De Quincey, Victorian London, and the Ratcliffe Highway murders from history. Fogbound streets become a battleground between a literary star and a brilliant murderer, whose lives are linked by secrets long buried but never forgotten.

Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture considers the visual languages, politics, and poetics of personal appearance. Dandyism has been most closely associated with influential caucasian Western men-about-town, epitomized by the 19th century style-setting of Oscar Wilde and by Tom Wolfe's white suits. The essays collected here, however, examine the spectacle and workings of dandyism to reveal that these were not the only dandies. On the contrary, art historians, literary and cultural historians, and anthropologists identify unrecognized dandies flourishing among early 19th century Native Americans, in Soviet Latvia, in Africa, throughout the African-American diaspora, among women, and in the art world. Moving beyond historical and fictional accounts of dandies, this volume juxtaposes theoretical models with evocative images and descriptions of clothing in order to link sartorial self-construction with artistic, social, and political self-invention. Taking into consideration the vast changes in thinking about identity in the academy, Dandies provides a compelling study of dandyism's destabilizing aesthetic enterprise. Contributors: Jennifer Blessing, Susan Fillin-Yeh, Rhonda Garelick, Joe Lucchesi, Kim Miller, Robert E. Moore, Richard J. Powell, Carter Ratcliffe, and Mark Allen Svede.

"Offering readers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from the 1950s to the present, this book highlights how the artist's book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to providing a broad overview of the artist's book form since 1945 and the many ongoing debates surrounding it, this book thinks through the challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose. It then turns to look at five case studies, detailing not only how each individual collaboration came to be but how all five together engage and challenge conventional ideals about art, subjectivity, poetry, and interpersonal relations, as well as complex social questions related to gender and race. Making several of these books, typically consigned to special collections libraries and museum archives, more available to a broad readership, the book aims to brings to light a whole genre of works that has been largely forgotten or neglected in critical scholarship and institutional exhibitions. As this study illustrates, the artist's book has been an especially rich site for both poets and painters to engage with the world around them and with each other since the mid-twentieth century and consequently deserves more scholarly and institutional attention than it has been previously granted"--

This book traces the development of Plato's analogy between craft and virtue from Euthydemus and Gorgias through the central books of the Republic. It shows that Plato's middle dialogues develop and extend, rather than reject, philosophical positions taken in the early dialogues.