Biographical fiction / autobiographical fiction

Book SynopsisA compelling story of father-son confrontation, Stevenson was working on this novel the day he died.Trade ReviewUnder the general editorship of Catherine Kerrigan, the handsome new Centenary edition, inaugurated by the two volumes under review, seeks for the first time systematically to dislodge Colvin and re-build the monument. Under the general editorship of Catherine Kerrigan, the handsome new Centenary edition, inaugurated by the two volumes under review, seeks for the first time systematically to dislodge Colvin and re-build the monument.

Read more less

Book SynopsisGoing back to the original manuscripts, a team of scholars has uncovered what Scott originally wrote and intended his public to read before errors, misreadings and expurgations crept in during production.Trade ReviewIvanhoe was the first of Scott's novels to be located wholly in England, and the first to take place in the middle ages. But it is far from being the fantastic, medievalist romance associated (in the critical imagination) with a visionary Britain that never was. This is a serious novel, the first in English to deal carefully with race. And at the same time, it is an incredibly exciting read for contemporary readers. Ivanhoe was the first of Scott's novels to be located wholly in England, and the first to take place in the middle ages. But it is far from being the fantastic, medievalist romance associated (in the critical imagination) with a visionary Britain that never was. This is a serious novel, the first in English to deal carefully with race. And at the same time, it is an incredibly exciting read for contemporary readers.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSet on the eve of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, The Monastery is full of supernatural events, theological conflict, and humour.Trade ReviewWilll certainly be the definitive scholarly edition of Scott for the foreseeable future. The notes and emendation lists ! evince years of thorough, diligent research into manuscripts, editions, sources, references, and allusions. The information will give the serious reader inestimable help in understanding Scott. These latest volumes in the Edinburgh Edition afford fascinating insights into Scott's career as a novelist in the 1820s. The Edinburgh Edition is always alert to Scott's working practices and circumstances of the author and his publishers at the time of the genesis, composition, and production of the individual novels. These volumes are no exception. The editors describe with lucidity and eloquence the significance of these works within Scott's career, the processes of their composition and production, and the historical context of the novels. The Edinburgh Edition respects Scott the artist by 'restoring' versions of the novels that are not quite what his first readers saw. Indeed, it returns to manuscripts that the printers never handled, as Scott's fiction before 1827 was transcribed before it reached the printshop. Each volume of the Edinburgh edition presents an uncluttered text of one work, followed by an Essay on the Text by the editor of the work, a list of the emendations that have been made to the first edition, explanatory notes and a glossary ! The editorial essays are histories of the respective texts. Some of them are almost 100 pages long; when they are put together they constitute a fascinating and lucid account of Scott's methods of compostion and his financial manoeuvres. This edition is for anyone who takes Scott seriously. The best and most thoroughly pioneering textual editing project in the history of Scottish literary scholarship ! In the Edinburgh Edition, the specifics of the various transmissional layers are dealt with in an "Essay on the Text", particular to each novel, and each essay would make for an excellent primer in modern, rigorously empirical practices of textual editing. These essays uncover the archaeology of Scott's compositional practice based upon an exhaustive trawl through letters to and by Scott, James Ballantyne, Robert Cadell and others. They also make as much sense as possible of the transition between manuscript and first edition and between the significant printed editions of each text. Along with emendation lists much more extensive than any before in editions of Scott, this extensive apparati represents many hundreds of hours of work by the volume editor, by research assistants and by the general editor!It is the transparency, consistency and boldness of the Edinburgh edition in creating a kind of hyper-socialised text (where so much which was manifestly designed for inclusion and demonstrably lost through error first time around is recovered) which makes it such a courageous example of empirical text editing!.these volumes continue the process of the Edinburgh Edition in providing the best textual and annotational maps of Scott-land. Penny Fielding's new edition of Scott's second departure from his recent Scottish history, The Monastry, contains a facinating account of how this novel came into being before the success of Ivahoe was assured, and for this alone it would be a valuable resource for the serious student of Scott's work. Yet it is also an impressive work of textual scholarship, while being the first fully-annotated edition of one of the moe critically neglected of the Waverly series. Scott enthusiasts ! owe a debt of gratitude to Penny Fielding for making the novel available in such a helpful, scholarly, but still thoroughly readable form. Willl certainly be the definitive scholarly edition of Scott for the foreseeable future. The notes and emendation lists ! evince years of thorough, diligent research into manuscripts, editions, sources, references, and allusions. The information will give the serious reader inestimable help in understanding Scott. These latest volumes in the Edinburgh Edition afford fascinating insights into Scott's career as a novelist in the 1820s. The Edinburgh Edition is always alert to Scott's working practices and circumstances of the author and his publishers at the time of the genesis, composition, and production of the individual novels. These volumes are no exception. The editors describe with lucidity and eloquence the significance of these works within Scott's career, the processes of their composition and production, and the historical context of the novels. The Edinburgh Edition respects Scott the artist by 'restoring' versions of the novels that are not quite what his first readers saw. Indeed, it returns to manuscripts that the printers never handled, as Scott's fiction before 1827 was transcribed before it reached the printshop. Each volume of the Edinburgh edition presents an uncluttered text of one work, followed by an Essay on the Text by the editor of the work, a list of the emendations that have been made to the first edition, explanatory notes and a glossary ! The editorial essays are histories of the respective texts. Some of them are almost 100 pages long; when they are put together they constitute a fascinating and lucid account of Scott's methods of compostion and his financial manoeuvres. This edition is for anyone who takes Scott seriously. The best and most thoroughly pioneering textual editing project in the history of Scottish literary scholarship ! In the Edinburgh Edition, the specifics of the various transmissional layers are dealt with in an "Essay on the Text", particular to each novel, and each essay would make for an excellent primer in modern, rigorously empirical practices of textual editing. These essays uncover the archaeology of Scott's compositional practice based upon an exhaustive trawl through letters to and by Scott, James Ballantyne, Robert Cadell and others. They also make as much sense as possible of the transition between manuscript and first edition and between the significant printed editions of each text. Along with emendation lists much more extensive than any before in editions of Scott, this extensive apparati represents many hundreds of hours of work by the volume editor, by research assistants and by the general editor!It is the transparency, consistency and boldness of the Edinburgh edition in creating a kind of hyper-socialised text (where so much which was manifestly designed for inclusion and demonstrably lost through error first time around is recovered) which makes it such a courageous example of empirical text editing!.these volumes continue the process of the Edinburgh Edition in providing the best textual and annotational maps of Scott-land. Penny Fielding's new edition of Scott's second departure from his recent Scottish history, The Monastry, contains a facinating account of how this novel came into being before the success of Ivahoe was assured, and for this alone it would be a valuable resource for the serious student of Scott's work. Yet it is also an impressive work of textual scholarship, while being the first fully-annotated edition of one of the moe critically neglected of the Waverly series. Scott enthusiasts ! owe a debt of gratitude to Penny Fielding for making the novel available in such a helpful, scholarly, but still thoroughly readable form.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Abbot concludes the fiction begun in The Monastery. Scott follows the fortunes of young Roland Graeme as he emerges from rural obscurity to become an attendant of Mary Queen of Scots during her captivity in Lochleven Castle.Trade ReviewThe volumes have been carefully and critically edited from the original manuscripts and now the texts, which in each case capture large numbers of readings never before printed and clear away elements of corruption in existing editions, are as close to what Scott originally wrote as the skills of the editorial team can make them. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the appearance of two more volumes in the new critical Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels ! both volumes are truly impressive jobs of scholarly editing, and they are handsomely designed and printed. Christopher Johnson, who works in the House of Lords, has produced a magisterial edition of the neglected novel as part of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels ! In short, this addition to The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels is remarkable value. Christopher Johnson's edition of The Abbot should be in every library collecting material on the great Sir Walter Scott and on Scottish-English relationships. Highly recommended. -- Professor William Baker, Northern Illinois University The Edinburgh Edition respects Scott the artist by 'restoring' versions of the novels that are not quite what his first readers saw. Indeed, it returns to manuscripts that the printers never handled, as Scott's fiction before 1827 was transcribed before it reached the printshop. Each volume of the Edinburgh edition presents an uncluttered text of one work, followed by an Essay on the Text by the editor of the work, a list of the emendations that have been made to the first edition, explanatory notes and a glossary ! The editorial essays are histories of the respective texts. Some of them are almost 100 pages long; when they are put together they constitute a fascinating and lucid account of Scott's methods of composition and his financial manoeuvres. This edition is for anyone who takes Scott seriously. The volumes have been carefully and critically edited from the original manuscripts and now the texts, which in each case capture large numbers of readings never before printed and clear away elements of corruption in existing editions, are as close to what Scott originally wrote as the skills of the editorial team can make them. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the appearance of two more volumes in the new critical Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels ! both volumes are truly impressive jobs of scholarly editing, and they are handsomely designed and printed. Christopher Johnson, who works in the House of Lords, has produced a magisterial edition of the neglected novel as part of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels ! In short, this addition to The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels is remarkable value. Christopher Johnson's edition of The Abbot should be in every library collecting material on the great Sir Walter Scott and on Scottish-English relationships. Highly recommended. The Edinburgh Edition respects Scott the artist by 'restoring' versions of the novels that are not quite what his first readers saw. Indeed, it returns to manuscripts that the printers never handled, as Scott's fiction before 1827 was transcribed before it reached the printshop. Each volume of the Edinburgh edition presents an uncluttered text of one work, followed by an Essay on the Text by the editor of the work, a list of the emendations that have been made to the first edition, explanatory notes and a glossary ! The editorial essays are histories of the respective texts. Some of them are almost 100 pages long; when they are put together they constitute a fascinating and lucid account of Scott's methods of composition and his financial manoeuvres. This edition is for anyone who takes Scott seriously.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Fortunes of Nigel sits among Walter Scott's richest creations in political insight and range of characterisation. Steeped in Jacobean drama, this tale shows Scott revelling in the linguistic riches of the age.Trade ReviewA part of our immediate response to these exemplary volumes is to feel the discrepancy between Scott's slapdash, hearty, headlong method of composition and the painstaking toil of his editors!the Edinburgh editors have reverted to the first editions, but have also combed the manuscripts for missed readings and lost material; some of the latter, such as the portraits of Edinburgh literati in Guy Mannering, are substantial discoveries. A part of our immediate response to these exemplary volumes is to feel the discrepancy between Scott's slapdash, hearty, headlong method of composition and the painstaking toil of his editors!the Edinburgh editors have reverted to the first editions, but have also combed the manuscripts for missed readings and lost material; some of the latter, such as the portraits of Edinburgh literati in Guy Mannering, are substantial discoveries.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the summer of 1765 Darsie Latimer sets out to discover the secret of his parentage in a journey to the wilds of Dumfriesshire. But very soon he discovers that he must confront not geographical but ideological wilds, for he is kidnapped by Edward Hugh Redgauntlet and involved in a last, fictional, attempt to restore the Stuarts to the British throne. The violent past is repeatedly recalled: the oral diablerie of the inset ''Wandering Willie''s Tale'', probably the greatest short story ever written in Scots, provides a grotesque vision of the structures of an older Scotland. It is this older Scotland which Redgauntlet wishes to restore.Trade ReviewYet another triumph in this marvellous series. Here are six English-language novels which I think great and which I do come back to. They all pass an essential test: that with each reading you find something new in them, and so they never exhaust what they have to say ... Redgauntlet, a warm and wonderfully relaxed novel celebrating, among other things, friendship, is also a penetrating psychological study of attachment to a lost cause. -- Allan Massie Yet another triumph in this marvellous series. Here are six English-language novels which I think great and which I do come back to. They all pass an essential test: that with each reading you find something new in them, and so they never exhaust what they have to say ... Redgauntlet, a warm and wonderfully relaxed novel celebrating, among other things, friendship, is also a penetrating psychological study of attachment to a lost cause.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAnne of Geierstein (1829) is set in Central Europe in the fifteenth century, but it is a remarkably modern novel, for the central issues are the political instability and violence that arise from the mix of peoples and the fluidity of European boundaries.Trade ReviewThe volumes have been carefully and critically edited from the original manuscripts and now the texts, which in each case capture large numbers of readings never before printed and clear away elements of corruption in existing editions, are as close to what Scott originally wrote as the skills of the editorial team can make them. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the appearance of two more volumes in the new critical Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels ! both volumes are truly impressive jobs of scholarly editing, and they are handsomely designed and printed. The best and most thoroughly pioneering textual editing project in the history of Scottish literary scholarship ! In the Edinburgh Edition, the specifics of the various transmissional layers are dealt with in an 'Essay on the Text', particular to each novel, and each essay would make for an excellent primer in modern, rigorously empirical practices of textual editing. These essays uncover the archaeology of Scott's compositional practice based upon an exhaustive trawl through letters to and by Scott, James Ballantyne, Robert Cadell and others. They also make as much sense as possible of the transition between manuscript and first edition and between the significant printed editions of each text. Along with emendation lists much more extensive than any before in editions of Scott, this extensive apparati represents many hundreds of hours of work by the volume editor, by research assistants and by the general editor!It is the transparency, consistency and boldness of the Edinburgh edition in creating a kind of hyper-socialised text (where so much which was manifestly designed for inclusion and demonstrably lost through error first time around is recovered) which makes it such a courageous example of empirical text editing ! these volumes continue the process of the Edinburgh Edition in providing the best textual and annotational maps of Scott-land The Edinburgh Edition respects Scott the artist by 'restoring' versions of the novels that are not quite what his first readers saw. Indeed, it returns to manuscripts that the printers never handled, as Scott's fiction before 1827 was transcribed before it reached the printshop. Each volume of the Edinburgh edition presents an uncluttered text of one work, followed by an Essay on the Text by the editor of the work, a list of the emendations that have been made to the first edition, explanatory notes and a glossar y! The editorial essays are histories of the respective texts. Some of them are almost 100 pages long; when they are put together they constitute a fascinating and lucid account of Scott's methods of compostion and his financial manoeuvres. This edition is for anyone who takes Scott seriously The foremost Scott textual scholar and authority J H Alexander has produced the definitive edition of the novel. It is part of the monumental on-going Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels! Sensibly priced, pleasantly printed with reasonable margins and firmly bound with gilt lettering on the spine, J H Alexander's definitive edition of Scott's unjustly neglected late Anne of Geierstein is a must for all libraries collecting the works of the great master of the novel. It is also a must for libraries with collections in European history and culture. Strongly recommended. -- Professor William Baker, Northern Illinois University The volumes have been carefully and critically edited from the original manuscripts and now the texts, which in each case capture large numbers of readings never before printed and clear away elements of corruption in existing editions, are as close to what Scott originally wrote as the skills of the editorial team can make them. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the appearance of two more volumes in the new critical Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels ! both volumes are truly impressive jobs of scholarly editing, and they are handsomely designed and printed. The best and most thoroughly pioneering textual editing project in the history of Scottish literary scholarship ! In the Edinburgh Edition, the specifics of the various transmissional layers are dealt with in an 'Essay on the Text', particular to each novel, and each essay would make for an excellent primer in modern, rigorously empirical practices of textual editing. These essays uncover the archaeology of Scott's compositional practice based upon an exhaustive trawl through letters to and by Scott, James Ballantyne, Robert Cadell and others. They also make as much sense as possible of the transition between manuscript and first edition and between the significant printed editions of each text. Along with emendation lists much more extensive than any before in editions of Scott, this extensive apparati represents many hundreds of hours of work by the volume editor, by research assistants and by the general editor!It is the transparency, consistency and boldness of the Edinburgh edition in creating a kind of hyper-socialised text (where so much which was manifestly designed for inclusion and demonstrably lost through error first time around is recovered) which makes it such a courageous example of empirical text editing ! these volumes continue the process of the Edinburgh Edition in providing the best textual and annotational maps of Scott-land The Edinburgh Edition respects Scott the artist by 'restoring' versions of the novels that are not quite what his first readers saw. Indeed, it returns to manuscripts that the printers never handled, as Scott's fiction before 1827 was transcribed before it reached the printshop. Each volume of the Edinburgh edition presents an uncluttered text of one work, followed by an Essay on the Text by the editor of the work, a list of the emendations that have been made to the first edition, explanatory notes and a glossar y! The editorial essays are histories of the respective texts. Some of them are almost 100 pages long; when they are put together they constitute a fascinating and lucid account of Scott's methods of compostion and his financial manoeuvres. This edition is for anyone who takes Scott seriously The foremost Scott textual scholar and authority J H Alexander has produced the definitive edition of the novel. It is part of the monumental on-going Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels! Sensibly priced, pleasantly printed with reasonable margins and firmly bound with gilt lettering on the spine, J H Alexander's definitive edition of Scott's unjustly neglected late Anne of Geierstein is a must for all libraries collecting the works of the great master of the novel. It is also a must for libraries with collections in European history and culture. Strongly recommended.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis edition of Scott's last full novel, the first to have returned to the manuscript and to the many surviving proofs, realises Scott's original intentions.

Read more less

Book SynopsisCount Robert of Paris, condemned by Scott''s printer as ''altogether a failure'', was later prepared for publication by his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart , and his publisher Robert Cadell. What appeared was a bowdlerised, tamed and tidied version of what Scott had written and dictated. This edition, the first to have returned to the manuscript and to the many surviving proofs, realises Scott''s original intentions. Scott''s last full novel has many roughnesses, but it also challenges the susceptibilities of his readers more directly than any other and in that lay its fault in the eyes of the lesser men who condemned it.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis is the second of the 2-volume introduction and notes which Scott wrote to accompany the first complete edition of his fiction. His notes explain both use of language and incidents in his novels. The Edinburgh Edition includes a scholarly introduction, full addenda, corrigenda and explanatory notes.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Siege of Malta and Bizarro are Scott''s final works, written in Malta and Italy at the end of 1831 and the beginning of 1832. Although extracts from The Siege of Malta have been published, this is the first complete edition. Bizarro has not been available in print until now.The Siege of Malta begins as a novel but ends as a historical account of the extraordinary defence of Malta by the Order of St John of Jerusalem and their Maltese helpers against much larger Muslim forces. It is an epic tale of endurance, resulting in inevitable defeat for some of the Knights, and for the rest, in the most hard-won of victories, setting the scene for the subsequent development of the Maltese nation.In the novella Bizarro Scott takes up the story of a notorious Calabrian brigand of the early nineteenth century. Scott''s fictionalised account draws on his experience of visiting Naples and its surroundings and his earlier knowledge of Neapolitan history to tell a tale of passion, murder and revenge with a level of violence rarely seen in his earlier work. Though incomplete, Bizarro shows Scott had not lost his power to tell a good story in this, his very last piece of fiction.Table of ContentsIntroduction; Reading text of The Siege of Malta, Reading text of Bizarro; Hyphenation lists; Diplomatic transcription of the manuscript of The Siege of Malta; Essay on the Text for The Siege of Malta; Historical Note for The Siege of Malta; Explanatory Notes for The Siege of Malta; Diplomatic transcription of the manuscript of Bizarro; Essay on the Text for Bizarro; Historical Note for Bizarro; Explanatory Notes for Bizarro; Combined Glossary; Map of Malta; Digital photographs of the manuscripts on CD-rom.

Read more less

Book SynopsisOne of Hogg's longest and also one of his most original and daring works, presented here in a scholarly edition in light of the discovery of the original manuscript.Table of ContentsPreliminaries and Series Preface; Introduction; The text of the novel; Historical and Topographical Note; Explanatory Notes; Glossary.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe tiny 19th-century German state of Grunewald seems to be a principality of the world of fairy-tale. But its ruler is beset in public by the forces of modern politics, and troubled in private by an unhappy marriage. Ill-prepared to deal with either, Otto is forced to choose between them.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA captivating new series to spark the imagination and breathe new life into classic works

Read more less

Book Synopsis''...the more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.''Marianne Dashwood is young, flirtatious and ready to meet a knight in shining armour. Her sister, Elinor, is more restrained - she knows that when it comes to romance, slow and steady wins the race. But while both seem to have found what they want, the path to happiness isn''t as straightforward as they first thought. True love has a habit of breaking the rules and turning up whenever it''s least expected...

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhen the gorgeous Henry Crawford and his pretty sister Mary come to Mansfield Park, they''ve no idea what a disturbance they will cause. There they find the Bertram family, with their beautiful daughters and handsome sons - and Fanny Price. Eighteen-year-old Fanny has grown up in the shadow of her glamorous relations. In fact, no one seems to remember she''s there at all, which is why they don''t notice that she''s gradually been falling in love. But while she hides a secret passion, she has no idea she''s become an object of interest herself for another admirer. As a scandal begins to unfold that will have devastating effects on everyone, Fanny discovers that love will blossom in the most unusual of places...

Read more less

Book SynopsisLike many girls, Emma Woodhouse thinks she knows best. Her heart is in the right place - but her head isn''t. Beautiful, clever and rich, she only wants to help others arrange things as she thinks they should be done. Emma has no interest in true love for herself: convinced she''s just not destined to find it, she believes she must instead devote herself to playing Cupid for others. Ignoring the warnings of good family friend Mr Knightley, Emma sets out to find a husband for her favourite new companion, the lovely, shy Harriet Smith. But absolutely nothing goes to plan - and in the process, Emma has a lot of learning to do: about others, but most of all about herself.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEight years ago, Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth fell head over heels in love. But Anne''s snobbish family put a stop to their engagement, believing the young naval captain wasn''t good enough for her. Pretty, intelligent Anne soon realises it was a terrible mistake, and spends her twenties in the shadow of her father and her selfish sisters. But she never forgets.Then Captain Wentworth - by now a successful, wealthy man, looking for a wife - walks back into her life. Can he forgive her? Does he still love her? And could they ever be happy, after all this time?

Read more less

Book SynopsisCan this be the end for the Loveday family? Wild blood courses through the Loveday veins, as romance and danger continue to colour their lives. Blighted by a series of tragedies, the Loveday family is on the edge of ruin. It would seem these cruel events have been instigated by Harry Sawle - an evil and corrupt smuggler who has sworn to destroy them. If the family is to survive, the time has come for brothers Adam and St John Loveday to exact their revenge. Meanwhile their stepbrother, Richard Allbright, returns from the war with France, with sinister consequences. And in Australia vengeance is also on Japhet Loveday''s mind. He must triumph over his adversaries or fail to achieve his dream of returning to England with pride and honour...

Read more less

Book SynopsisInspired by the true story of a dangerous atomic weapon and the man who designed it, here is a stunning novel of morality, creation, and loss from the acclaimed author of The Honey Farm and Natural Killer.It is August 12, 1945. Tomorrow, August Snow will be tried at the International War Crimes Court for patenting a more lethal variation on the atomic bomb. He invented a radiation machine to cure his young daughter’s cancer, despite knowing that the very same technology was capable of great destruction, and inevitably profited from disaster. But are his intentions relevant when the fate of the world is at stake?August’s former wife, June, will also attend the hearing. Restless in her Hague hotel room the night before, she keeps watch over their daughter and reflects on the events that brought them here. She had nothing to do with making the bomb. But is she innocent? Wouldn’t any wife and mother have done the same thing in her shoe

Read more less

Book SynopsisHailed as a great Canadian classic on boyhood, Who Has Seen the Wind evokes the sheer immensity of the prairie landscape, from the relentless wind to the far reaches of the bright blue sky. Like children everywhere, Brian O’Connal is a curious sort, and with enchanting naïveté he bestows his unforgettable perspective on everything from gophers to God, from his feisty Scottish grandmother to his friends Ben and Saint Sammy, the town of Arcola’s local madman. This is no simple, forgettable novel: Mitchell gives readers a memorable glimpse into the ins and outs of small-town life during the Depression years, always through Brian’s eyes, and in doing so creates a poignant and powerful portrait of childhood innocence and its loss.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom the bestselling author of Above All Things and inspired by real events, this powerful novel follows two families brought together to reckon with what it means to make amends—for historic wrongs and the wrongs we commit against the ones we love. For readers of Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, Esi Edugyan's Washington Black, Joan Thomas's Five Wives, and Michael Christie's Greenwood.On a small island in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, the Tabés are a family mourning the death of their son in the aftermath of a devastating cyclone, while worrying over the looming departure of another. Desperate to find a way to change their fates, David Tabé places a phone call halfway around the world to the Stewarts, a family bound to his own through a fraught connection in the distant past—their ancestors met on the island two hundred years earlier, with calamitous results. In Toronto, the Stewarts are themselves locked in mourning after the accidental drowning of their youngest son. When Michelle Stewart receives David’s invitation to participate in a reconciliation ceremony to put the spirits of their respective ancestors to rest, she accepts in a desperate effort to save herself and her family. As the ceremony approaches, the Tabés and the Stewarts will uncover their shared losses and failings, their fragile hopes for what a better future might hold, and the wounds that stand in the way of freeing themselves from the legacy of past betrayals.     Heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, and morally complex, The Sea Between Two Shores immerses us in the lives of two families connected as much by their desire for healing as by the actions of their ancestors. It is an extraordinary meditation on the complications of history, the possibilities for redemption, and the meaning of the stories we tell ourselves.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom the bestselling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis comes another beautiful story inspired by C. S. Lewis’s ability to change the world and captivate hearts---including those of a terminally ill boy and his logic-driven sister.Trade Review''Once Upon a Wardrobe' is a beautiful follow-up to 'Becoming Mrs. Lewis.' It's a love letter to books and stories with a meaningful message. Megs and her family learn that fantastical tales are more than mere ways to appease young children. Stories are nourishment for the souls that need joy the most, and sometimes they're the only thing that can help us understand life.' * The Washington Post *'Full of magic, nostalgia and a sister's love, Coben calls this novel 'a love letter to those of us obsessed with C.S. Lewis's Narnia series.'' * TODAY *'Patti Callahan's powerful and captivating new novel ponders how the events in C.S. Lewis' life, particularly his childhood, inspired him to create the magical and mythical world of Narnia and the cast of characters inhabiting it . . . Readers will reach for it again and again, eager to be reminded that love will prevail and imagination leads people down fantastical paths. Some books are read and forgotten soon after; others linger forever in one's mind, popping up from time to time when something relevant sparks the memory. ONCE UPON A WARDROBE is certainly the latter and will be cherished by anyone who reads it.' * BookReporter.com *'This beautiful and soul-touching book is about death and dying, but it also reminds us that new chapters remain for those of us who are left behind.' * Historical Novel Society *Callahan once again visits the life and works of C. S. Lewis in this enlightening novel of logic and imagination, faith, and reason . . . This enchanting novel of faith and hope is a must-read for fans of C. S. Lewis. Readers will be eager to return to the world of 'The Chronicles of Narnia' with new insights. * Library Journal, starred review *From Patti Callahan, the bestselling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis, comes another enchanting story that pulls back the curtain on the early life of C. S. Lewis. * The Nerd Daily *Heartfelt characters will win over sentimental readers. Callahan's fans will love this. * Publishers Weekly *More than just a clever way to tell the story of Lewis' life, the book explores the power of story and the importance of imagination. * The Atlanta Journal-Constitution *This is a heartwarming tale about the transformative power of books, with engaging and detailed descriptions. George's earnestness and imaginative nature uplift his family and will charm any reader who enjoys looking at the stories behind our favorite childhood stories. * Booklist *

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis The next elegant edition in the Chartwell Classics series, The War of the Worlds is a well-known tale about extraterrestrial invasions.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom the rich store of medieval tales, Morris Bishop brings together a delightful collection of thirty-five stories—some romantic, some religious, some realistic, some even scurrilous.Trade ReviewA pleasant collection of medieval tales intended for light reading. There are the usual bits and pieces from the Arthurian legend, from the lais and the collections like the Decameron, from saints' lives, and from the moralized exempla of the preachers’ handbooks, all illustrating the lighter side of the extraordinarily rich tradition of medieval narrative art. * Virginia Quarterly Review *Every medievalist with a sense of humor has wanted to do this sort of book, but too few have. Morris Bishop gives us a delightful collection of medieval storytelling, ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, in Latin, Norse, French, Spanish, Italian, and English. Recommended for all popular collections and especially for children. * Library Journal *Table of ContentsPrefaceI. Romances of King Arthur's CourtThe Story of Merlin The Sword in the Stone, by Sir Thomas Malory Launcelot, Elaine, and Guenever, by Sir Thomas Malory Tristan's EndII. Adventures and EscapadesThe Story of Frithjof and Ingebjorg Amleth's Revenge, by Saxo Grammaticus A Knight Who Made a Bargain with a Merchant A Story of beyond the Sea The Cruelty of Francesco Orsini, by Giovanni Fiorentino A Night in Naples, by Giovanni BoccaccioIII. Lovers' Weal and WoeThe Dapple-Gray Palfrey, by Huon Leroi The Lay of the Nightingale, by Marie de France The Falcon, by Giovanni BoccaccioIV. Wonders and ProdigiesThe Life of Saint Brandon, by Jacobus de Voragine The Famous History of Friar BaconV. Moral TalesThe Execrable Devices of Old Women Of the Cunning of the Devil, and of the Secret Judgments of God Of the Transgressions and Wounds of the Soul Of Extreme Fear The Marvelous Conversion of the Blessed Hildegund, Virgin, by Caesarius of Heisterbach The Cleric Who Deflowered a Jewish Maiden, by Caesarius of Heisterbach How the Novice Theobald Conquered His Pride, by Caesarius of Heisterbach Friar JuniperVI. Merry Tales and Salty FictionsOf the Churl Who Won Paradise A Dean and a Magician, by Juan Manuel King Ben Abit and Queen Romaquia, by Juan Manuel A Profound Judgment The Pear Tree Fra Cipolla, by Giovanni Boccaccio A Father's Wise Counsel, by Franco Sacchetti The Rustic Ambassadors, by Franco Sacchetti The Noble Crest, by Franco Sacchetti Sacchetti and the Astrologer, by Franco Sacchetti The Blind Man of Orvieto, by Franco Sacchetti The Reeve's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

Read more less

Book SynopsisPresents a clean, authoritative text of the first edition and charts the subsequent drastic revisionsTrade Review"This authoritative edition of Cather's perhaps least understood novel is a welcome addition to the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, begun under the general editorship of Susan Rosowski and now under that of Guy Reynolds. The Song of the Lark is important for taking the portraits of European immigrants in the US in O Pioneers! and adding the element of art as it traces the evolution of Thea Kronborg from small-town girl to opera singer acclaimed in Chicago, New York, and Europe. . . . Embellished with handsome photographs and presented in an easy-to-read format, this is a necessary edition for any scholar of Cather."—N. Birns, ChoiceTable of ContentsPart I - Friends of ChildhoodPart II - The Song of the LarkPart III - Stupid FacesPart IV - The Ancient PeoplePart V - Dr. Archie's VenturePart VI - KronborgEpilogue

Read more less

Book Synopsis Hailed by reviewers and readers for its originality, vitality, and truth, this novel secured Willa Cather a place in the first rank of American writers. Cather called My Ántonia “the best thing I’ve done.” For Oliver Wendell Holmes, My Ántonia had “unfailing charm, perhaps not to be defined; a beautiful tenderness, a vivifying imagination that transforms but does not distort or exaggerate.” H. L. Mencken declared it “one of the best [novels] any American has ever done.” Cather drew deeply on her childhood days in frontier Nebraska for this, her fourth novel, published in 1918. Old immigrant neighbors inspired many of the characters, particularly the heroine. Ántonia Shimerda is memorable as the warmhearted daughter of Bohemians who must adapt to a hard life on the desolate prairie. She survives and matures, a pioneer woman made radiant by spirit. W. T. Benda’s illustrationsfurther illTable of ContentsBook I - The ShimerdasBook II - The Hired GirlsBook III - Lena LingardBook IV - The Pioneer Woman's StoryBook V - Cuzak's Boys

Read more less

Book SynopsisMarried or Single?, published in 1857, was Catharine Maria Sedgwick's final novel and a fitting climax to the career of one of antebellum America's first and most successful woman writers. Insisting on women's right to choose whether to marry, Married or Single? rejects the stigma of spinsterhood and offers readers a wider range of options for women in society, recognizing their need and ability to determine the course of their lives. Sedgwick's touching, witty, and shrewdly observant novel centers on Grace Herbert, a New York City socialite who must negotiate the marriage market and also learn to develop her own character and take control of her own destiny. The story merges a wide range of popular American literary formsincluding the seduction novel, the conversion narrative, the novel of education, and social reform fictionand provides a window on many of the cultural and political anxieties of the 1850s beyond marriage, including immigration, slavery, and urban poverty. Sedgwick'Trade Review"A classic that is at once both an engrossing read and an erudite champion of women's rights, Married or Single? is highly recommended especially for public and college library literature and women's studies shelves."—Midwest Book Review“A modern edition of Sedgwick’s final novel is long overdue, and Deborah Gussman is its ideal editor. Gussman’s introduction will reflect and forward current scholarly concerns.”—Mary Kelley, author of Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic“This is a very teachable and useful book and should appeal to scholars, libraries, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates.”—Martha Cutter, author of Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women’s Writing, 1850–1930Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Editor’s Introduction A Note on the Text Married or Single? Notes

Read more less

Book SynopsisJack London’s two most beloved tales of survival in Alaska were inspired by his experiences in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. Both novels grippingly dramatize the harshness of the natural world and what lies beneath the thin veneer of human civilization.The canine hero of The Call of the Wild is Buck, a pampered pet in California who is stolen and forced to be a sled dog in the Alaskan wilderness. There he suffers from the brutal extremes of nature and equally brutal treatment by a series of masters, until he learns to heed his long-buried instincts and turn his back on civilization. White Fang charts the reverse journey, as a fierce wolf-dog hybrid born in the wild is eventually tamed. White Fang is adopted as a cub by a band of Indians, but when their dogs reject him he grows up violent, defensive, and dangerous. Traded to a man who stages fights, he is forced to face dogs, wolves, and lynxes in gruesome battles to the death, until he is rescued

Read more less

Book SynopsisMen died when women began to read.Trade Review"Nakhjavani's treatment of the historical figure is not so much to paint her as an eloquent proponent of the nascent faith but to apply her considerable narrative dexterity to an imaginative novel portraying the life and times of a woman with a strong voice in mid-nineteenth-century Iran who dared remove her veil in public and engage men in religious polemic. It is an engrossing story; to this day, Iranian society has not resolved publicly the social and political rights of women, nor has it clarified the status of religious and ethnic minorities."—Gayatri Devi, World Literature Today"'History is filled with screams that are best ignored,' Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in The Woman Who Read Too Much. Yet this mordant and seethingly intelligent story of palace intrigue in late 19th-century Persia echoes with the cries of the forgotten dead - and good luck ignoring them."—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal"Bahiyyih Nakhjavani's . . . visual storytelling is so enticing that it allows your imagination to shape, plot, and cast the narrative like episodes from a modern-day "House of Cards." . . . This book chronicles the haunting, rebellious lives of Qajar women . . . [and] reminds us all that whether Tudor, Qajar, or Clinton, behind every throne is a queen mother, wife, and sister who runs the show."—Davar Ardalan, Washington Independent Review"Bahiyyih Nakhjavani has chosen to construct, around the figure of Táhirih, a complex fragmented portrait that brings to literary life not only the remarkable personality of someone little known in the west, but also the convoluted Persia of the 19th century, treacherous and bloodthirsty . . . In a beautifully unobtrusive and graceful style, Nakhjavani succeeds in portraying these currents and countercurrents, and the many conflicting characters, in a narrative that is breathtaking in its scope and wonderfully illuminating. Above all, the figure of Táhirih . . . becomes one of the most powerfully convincing characters in recent historical fiction."—Alberto Manguel, The Guardian"Although set in the Victorian era, Nakhjavani's portrait is as contemporary as anything making headlines today, filled with issues ranging from women's subjugation and gender inequality to political violence and religious fundamentalism. Internationally acclaimed for her fiction and her nonfiction about religion and education, Nakjavani offers a philosophically complex yet lyrically wrought examination of the eternal struggle for women's rights."—Carol Haggas, Booklist"A mid-19th-century Persian poetess clashes against old-world gender expectations, religious orthodoxy, and politics in this exquisite tale, based on the actual life of poet and theologian Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn . . . Nakhjavani deftly transforms an incomplete history into legend. An ambitious effort produces an expertly crafted epic."—Kirkus ReviewsPraise for The Saddlebag and Paper: "Nakhjavani displays a love of storytelling almost for its own sake."—Literary Review"Nakhjavani's anachronistic style sets the novel apart from the bulk of contemporary literary fiction and adds immensely to its charm."—Publishers Weekly"Bahiyyih Nakhjavani is best—really very effective—when she writes of the sandstorms and delusions of our own imperfect Earth."—The Washington Post"Nakhjavani's language has a subtly wrought simplicity that serves to emphasize her themes, and her argument for the sanctity of the written word is tightly woven into a vivid tapestry of characters and situations."—Times Literary Supplement"Nakhjavani throws into her tale such a mixture of humor, exotic sensuousness and lofty omniscience that I was left spellbound like Scheherezade's sultan."—Tablet"Nakhjavani's rich, poetic narrative . . . is a delight to read and her words just dance across the page, dazzling even the casual reader . . . A remarkable first novel that expands like the overlapping petals of a flower."—The Big Issue"A first novel of astonishing power and originality . . . [T]his is both a thriller and a meditation on the ultimate goal of human existence and most of all it is a celebration of storytelling."—The Good Book Guide

Read more less

Book SynopsisMen died when women began to read.Trade Review"Nakhjavani's treatment of the historical figure is not so much to paint her as an eloquent proponent of the nascent faith but to apply her considerable narrative dexterity to an imaginative novel portraying the life and times of a woman with a strong voice in mid-nineteenth-century Iran who dared remove her veil in public and engage men in religious polemic. It is an engrossing story; to this day, Iranian society has not resolved publicly the social and political rights of women, nor has it clarified the status of religious and ethnic minorities."—Gayatri Devi, World Literature Today"'History is filled with screams that are best ignored,' Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in The Woman Who Read Too Much. Yet this mordant and seethingly intelligent story of palace intrigue in late 19th-century Persia echoes with the cries of the forgotten dead - and good luck ignoring them."—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal"Bahiyyih Nakhjavani's . . . visual storytelling is so enticing that it allows your imagination to shape, plot, and cast the narrative like episodes from a modern-day "House of Cards." . . . This book chronicles the haunting, rebellious lives of Qajar women . . . [and] reminds us all that whether Tudor, Qajar, or Clinton, behind every throne is a queen mother, wife, and sister who runs the show."—Davar Ardalan, Washington Independent Review"Bahiyyih Nakhjavani has chosen to construct, around the figure of Táhirih, a complex fragmented portrait that brings to literary life not only the remarkable personality of someone little known in the west, but also the convoluted Persia of the 19th century, treacherous and bloodthirsty . . . In a beautifully unobtrusive and graceful style, Nakhjavani succeeds in portraying these currents and countercurrents, and the many conflicting characters, in a narrative that is breathtaking in its scope and wonderfully illuminating. Above all, the figure of Táhirih . . . becomes one of the most powerfully convincing characters in recent historical fiction."—Alberto Manguel, The Guardian"Although set in the Victorian era, Nakhjavani's portrait is as contemporary as anything making headlines today, filled with issues ranging from women's subjugation and gender inequality to political violence and religious fundamentalism. Internationally acclaimed for her fiction and her nonfiction about religion and education, Nakjavani offers a philosophically complex yet lyrically wrought examination of the eternal struggle for women's rights."—Carol Haggas, Booklist"A mid-19th-century Persian poetess clashes against old-world gender expectations, religious orthodoxy, and politics in this exquisite tale, based on the actual life of poet and theologian Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn . . . Nakhjavani deftly transforms an incomplete history into legend. An ambitious effort produces an expertly crafted epic."—Kirkus ReviewsPraise for The Saddlebag and Paper: "Nakhjavani displays a love of storytelling almost for its own sake."—Literary Review"Nakhjavani's anachronistic style sets the novel apart from the bulk of contemporary literary fiction and adds immensely to its charm."—Publishers Weekly"Bahiyyih Nakhjavani is best—really very effective—when she writes of the sandstorms and delusions of our own imperfect Earth."—The Washington Post"Nakhjavani's language has a subtly wrought simplicity that serves to emphasize her themes, and her argument for the sanctity of the written word is tightly woven into a vivid tapestry of characters and situations."—Times Literary Supplement"Nakhjavani throws into her tale such a mixture of humor, exotic sensuousness and lofty omniscience that I was left spellbound like Scheherezade's sultan."—Tablet"Nakhjavani's rich, poetic narrative . . . is a delight to read and her words just dance across the page, dazzling even the casual reader . . . A remarkable first novel that expands like the overlapping petals of a flower."—The Big Issue"A first novel of astonishing power and originality . . . [T]his is both a thriller and a meditation on the ultimate goal of human existence and most of all it is a celebration of storytelling."—The Good Book Guide

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Trial: Three stories he published in his lifetime, including his best-known tale, “The Metamorphosis.”I have only one request, Kafka wrote to his publisher Kurt Wolff in 1913. ''The Stoker,'' ''The Metamorphosis,'' and ''The Judgment'' belong together, both inwardly and outwardly. There is an obvious connection among the three, and, even more important, a secret one, for which reason I would be reluctant to forego the chance of having them published together in a book, which might be called The Sons.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisWheels spin within wheels in Spark’s comedy of betrayals and terrorism, set in her beloved Venice

Read more less

Book SynopsisSpark’s very British bachelors come in every stripe

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Driver’s Seat, Spark’s own favorite among her many novels, was hailed by the New Yorker as “her spiny and treacherous masterpiece.”

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe fraying fringes of 1950s literary London

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis fast-moving, tightly-wound, and gleefully dark novella contains an entire universe in miniatureTrade Review"Weiss remains among the most important postwar German authors no one’s read." -- Slate"Peter Weiss embarks on his literary work and enters purgatory. All his work is designed as a visit to the dead." -- W. G. Sebald"Staggering ambition! Extraordinary richness." -- Susan Sontag

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first translation in over one hundred years of The Countess von Rudolstadt brings to contemporary readers one of George Sand's most ambitious and engaging novels, hailed by many scholars of French literature as her masterpiece.Trade Review"Van Slyke's elegant and comprehensive translation is a groundbreaking contribution to the rediscovery of George Sand's work and thought." * Nineteenth-Century French Studies *

Read more less

Book SynopsisHeterosexuality, this novel forthrightly claims, is a poor substitute for passionate love between men—and heterosexuality''s historical emergence in the nineteenth century is consequently, Cecil Dreeme laments, a grave misfortune.—Christopher Looby, from the IntroductionFreshly returned to New York City from his studies abroad, unmoored by news of the apparent suicide of his accomplished childhood friend Clara Denman, and drawn in spite of himself toward the sinister man-about-town Densdeth, Robert Byng is unsettlingly adrift in the city of his birth. Things take an even stranger turn once he finds lodgings in the Gothic halls of Chrysalis College in lower Manhattan. There he meets the mysteriously reclusive Cecil Dreeme, brilliant artist and creature of the night. In Dreeme, Byng finds a friend unlike any he has known before. But is Cecil the man he claims to be, and can their friendship survive the dangers they will soon face together?Issued posthumoTable of ContentsIntroduction: Cecil Dreeme and the Misfortune of Sexuality —Christopher Looby Editor's Note Biographical Sketch of the Author —George William Curtis I. Stillfleet and His News II. Chrysalis College III. Rubbish Palace IV. The Palace and Its Neighbors V. Churm Against Densdeth VI. Churm as Cassandra VII. Churm's Story VIII. Clara Denman, Dead IX. Locksley's Scare X. Overhead, Without XI. Overhead, Within XII. Dreeme, Alseep XIII. Dreeme, Awake XIV. A Mild Orgie XV. A Morning with Densdeth XVI. Emma Denman XVII. A Morning with Cecil Dreeme XVIII. Another Cassandra XIX. Can This Be Love? XX. A Nocturne XXI. Lydian Measures XXII. A Laugh and a Look XXIII. A Parting XXIV. Fame Awaits Dreeme XXV. Churm Before Dreeme's Picture XXVI. Towner XXVII. Raleigh's Revolt XXVIII. Densdeth's Farewell XXIX. Dreeme His Own Interpreter XXX. Densdeth's Dark Room Notes * * * * * Introduction Cecil Dreeme and the Misfortune of Sexuality Christopher Looby It's always fascinating to come upon a record of an actual reader's lively encounter with a book. Here is a story about a real nineteenth-century reader and his fraught engagement with the novel you are holding, Theodore Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme. On January 10, 1875, a young man named Henry Blake Fuller was enduring a dismal stint as a clerk in Ovington's crockery store in Chicago. He had turned eighteen years old the day before, and he confided moodily to his diary (to which he gave the grandiloquent title "A Legacy to Posterity") that he felt he would always look back upon himself at eighteen "as a boy in bad health, & who wished to be somewhere else. In short as a discontented young person. Unfortunate!" Fuller felt acutely conscious, he told his diary, of his many personal inadequacies, which he tallied in self-deriding terms reflecting the standard novelistic clichés of the time: "Harry Fuller at eighteen would never serve as a romantic hero. No olive complexion, no hair in graceful curves and black as the raven's wing; no commanding figure, no fascinating presence, no woman's tenderness with a man's courage.—but why torment myself by prolonging the list of my own deficiencies. Yes, I may set myself down as quite an ordinary person." Then suddenly the diarist's attention turned from morose self-examination, rendered in familiar novelistic terms, to a novel he had just read—this very novel. "Read Cecil Dreeme yesterday. A peculiar book. Not a profound observation. A book that interests me greatly." Versions of many of the romantic clichés with which he had just berated himself would, in fact, have been ready to hand in the florid "Biographical Sketch of the Author" by George W. Curtis that prefaces Cecil Dreeme (included here as an integral part of this "peculiar" book). Fuller would have read there of Winthrop's "keen gray eye" and "clustering fair hair" (5), would have learned that Winthrop's "sensitive seriousness grew sometimes morbid" (8) and that he was afflicted with "an ill-health that colored all his life" (9); that he had "a flower-like delicacy of temperament" characterized by "the curious, critical introspection which marks every sensitive and refined nature" (11), but that his "womanly grace of temperament merely enhanced the unusual manliness of his character and impression" (11-12). Fuller would have found, in other words, someone whose "ill-health" matched his own "bad health," but who was somehow a paragon of the "romantic hero" he felt he was not. He would have found a model for his own morbid self-castigation, but perhaps also an image of something less "ordinary" that he might aspire toward. Many questions arise here. The teenaged Fuller was certainly a great reader: the diary in question is full of references to novelists and novels, poets and poetry, as well as histories and other literary genres. Wilkie Collins (July 12, 1874), Charles Dickens—he reported reading David Copperfield and Dombey and Son (July 14), Nicholas Nickleby (Aug. 23), and Bleak House (Nov. 22)—Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris and Schiller's Maid of Orleans (July 17), Longfellow's "Wayside Inn" (July 20), Johnson's Rasselas (Aug. 30), Bulwer's The Last Days of Pompeii (Sept. 27), Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Jan. 28, 1875), Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake (Nov. 25), and Macaulay's Essays (Dec. 25)—Fuller mentioned all of these and more. About many of them he had substantive critical observations to make, as a future novelist very well might. Some of them he read patiently over an extended period of time, and returned to for rereading and reconsideration. But about Cecil Dreeme, which he evidently read in one day—on his eighteenth birthday, no less, and in a state of deep discontent—he could not muster anything that would satisfy him as "a profound observation." Something about Cecil Dreeme left him nonplussed, but at the same time intrigued. "A peculiar book," he wrote. "A book that interests me greatly." How did Cecil Dreeme come to Fuller's attention? What did he find "peculiar" about it, and why did it interest him so "greatly"? Did someone who had responded to its peculiarity—and who thought its peculiarity would interest Fuller—recommend it to him? We probably cannot know. Fuller went on to become a noted writer himself, and many decades later he would write one of the earliest unmistakably queer American novels, Bertram Cope's Year (1919). The fact of this later literary performance, and the knowledge that Fuller was also an avid lover of men, perhaps licenses us to infer that the great and baffled interest that his teenaged self took in the "peculiar book" Cecil Dreeme must have had something to do with its (and his) incipient queerness. The single word Fuller used to describe the novel, the mere epithet peculiar, is a curious one, having served over the years prior to the invention of homosexual identity as one of the many vague euphemisms that could evoke what was not yet, in 1875, as firmly conceived, securely denoted, or publicly recognized as it would soon come to be: a style of sexual personhood that had not yet coalesced into a defined social identity, did not yet have a label, had not yet become a description under which people could act and could understand themselves and others to exist. Cecil Dreeme's narrator, Robert Byng, tellingly refers at one point to the "peculiar power" that the dangerously magnetic Densdeth exerted over him, and at another place to the "too peculiar a tenderness" he himself felt for his beloved Cecil Dreeme (194, 281, emphasis added). A decade earlier Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrator, Miles Coverdale, teased his friend Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance (1852) by reading to him some suggestive passages from the writings of Charles Fourier, and explaining to him ("as modestly as I could") the radical sexual arrangements that Fourier advocated. Coverdale then provocatively asked Hollingsworth whether he thought they could introduce these "beautiful pecularities" into their own communal practice. At roughly the same time as Winthrop published Cecil Dreeme another adventurous novelist, Margaret J. M. Sweat, had the eponymous protagonist of Ethel's Love-Life (1859) describe to her fiancé Ernest the "peculiar relationship" she had with a woman named Leonora: "Women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men," Ethel patiently explained, and although Leonora has been banished from Ethel's life their "subtle essences mingled and assimilated too thoroughly ever to be entirely disunited." Fuller in 1875 may not yet have had any sense of a firm sexually categorical possibility for himself or for a character in a novel. But he was certainly aware of the bent of his own desires, and of his unsuitedness for the role of romantic hero if it would entail an erotic interest in women. Naturally, then, he would have taken a great interest in a novel that, among many other things that might have appealed to him, featured a passionate friendship apparently between two men, described unabashedly (and repeatedly) as "more precious than the love of women" (235), "a love passing the love of women" (275). But that passionate friendship, forthrightly depicted in 1861 by Theodore Winthrop as something that did not entail categorization as "homosexual," would have been at least somewhat more likely by 1875, when Fuller read the novel, to have had such an implication. But then again, it would not yet certainly have had this implication: many readers and reviewers at the time did not detect any such suggestion. Same-sex romantic friendship was then in the midst of a long late nineteenth-century transition from a perfectly normal and even celebrated form of personal attachment to a suspect and eventually deviant form of desire. What we have, in the encounter between Henry Blake Fuller and Cecil Dreeme, then, is a neat vignette exhibiting a book written and published before what is often called the "invention" of the homosexual (indeed, the invention of the heterosexual too) and an act of reading coming in an uncertain, slightly later moment when that incomplete invention may or may not have been clearly known to this particular young reader. The book's transitional status, and the liminal quality of this scene of reading, both contribute to what Fuller called "peculiar" about Cecil Dreeme.What he called "peculiar" corresponds to what we might today call queer. Queer is a term in use today to suggest a broad range of erotic tastes, inclinations, attachments, and desires that do not fall neatly into the binary categories the dominant culture still frequently deploys for the sake of distinguishing between the normal (heterosexual) and the abnormal (homosexual). It seems fair, then, to describe Cecil Dreeme as a queer novel, since it doesn't entirely observe or respect that binary distinction (and certainly doesn't frame that distinction in the rigid way that later generations would do). Cecil Dreeme depicts some "peculiar" ways of feeling and desiring, relatively unfamiliar to us today, and registers the profound effects of what may have seemed to its author like the faintly incipient and unwelcome emergence of sexual taxonomies that (as it happens, because Theodore Winthrop was killed in the Civil War) he would not live to see put firmly in place. Unlike his reader Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929), whose life began before the homosexual had fully become, in Michel Foucault's famous phrase, "a species," a recognized type of person, but who did live to see that historical emergence play itself out, Winthrop died in 1861 just as that process of sexual emergence was faintly beginning to get traction. Fuller's youthful recognition of this quality in Cecil Dreeme—what he was able in 1875 to call "peculiar" and what we might today call queer—hints at the role Winthrop's novel may have played in the lives of other readers who recognized in it something that interested them greatly but that they could not precisely describe. And it suggests as well the agency Cecil Dreeme may have exercised in beginning to articulate modern forms of disciplinary sexual identity (the novel taints some forms of desire as "perverse," and there is, after all, a faint odor of suspicion attached to Fuller's adjective "peculiar") as well as articulating countervailing literary resources for erotic dissidence ("It interests me greatly"). At the same time, then, as Cecil Dreeme takes its historical place in a genealogy of emergent sexual identities, it also takes its place in a history of resistance to that emergence, because of the share it takes in the devoted preservation of what Peter Coviello has nicely called "all the errant possibilities for imagining sex that have sunk into a kind of muteness with the advent of modern sexuality." Cecil Dreeme regrets what it senses as the imminent "deployment of sexuality," in Foucault's terms—the stringent necessity people would soon be under to sign up for (or be assigned to) one sexual category or another. Cecil Dreeme thus takes us back to a time before "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" fully existed—indeed, even before a crisp distinction came to be made between the realms of the sexual and the nonsexual as such. Perhaps the queerest thing about Cecil Dreeme is its tense negotiation of the fuzzy boundaries between the realms of the senses that it would designate as, on the one hand, morally blameworthy "sensuality" (184), and, on the other, those it would celebrate as innocent pleasures of the senses. If you have ever wondered how and why the unnecessary institution of heterosexuality emerged in history, Cecil Dreeme has a provocative answer. The novel's date, as I have suggested, is fairly close to one of the usual chronological markers of the advent of heterosexual/homosexual differentiation, that is, the first appearance of the term homosexual in print—in German—in 1869 or so. Many historians of sexuality have pointed out how the articulation of one category of sexual existence, homosexuality, implies the existence of its opposite, heterosexuality. Cecil Dreeme evocatively captures the feeling of the fraught moment when this strange new thing, heterosexuality, appeared on the historical scene as an untested and not universally welcomed phenomenon—one whose cunning attractions, it appeared to some, might not outweigh its punitive exactions. Heterosexuality, this novel forthrightly claims, is a poor substitute for passionate love between men—and heterosexuality's historical emergence in the nineteenth century is consequently, Cecil Dreeme laments, a grave misfortune. But if we must resign ourselves to the unhappy fate of heterosexuality's emergence and eventual dominance, Cecil Dreeme further implies, then perhaps something can be done to make it a tolerable form of life. If only it could be infused, the novel finally suggests, with the passionate intensity that had belonged principally to male same-sex attachments, heterosexuality might then prove to be a more or less satisfactory arrangement. (Readers who don't want the plot's twists to be revealed should postpone reading the rest of this introduction). This is the meager hope with which the novel's narrator, Robert Byng, is left when the man he loved (known to him as Cecil Dreeme) turns out to be a woman (Clara Denman) in male disguise. This revelation creates for Byng a vexatious problem. Can his cherished same-sex love be transmuted, somehow, into heterosexual attachment? Perhaps it can—although Byng continues to refer to his beloved mostly as "he" and "him" and "Cecil Dreeme" even after Clara's true sex and actual name have been revealed (335ff.). "Every moment it came to me more distinctly that Cecil Dreeme and I could never be Damon and Pythias again" (347-48), Byng laments. He continues: "And now that the friend proved a woman, a great gulf opened between us" (348). "But thinking of what might start up between Cecil Dreeme and me, and part us," Byng rues, "I let fall the hand I held" (348, emphasis added). If something were now to "start up" between them—and if Byng could reconcile himself to recognizing her as "Clara," which he continues to be unable or unwilling fully to do even at the novel's end—it seems it would always be an attachment troubled by the sacrifice it exacts from its practitioners, the compulsory abandonment of the prior institution of same-sex friendship. Robert's love for Cecil was fundamentally predicated on his being a man—although, to be sure, a peculiar man, "a man of another order, not easy to classify" (138). If he could now love the woman, Clara, it would be a love always haunted by its need to draw upon and, if possible, transmute the charisma of homoerotic attachment into heterosexual desire. Here is how it goes. Having been surprised and dismayed by the discovery that the man he loved dearly—the delicately enchanting young painter Cecil Dreeme—was in fact, all along, a young woman in disguise, the novel's narrator is left at the tale's close with a melancholy task ahead of him—converting his powerful love for Cecil into a different, derivative, and denatured kind of love, the love of the woman Clara Denman, who had been masquerading as Cecil. The man Byng has called his "friend of friends" (229, 291), "dearer to me than a brother" (296), "part of my heart" (321)—"this friend closer than a brother was [now] a woman" (335). What can happen to a friendship "more precious than the love of women" (235), "a love passing the love of women" (275), when its object now turns out to be—a woman? It is a bit like what Millamant says to Mirabell in William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), setting out her conditions for consenting to marry him: if he will agree to her various stipulations, she says, it is possible that she "may by degrees dwindle into a wife." Cecil Dreeme leaves Robert Byng to wonder what it would mean, and whether he can consent, to dwindle into a husband and, perforce, reconcile himself to being in effect a heterosexual. Byng has spent a considerable portion of his tale describing his never very enthusiastic or strenuous attempts to convince himself to fall in love with a woman ("I loved, or thought I loved, or wished that I loved" another character, he avers, the enchanting Emma Denman [232]; "I had fancied I loved" her, he later admits [281]). But he has all the while been more apt to worry about the dire prospect of being "imprisoned for life in matrimony" (72). It is as if we see him, then, when the gender of his love object has been suddenly switched, internalizing the new coercions of heterosexuality before our eyes. To the revealed Clara he says, "I talked to you and thought of you, although I was not conscious of it, as man does to woman only" (338). Again: "Ignorantly I had loved my friend as one loves a woman only" (348). One easy mistake to make about this novel's plot, however, is to judge that the eventual revelation of Cecil Dreeme's female identity constitutes a wary retreat from the queer potential that the novel has created. It might seem, to be sure, that Winthrop's novel about a man's love for another man is fatally compromised—or, as some recent readers would have it, rescued—by the belated revelation that one of them is in fact (sigh of relief) a woman. One commentator, for example, writes of Byng and Dreeme that "gradually their comradeship deepens into something more: a friendship 'more precious than the love of women,' reminiscent of the Greek lovers Damon and Pythias." But then he adds, not very coherently, "At last, to the narrator's relief, his heterosexuality is reaffirmed—more or less—when it turns out that the delectable roommate is a woman in disguise." (That "more or less" is a nasty touch: it amounts to a homophobic sneer.) The novel, as I have emphasized, portrays Byng as emphatically not relieved to discover that Dreeme is a woman but as in fact quite the opposite: surprised, disappointed, confused, and dismayed. Nor is his "heterosexuality" reaffirmed by this revelation—it is anachronistic to think of him as securely possessing a quality of "heterosexuality" that would be satisfyingly "reaffirmed" by the revelation of Dreeme's female sex. It would be more accurate to say that with the revelation that Cecil is really Clara, the unwelcome fate of heterosexuality is rudely forced upon him. In a similar vein, another commentator has written that when Dreeme is revealed to be a woman in masculine disguise, "the revelation is startling to Robert who now has an explanation for his sexual attraction to the young man." Again, this gets things desperately—one wants to say deliberately, perversely—wrong. Byng has not been at all troubled by his romantic attraction to Cecil Dreeme; on the contrary, he has felt personally gratified and even morally strengthened by it. Thus he has never felt any need of an "explanation" for this attraction; such a claim betrays, again, an anachronistic imposition of later ideas of sexual normalcy upon a very different nineteenth-century set of assumptions about the moral value and intrinsic beauty of same-sex intimacies. And it prejudicially assumes, to boot, that heterosexual attraction is natural and proper and that its hidden motivating presence here would somehow justify Byng's otherwise inexplicable erotic attraction to another man. Cecil Dreeme does not think that there is anything wrong with same-sex passion, that it needs "explanation" or that one would naturally be relieved to have an opportunity to disown it. Could this in fact be what Henry Blake Fuller found so "peculiar" and yet so interesting about it? Cecil Dreeme's liminal historical position, on the cusp of the invention of sexuality, can be measured by the kinds of responses it began to engender in the decades after its initial popularity and Fuller's intrigued but slightly nervous response to it. Julian Hawthorne in 1887 reviewed "Theodore Winthrop's Writings" and found himself baffled and perturbed by the greater popularity of Cecil Dreeme as compared to Winthrop's other novels, which he considered superior. John Brent, he writes, is "more mature" in style and "quality of thought," and "its tone is more fresh and wholesome." Hawthorne ratchets up the suggestive moralizing a few pages later on: in Cecil Dreeme "the love intrigue is morbid and unwholesome," and the characters are "artificial and unnatural." And there is more: "Cecil Dreeme herself [Hawthorne, unlike Byng, has no trouble assigning her the correct gendered pronoun] never fully recovers from the ambiguity forced upon her by her masculine attire." Tellingly, Winthrop's "unwholesome" production reminds the younger Hawthorne of his father Nathaniel's Blithedale Romance, which, as we have hinted, had its own interest in the "beautiful peculiarities" of sexual irregularity. Theodore Winthrop's other novels—Fuller would have found them all quite "peculiar" too, despite Julian Hawthorne's insistence that they were not "unwholesome" like Cecil Dreeme—are ripe with suggestions of same-sex and other queer desires that do not conform to either Winthrop's contemporaries' emergent norms or to what have become ours. Edwin Brothertoft (1862), for example, is a historical romance of the American Revolution, in which the narrator is fascinated by nothing so much as the magnificent and evidently locally celebrated moustache that one of the tale's heroes, the patriot Major Peter Skerrett, wears. "On his nut-brown face his blonde moustache lay lovingly curling," we are told. When Skerrett disguises himself as a redcoat officer as part of a plot to rescue Edwin Brothertoft's estranged daughter Lucy—whose coarse and dishonest mother, having deceived Brothertoft into marriage, now intends to marry her daughter unwillingly to an oafish British officer named Kerr—the patriotic destruction of this fabled moustache is called for, since its widespread celebrity would otherwise give Skerrett's true identity away. But Skerrett at the same time fears—because he is dreaming romantically of Lucy, whom he has yet to meet—that without his beauteous and "lovingly curling" moustache he will not make the best first impression on her when he achieves her rescue. Lucy, for her part, is actively conjuring a mental image of her fondly awaited handsome rescuer and his anticipated virtues: "Truth, Virtue, Courage and the sister qualities, Lucy had dimpled into the bronzed cheeks, as a sailor pricks an anchor, or Polly's name, into a brother tar's arm with Indian ink" (240). It is tempting to say that something like a fantasy of heterosexual romance is being metaphorically converted here into a moment of pricking intimacy between two sailors for whom "Polly" is just the generic name for a little-regretted absence. In Edwin Brothertoft nearly every realized affiliation between a man and a woman is ugly and deformed, characterized by treachery and horror; even the promising match between Peter Skerrett and Lucy Brothertoft, once he (sans moustache) does rescue her, is left conspicuously unrealized and strenuously uncertain at the end. "It seems the fair beginning of a faithful love" (emphasis added), we hear from the narrator, but he asks nervously whether this love will "end in doubt, sorrow, shame, and forgiveness; or in trust, joy, constancy and peace" (369). That pregnant question is the very last line of the novel, and no answer is given—unless the discouraged answer lies, only partially hidden, in the near-homonymy between "brother tars" and "Brothertoft." Winthrop's other completed novel, John Brent (1862), has an even weirder and richer queer subtext. The first-person narrator, Richard Wade, early in the Western portion of the tale acquires a magnificent black stallion that no one has yet been able to tame and ride. But Wade himself is able to domesticate the steed using the methods of love. "I loved that horse as I have loved nothing else yet, except the other personage for whom he acted," prefiguring the heroic horse's later crucial mediation of his relationship with the eponymous John Brent, a dear college friend with whom Wade was once intimate and with whom he is now to be reunited. "Brent was [then] a delicate, beautiful, dreamy boy" (41), Wade recalls; he reappears suddenly in Nevada ten years later when Wade, who has been seeking gold, is packing up to return east and care for his widowed—and now dead—sister's two orphaned children. When the long-lost Brent rides toward him Wade first mistakes him at a distance for a handsome Indian brave of the kind that James Fenimore Cooper's pen might have drawn in his lustrous beauty: "'The Adonis of the copper-skins!' I said to myself." And then Wade unabashedly confides to the page: "I wish I was an Indian myself for such a companion; or, better, a squaw, to be made love to by him" (38). But as Brent draws nearer, Wade begins to recognize him as a deeply tanned white man—"not copper, but bronze" (38)—and, indeed, soon hails him as his beloved school friend, whereupon their interrupted intimacy is resumed and they set out across the prairie together. Brent has changed—those ten years, we learn, have involved struggle and pain, due to a woman's perfidy—but those difficulties, in Brent's own words, "have taken all the girl out of me" (39). And to explain Wade's initial misrecognition, he adds—here it comes again—"'Ten years have presented me with this for a disguise,' said he, giving his moustache a twirl" (39). The moustache aside, however, this doesn't explain Wade's fantasy of being a "squaw" so that he might be "made love to" by a handsome Indian brave; in Winthrop's world, this desire evidently needs no explanation at all. Although Brent ends up at the novel's end with an anticipated marriage to a fine woman, abetted by his loyal friend Wade, the latter is left alone for the moment with his bated love for Brent—whom he loved, he tells us, "as mature man loves man. I have known no more perfect union than that one friendship. Nothing so tender in any of my transitory loves for women" (57). When this same Richard Wade appears again in another piece of Winthrop's fiction, a long story published in the Atlantic Monthly, "Love and Skates" (1862), he is somewhat older and now expressly in search of a wife of his own: he is judged to be "incomplete and abnormal" because he's unmarried. Wade eventually, like Brent earlier, finds his own excellent woman to marry, but not until he has a peculiarly intense passage with one Bill Tarbox, a rough worker in the Hudson River Valley iron factory Wade has been sent to superintend. Wade and Tarbox are both thirty years old, described as each other's matching physical counterparts, each a "Saxon six-footer" (137, 139). Wade first establishes his managerial authority and manly dominance by beating Tarbox in a fistfight; Tarbox thenceforth respects and admires Wade, and becomes his devoted ally—as well as avid ice-skating partner. When the river freezes over one Christmas Day, and the entire town goes out for a frolic on the ice, Wade and Tarbox have an opportunity to demonstrate their well-rehearsed skill as a figure-skating pair: "Wade backwards, Bill forwards, holding hands . . . both dropped into a sitting posture, with the left knee bent, and each with his right leg stretched out parallel to the ice and fitting compactly by the other man's leg. In this queer figure they rushed through the laughing crowd" (154). A "queer figure" indeed, holding hands face to face and with legs interlaced, but with sharp blades extended in each other's vicinity too—their tense rivalry and their tight attachment both expressed in this peculiar posture. I have thus far concentrated on representing Winthrop's depiction of same-sex love as a mainly positive phenomenon—and something that threads through many of his published writings—in order to correct a few egregious misrepresentations of Cecil Dreeme. But it must be conceded after all that this is itself a rather one-sided account of queer relations in it. This is a novel that presents what I will call a "stereoscopic" picture of male-male love. There are two same-sex love plots in it, one of which I have discussed (involving Byng and Dreeme), which is understood to be beautiful and healthy, while the other (between Byng and a seductive character named Densdeth) is condemned as morbid and suspect. The two queer love plots share the space of the novel uneasily, we might say; the one fits within the literary tradition of exalted same-sex romantic friendship, the other within a competing tradition that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called the "paranoid gothic," characterized by its melodramatic depiction of "homosexual panic." I borrow the term "stereoscopic" from the novel itself (147). One of the peculiarities of the tale has to do with Byng's nonrecognition of Clara Denman when she is first presented to him in male disguise. This obtuseness may seem implausible to some readers. After all, Byng knew Clara and her sister Emma intimately in childhood, even played "little husband and little wife" with them (188), but oddly he doesn't at all recognize Clara now. True, Byng has been told that Clara is dead, so he does not expect ever to meet her; she is also in masculine disguise, apparently quite convincing; he has been prepared by others in various ways to meet a young man, an artist named Cecil; the room where they first meet is dark; Cecil is pale and wasted with lack of nourishment; and ten years have passed since they last met (when he was fifteen and Clara was several years younger). Clearly Winthrop labors to make this nonrecognition seem passably believable under the circumstances. At several moments in the story Byng almost thinks he has seen Cecil before, but he cannot quite remember where or when. Later, Clara says that she recognized him instantly: "I knew you as my old playmate from the first moment" (347). But because he does not appear to recognize her in that first moment, she doesn't reveal herself to him. She is relieved, also, to be able to go unrecognized, since she is in hiding from Densdeth, living in deep fear of being located by him. Dreeme's reclusiveness argues that he has a secret of some kind, and this putative secret continues to stimulate Byng's curiosity even as he feels duty-bound to respect its privacy—but still he never brings himself to recognize Clara in Cecil. There is certainly something willful in Byng's nonrecognition, as he later comes to admit: "And every moment fancies drift across my mind that I actually know his secret, and am blind, purposely blind to my knowledge, because I promised when we first met that I would be so" (213). When he first encounters Cecil Dreeme, famished and half-conscious, he forbears to look directly at him, thinking it would be rude to stare at someone who was only half awake and too weak to resist uninvited inspection: "Curiosity urged me to study the face more in detail. But that seemed disloyal to the sleeper. . . . I therefore stopped intentionally short of a thorough analysis of his countenance" (137). When Dreeme does become fully conscious, however, Byng looks intently at him, "eye to eye" (147), and he has one of his fleeting sensations of half-recognition: "As we regarded each other earnestly, I perceived the question flit across my mind: 'Had I not had a glimpse of that inspired face before?'" (147). He already knows that Dreeme is a painter, so he immediately thinks of likely places he might have caught sight of him plying his trade in the past (here is where the image of a stereoscope comes in): "I may have seen him copying in the Louvre, sketching in the Oberland, dejected in the Coliseum, elated in St. Peter's, taking his coffee and violets in the Café Doné, whisking by at the Pitti Palace ball. He may have flashed across my sight, and imprinted an image on my brain to which his presence applies the stereoscopic counterpart" (147). The stereoscope (also called a stereograph) was a technology, widely popular in the nineteenth century, for creating the illusion of three-dimensional depth in a photographic image. A pair of almost identical pictures was printed side by side on a single paper card, one a right-eye view and the other a left-eye view of the same scene (that is, the images were captured from fractionally divergent perspectives, as a person's two eyes would see a scene from very slightly different angles). The photographic card was inserted into a viewer (a hand-held viewer, sometimes called a Holmes Stereoscope, after its inventor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who made this entertainment device affordable for the American market). The parallax effect of the two slightly offset images required that the viewer's brain combine them, as it combined the visual sensations from a viewer's own two slightly divergent eyes, thus producing the appearance of three-dimensional depth of field. Used metaphorically by Winthrop (or, rather, by the narrator Byng), the idea of having seen Dreeme fleetingly once, somewhere in the past, and now having a second image to complete, as it were, the stereoscopic effect, should logically lead to recognition rather than stymie it. But instead of recognizing his old playmate, Byng cannot (or will not) do so, even as he observes that Dreeme appears to recognize him:When he glanced up at me anew, I fancied I saw an evanescent look of recognition drift across his face. This set me a second time turning over the filmy leaves of the book of portraits in my brain. Was his semblance among those legions of faces packed close and set away in order there? No. I could not identify him. The likeness drifted away from me, and vanished. (150)As readers we must take Cecil Dreeme stereoscopically, as it were: the two queer romances (one beautiful, one sinister) are each other's slightly mismatched counterparts, which, if taken together, produce a historical reality effect. The "stereoscopic counterpart" of the plot of glorious romantic friendship in Cecil Dreeme is the counterplot of sinister same-sex attraction centered in the figure of Densdeth. And just as Byng cannot bring his two images of Cecil together, the novel, we might say, does not bring its two homoerotic love plots into a single focus. This is not, in my view, a deficiency at all—rather, it is one of the qualities that makes Cecil Dreeme such a powerfully queer witness to the contradictions of its historical moment, its suspension between a prior historical deployment in which same-sex passion was uncontroversial and celebrated and an emerging historical deployment that would soon stigmatize same-sex love as morbid, unwholesome, indecent, and perverse. Roland Barthes in his classic essay "From Work to Text" (1971) elaborated upon the concept of the text (which he famously distinguished from the work) by saying that the essential plurality of the text will make it seem "stereographic," written from multiple directions and thus necessarily read from multiple angles. "The stereographic plurality of the text" is produced, he said, not merely by the ambiguity of its contents but by the irreducible multiplicity of its "weave of signifiers." This image of the stereographic text also appeared in his S/Z: An Essay (1970), where Barthes referred to "the stereographic space of writing." By this he meant to foreground the way in which all writing (understood as text) is characterized not by the peaceable coexistence of different meanings but by their irrefragable heterogeneity, their dissemination of meaning. One senses that Cecil Dreeme fits the description very well, and not only because, like the Balzac story "Sarrasine" that is Barthes's object of textual analysis in S/Z, Winthrop's text too involves gender masquerade. And not only because, as the notes to the present edition show, Cecil Dreeme is woven of countless quotations, allusions, and intertexts, from the Bible to ancient mythologies to the Western classics to contemporary literature. Cecil Dreeme is "stereoscopic" (and slyly tells us that about itself) because its queer-affirmative "romantic friendship" love plot and its gothic "homosexual panic" love plot are so deeply at odds with one another and yet so intimately allied. Byng tells us that Densdeth aims at "perverting" him (64), as he "perverts" Mr. Denman (197), as he has in the past perverted the decrepit college janitor Locksley, and as he is currently trying to pervert another young man, Raleigh. Trying to characterize his magnetic attraction to the darkly handsome Densdeth, Byng reports that he felt "a hateful love for his society" (184). When Densdeth lies dying, stabbed and bleeding, Byng says he knelt down, "raised Densdeth's head" (330), and gently "parted the black hair from his forehead" (331). "There was the man whom I should have loved if I had not hated" (331). "Should have hated if I had not loved" would have done equally well here. Chapter XX, "A Nocturne," is as good a place as any to observe this "stereoscopic" textuality in a short compass. Robert and Cecil have a habit of taking long walks together at night, when the reclusive painter feels relatively safe from public observation. But on this night the city seems ominous: "Night! When the gas-lights, relit, reawaken harmful purposes, that had slept through all the hours of honest sunshine in their lairs; when the tigers and tigresses take their stand where their prey will be sure to come; when the rustic in the peaceful country, with leaves whispering and crickets singing around him, sees a glow on the distant horizon, and wonders if the bad city beneath it be indeed abandoned of its godly men, and burning for its crimes. Night! The day of the base, the guilty, and the desolate!" (239). The evocation here of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities of the plain understood to be given over to the carnal wickedness to which the name sodomy was therefore given, destroyed by the Lord, who rained "brimstone and fire" upon them (Genesis 19:24), cannot be accidental. And yet we are also given the thought of a young man in the rural countryside, looking toward what he has been told is the "bad city," and wondering whether it is in fact really "abandoned of its godly men, and burning for its crimes." It is in this very chapter that Dreeme and Byng first touch each other: "He dropped his cloak and took my arm. It was the first time he had given me this slight token of intimacy" (241). The gesture seals their love; they are now "Orestes and Pylades" (243), as they will be "Damon and Pythias" (348), two exemplary classical pairs of same-sex lovers. But then they have a fateful encounter with Densdeth outside a theater, and he recognizes (but conceals his recognition of) Clara Denman in the guise of Cecil Dreeme. The two love plots (the romantic and the sinister) meet and gaze at one another, so to speak—we might almost say cruise each other—on the nocturnal streets of New York City. Editor's Note Cecil Dreeme has been reproduced here from its first printing (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861) and has not been modernized except in one incidental respect. Contractions have been closed up (e.g., is n't becomes isn't, he 's becomes he's, did n't becomes didn't, I 've becomes I've, should n't becomes shouldn't). A few minor typographical errors have also been silently corrected. The notes to the text at the back of the book, keyed to page numbers, identify quotations and many literary allusions; provide classical, biblical, biographical, and other historical references; translate non-English words and phrases; and provide other kinds of supplementary information.

Read more less