While best know for his landscapes, French painter Camille Corot nonetheless left in his wake a considerable number of rarely exhibited yet highly sought figure paintings. And while Corot initially used these oil studies to improve the quality of his free composition for later historical and narrative landscapes, it was not long before his figure paintings became autonomous works, prized for their direct portrayal of emotional and spiritual states. Standing out in Corot's creative output is the remarkable oil painting A Girl Reading. This volume puts this impressive painting into context with a variety of Corot's paintings and drawings that both shed light on the role of reading that is characteristic of his work and provide the first representative overview of the artist's works inspired by the genre as a whole. Included are essays on Corot as a figure painter and thirty full-color, extensively annotated examples of his work.

Hèléne Cixous -- author, playwright and French feminist theorist -- is a key figure in twentieth-century literary theory. Stigmata brings together her most recent essays for the first time. Acclaimed for her intricate and challenging writing style, Cixous presents a collection of texts that get away -- escaping the reader, the writers, the book. Cixous's writing pursues authors such as Stendhal, Joyce, Derrida, and Rembrandt, da Vinci, Picasso -- works that share an elusive movement in spite of striking differences. Along the way these essays explore a broad range of poetico-philosophical questions that have become characteristic of Cixous' work: * love's labours lost and found * feminine hours * autobiographies of writing * the prehistory of the work of art Stigmata goes beyond theory, becoming an extraordinary writer's testimony to our lives and times.

A new town. A new name. A haunting old life. Addison Hastings is your everyday teenager, except that she has been having nightmares since she was old enough to know what they were. All she has ever wanted was to be normal. Addison thought that moving to a new town and changing her name to Addison Bennett would be the end of her old life and the beginning of a new one. Little did she know, Destiny has other plans for her. Will Addison be able to put a stop to her nightmares and her ever changing world?

Paper Secrets is the first book of a family saga involving the Black and Coleman families having mixed feeling for each other. Vivian Black and Louise Coleman were best friends during their childhood years in the 1930's until circumstances led to a ten-year separation. When they meet again in college, Louise is extremely rich and Vivian is attending college on an academic scholarship. They both fall in love with the same handsome, wealthy upperclassmen John Williams from Richmond, VA and the former friends find themselves at odds over for his affection. Louise is used to having her way and doesn't take no for an answer. She is determined to have him and will not let a little thing like his love for Vivian get in the way. Paper Secrets, a story with many misunderstandings, trials, and even lost loved ones for both families caused by the discovery of various pieces of paper. While some family members are anxious to have the secrets revealed, others want them hidden or forgotten forever. Lawsuits and threats of public humiliation are the least of their worries with the secrets looming over their heads.

Taking English culture as its representative sample, The Secret History of Domesticity asks how the modern notion of the public-private relation emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Treating that relation as a crucial instance of the modern division of knowledge, Michael McKeon narrates its pre-history along with that of its essential component, domesticity. This narrative draws upon the entire spectrum of English people's experience. At the most "public" extreme are political developments like the formation of civil society over against the state, the rise of contractual thinking, and the devolution of absolutism from monarch to individual Subject. The middle range of experience takes in the influence of Protestant and scientific thought, the printed publication of the private, the conceptualization of virtual publics -- society, public opinion, the market -- and the capitalization of production, the decline of the domestic economy, and the increase in the sexual division of labor. The most "private" pole of experience involves the privatization of marriage, the family, and the household, and the complex entanglement of femininity, interiority, Subjectivity, and sexuality. McKeon accounts for how the relationship between public and private experience first became intelligible as a variable interaction of distinct modes of being -- not a static dichotomy, but a tool to think with. Richly illustrated with nearly 100 images, including paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and a representative selection of architectural floor plans for domestic interiors, this volume reads graphic forms to emphasize how susceptible the public-private relation was to concrete and spatial representation. McKeon is similarly attentive to how literary forms evoked a tangible sense of public-private relations -- among them figurative imagery, allegorical narration, parody, the author-character-reader dialectic, aesthetic distance, and free indirect discourse. He also finds a structural analogue for the emergence of the modern public-private relation in the conjunction of what contemporaries called the "secret history" and the domestic novel. A capacious and synthetic historical investigation, The Secret History of Domesticity exemplifies how the methods of literary interpretation and historical analysis can inform and enrich one another.