The Ruins of the Abbey of Fitz-Martin is the story of a corrupt baron who exploits a monastery by publicizing the titillating acts of Sr. St. Anna after she breaks her vow of abstinence. Excerpt: "The old man started back with increased surprise, exclaiming, 'And pray what is thy business with Norman Clare?' 'The simple-hearted Owen entered into a full detail of his mission, adding, 'if such a person as Norman was alive, his master, Sir Thomas, Lord of Fitz-Martin's abbey and lands, demanded his assistance at the above-named mansion."

The Gothic Ideology argues that in order to modernize and secularize, the British Protestant imaginary needed an 'other' against which it could define itself as a culture and a nation with distinct boundaries. The 'Gothic ideology' is identified as an intense religious anxiety, produced by the aftershocks of the Protestant reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the dynastic upheavals produced by both events in England, Germany, and France, and was played out in hundreds of Gothic texts published throughout Europe between the mid-eighteenth century and 1880. This book is the first to read the Gothic ideology through the historical context of both King Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the extensive French anti-clerical and pornographic works that were well-known to Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis. The book argues that Gothic was thoroughly invested in a crude form of anti-Catholicism that fed lower class prejudices against the passage of a variety of Catholic Relief Acts that had been pending in Parliament since 1788 and finally passed in 1829.

Features annotations for more than 6,200 works in the main volume (2007), and more than 2,400 new titles in three annual supplements published 2008 through 2010. New coverage of biographies, art, sports, Islam, the Middle East, cultural diversity, and other contemporary topics keeps your library's collection as current as today's headlines.

Sweeney Todd is a barber who dispatches his victims by pulling a lever as they sit in his barber chair. His victims fall backward down a revolving trapdoor into the basement of his shop, generally causing them to break their necks or skulls. In case they are alive, Todd goes to the basement and ""polishes them off"" (slitting their throats with his straight razor). After Todd has robbed his dead victims of their goods, Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime, assists him in disposing of the bodies by baking their flesh into meat pies and selling them to the unsuspecting customers of her pie shop. All the horror stories in this nice collection are written by unknown authors.