"Madame Delphine" is a romance novel set in New Orleans. The roundest and happiest-looking priest in the city of New Orleans was a little man fondly known among his people as Père Jerome. He was a Creole and a member of one of the city's leading families. The priest receives a visit one day from Madame Delphine, who shares her concern about her daughter's mixed race and hopes that she can find a wealthy husband who can help her solve her financial troubles. With the two plotting to make this reality come into being, nothing can stand in their way...

Reproduction of the original: Madame Delphine by George W. Cable

The truth behind the legend of New Orleans’ infamous slave owner, madwoman, and murderess, portrayed in the anthology series, American Horror Story. On April 10, 1834, firefighters smashed through a padlocked attic door in the burning Royal Street mansion of Creole society couple Delphine and Louis Lalaurie. In the billowing smoke and flames they made an appalling discovery: the remains of Madame Lalaurie’s chained, starved, and mutilated slaves. This house of horrors in the French Quarter spawned a legend that has endured for more than one-hundred-and-fifty years. But what actually happened in the Lalaurie home? Rumors about her atrocities spread as fast as the fire. But verifiable facts were scarce. Lalaurie wouldn’t answer questions. She disappeared, leaving behind one of the French Quarter’s ghastliest crime scenes, and what is considered to be one of America’s most haunted houses. In Mad Madame Lalaurie, Victoria Cosner Love and Lorelei Shannon “shed light on what is fact and what is purely fiction in a tale that’s still told nightly on the streets of New Orleans” (Deep South Magazine).

The first comprehensive study of one of the most popular and critically acclaimed short story collections of the nineteenth century -- Old Creole Days (1879), by New Orleans author George Washington Cable. Each tale is closely analyzed, revealing Cable's technique, style, motifs, and sources, as well as his impact on later Southern writers such as William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

How does exile beget writing, and writing exile? What kind of writing can both be fuelled by absence and prolong it? Exile, which was meant to imprison her, paradoxically gave Madame de Stael a freedom that enabled her to be as active a dissident as any woman in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was capable of being. Repeatedly banished for her nonconformism, she felt she had been made to suffer twice over, first for political daring and then for daring, as a woman, to be political (a particularly grave offence in the eyes of the misogynist Napoleon). Yet her outspokenness - in novels, comparative literary studies, and works of political and social theory - made her seem as much a threat outside her beloved France as within it, while her friendship with statesmen, soldiers, and literary figures such as Byron, Fanny Burney, Goethe, and Schiller simply added to her dangerous celebrity. She preached the virtues of liberalism and freedom wherever she went, turning the experiences of her enforced absence into an arsenal to use against all who tried to suppress her. Even Napoleon, perhaps her greatest foe, conceded, from his own exile on St Helena that she would last. Her unremitting activity as a speaker and writer made her into precisely the sort of activist no woman at that time was permitted to be; yet she paradoxically remained a reluctant feminist, seeming even to connive at the inferior status society granted her sex at the same time as vociferously challenging it, and remaining torn by the conflicting demands of public and private life.

New Orleans is unique – which is precisely why there are many Crescent Cities all over the world: for almost 150 years, writers, artists, cultural brokers, and entrepreneurs have drawn on and simultaneously contributed to New Orleans’s fame and popularity by recreating the city in popular media from literature, photographs, and plays to movies, television shows, and theme parks. Addressing students and fans of the city and of popular culture, Popular New Orleans examines three pivotal moments in the history of New Orleans in popular media: the creation of the popular image of the Crescent City during the late nineteenth century in the local-color writings published in Scribner’s Monthly/Century Magazine; the translation of this image into three-dimensional immersive spaces during the twentieth century in Disney’s theme parks and resorts in California, Florida, and Japan; and the radical transformation of this image following Hurricane Katrina in public performances such as Mardi Gras parades and operas. Covering visions of the Crescent City from George W. Cable’s Old Creole Days stories (1873-1876) to Disneyland’s "New Orleans Square" (1966) to Rosalyn Story’s opera Wading Home (2015), Popular New Orleans traces how popular images of New Orleans have changed from exceptional to exemplary.