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With an introduction from poet Amy Key, this volume presents anew the poetry of Dante Gabriel, Christina and Elizabeth for a contemporary audience to read and enjoy. These carefully selected poems are arranged thematically under the headings of 'Love', 'Sex', 'Money', and 'Death'. Beautifully designed and illustrated with sumptuous Pre-Raphaelite images, this exquisite collection of poetry is full of romantic appeal.

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Breakdown and attempted suicide, and co-tenancy of Kelmscott Manor with Morris, balanced by usual professional concerns. The best of these letters, flowing rapidly from his pen, radiate charisma and enthusiasm, warmth and care for his friends, and a total engagement with art and literature. JULIAN TREUHERZ, BURLINGTON MAGAZINE [on I. and II.] These years were the most tumultuous of Rossetti's life. His breakdown and attempted suicide inevitably makes the letters of this period exceptionally poignant, but the volume contains many letters relating to his life and work. Throughout most of 1871 he was writing and painting; he became, with William Morris, a co-tenant of Kelmscott Manor, bringing him close to Jane Morris and also to the two Morris daughters. In October the name of Robert Buchanan entersthe letters as the likely author of 'The Fleshly School of Poetry', and an alarming unease can be sensed. Following his attempted suicide and eventual return to Kelmscott, the letters increase in number - affectionate, considerate and businesslike by turns, with a certain morbidity at times; many letters are concerned with helping Ford Madox Brown's application for the Slade Professorship at Cambridge. The wider world of Victorian London is present: Turgenev comes to dinner, Browning sends his new volumes, Swinburne arrives drunk, and the American poet and adventurer Joaquin Miller makes himself known to the Rossetti circle. Nine appendices include five devoted to Poems and one tothe Fleshly School controversy.

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Part of the Crane Classics series, featuring the poetry of Christina Rossetti.

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With an Introduction and Notes by Katherine McGowran.Christina Rossetti is widely regarded as the most considerable woman poet in England before the twentieth century. No reading of nineteenth century poetry can be complete without attention to this prolific and popular poet. Rosetti's inner life dominates her poetry, exploring loss and unattainable hope. Her divine poems have a freshness and toughness of thought, while many of her love poems are erotic, and as often express love for women as for men. The varied threads of Rossetti's concerns are drawn together in what is perhaps her greatest poem, the strange and ambiguous 'Goblin Market'.

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Major edition revealing key ideas and events in the lives and work of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and Victorian literary circles: 5,800 letters (including 2,000 previously unpublished letters) to 330 recipients. 1855-1862: This nine-volume editionl represents the definitive collection of extant Rossetti correspondence, an outstanding primary witness to the range of ideas and opinions that shaped Rossetti's art and poetry. The largest collection of Rossetti's letters ever to be published, it features all known surviving letters, a total of almost 5,800 to over 330 recipients, and includes 2,000 previously unpublished letters by Rossetti and selected letters to him.In addition to this, about 100 drawings taken from within letter texts are also reproduced. In its entirety the collection will give an invaluable and unparalleled insight into Rossetti's character and art, and will form a rich resource for students and scholars studying all aspects of his life and work. The correspondence has been transcribed from collections in sixty-four manuscript repositories, containing Rossetti's letters to his companions inthe Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt and Stephens; friends such as Boyce and Bell Scott; his early patrons, Ellen Heaton and James Leathart; and his publisher friend, Alexander Macmillan. An additional twenty-two printed sources have also been accessed. Index; extensive annotations. WILLIAM E. FREDEMAN (1928-1999) was professor of English at the University of British Columbia from 1956-1991. His many books, articles and reviews on the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers include his important Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study. He died in 1999 with this edition almost completed; LEONARD ROBERTS is an art historian and author of Arthur Hughes: His Life and Works.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), best known and admired for his striking and seductive portraits of women, was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists whose work is inspired by the art of the early Italian Renaissance. Rossetti’s powerful and unconventional portraits, with their sumptuous, jewel-like colours, are explored in this beautiful gift book. Examples have been drawn from the full range of Rossetti’s work – including paintings, drawings, print illustrations, decorative designs and staged photographs – and chart the artist’s lively engagement with mythology, history, literature, biblical subjects and modern life. Rossetti defined his experiences through his passion for his subjects and this book traces his deliberate intertwining of art and life. His models such as Jane Morris, Elizabeth Siddal and his sister Christina, were his inspiration and, in his rejection of conventional beauty, he redefined difference as desirable. Through his view of women – in which admiration veered towards fixation, praise towards possession – Rossetti confronted the staid 19th-century public with a new and powerful image of women, and the allure of that power is still felt today.With 126 illustrations in colour

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The Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano is a masterpiece of historically accurate Italo-Greek monastic literature. Neilos, who died in 1004, vividly exemplifies the preoccupations of Greek monks in southern Italy under the Byzantine Empire. A restless search for a permanent residence, ascetic mortification of the body, and pursuit by enemies are among the concerns this text shares with biographies of other saints from the region. Like many of his peers, Neilos lived in both hermitages and monasteries, torn between the competing conventions of solitude and community. The Life of Neilos offers a snapshot of a distinctive time when Greek and Latin monasticism coexisted, a world that vanished after the schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople in 1054. This is the first English translation, with a newly revised Greek text.

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Christina Rossetti has come to be considered one of the major poets. ""The Letters of Christina Rossetti"" makes available all of her extant letters, almost two-thirds of which have never before been published. These letters come from over 100 private and institutional collections. The fourth and final volume covers the last eight years of her life.

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Ana Rossetti is a unique phenomenon in Spanish culture, a performer and writer who resists categorization within any single genre, gender, period, or medium. She began as a performer, and she has returned repeatedly to artistic performance, playfully inverting and perverting norms, continually and radically transforming her public image, and mixing high and low culture. Rossetti's work employs unstable signifiers derived from fashion, literature, design, pornography, psychology, theater, drag, and Catholicism to destabilize critical, analytic, political, social, and gender categories. She has dabbled in most genres, including fiction, essay, drama, children's literature, and opera, and she has collaborated with visual artists, popular singers, and fashion designers. Rossetti's cultural practice in itself presents critics with a key hermeneutic problem: how to define her and her work without reverting back to the categories that her artistic practice destabilizes. This book avoids those temptations by presenting a kaleidoscope of critical readings of Rossetti's texts by leading U.S. scholars, each of whom focuses on a single text, or textual practice, in the case of her lesser known and studied texts.

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The letters in this volume show the woman Rossetti was at this time in her life. By 1874 she was an established poet with a literary reputation among her contemporaries. But her personal life was overshadowed by the deaths and illness of close friends, and her own affliction with Graves' disease. In the VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE series.

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A manuscript rather obliquely named from its once having been at Rosslyn Castle, but that at the time of this edition had come to the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, which since 1925 is part of the National Library of Scotland (MS Advocates 18.5.19). Lawlor dated it to the late 13th or early 14th century, and saw it as an English copy of an Irish exemplar in turn descended from a book belonging to the Benedictine nuns of St Werbugh, Chester, in the 12thcentury.

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The ‘Anti-Sicilians’ have invariably been a popular choice at all levels of the game. Analysis of this opening in previous literature has rarely been extensive due to the misconception that Anti-Sicilians are simplistic and thus, easy to play ‘by hand’. While maintaining the ideals of straightforward plans and digestible variations, this series of volumes will attempt to integrate ‘Anti-Sicilians’ into mainstream theory – with a particular focus on negating Black’s attempts to achieve any significant activity. This first volume provides significant coverage of the Rossolimo variation – perhaps the most pertinent example of how an ‘Anti-Sicilian’ has emerged to become arguably even more popular than its counterpart, 3.d4 after 2…Nc6. With a particular emphasis on analysing multiple alternatives within each critical variation, this book should appeal to anyone wishing to update and expand their knowledge and understanding of the fashionable Rossolimo.

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Following the death of Elizabeth Siddal in 1862 and his settling in Chelsea, Rossetti entered on a period of his life -- charted in volume 3 -- that was marked by renewed activity as a painter and increased financial prosperity.The years 1868-1870 covered by volume 4 culminate in his return to writing poetry and the publication in June 1870 of his long-anticipated and widely-read Poems. However, despite the satisfaction that he could take from his standing as a painter and from the fact that he was about to establish himself as a poet, 1868-1870 were troubled years for Rossetti. Problems with his eyesight led him to give up painting for long periods, and to fear that, like his father before him, he would end his days blind. He consulted Sir William Bowman and other leading ophthalmologists, who eased his mind sufficiently for him to return to his easel. This was also the time when he declared his lovefor Jane Morris, the wife of his long-time friend and admirer William Morris. In his long, moving letters to Janey we come face to face with the satisfactions and frustrations of their relationship. The letters to Janey provide acontext for understanding the many paintings and drawings from this period for which she was the model, and for gauging the biographical origins of the sonnets, written at this time for the sequence, The House of Life, an early version of which was included in Poems.Probably the most rewarding letters in the volume concern the preparation of Poems. The letters deal at length with Rossetti's decision to have his poems typeset for distribution to friends,the exhumation of Elizabeth Siddal's coffin to recover the manuscript of his poems, his obsessive care over the physical appearance of the volume, especially the binding , and his efforts at "working the oracle," William Bell Scott's description of his methodically lining up sympathetic reviewers.As with all of Rossetti's correspondence, the letters in volume 4 are replete with pointed and sometimes humorous commentary on an array of people and events,ranging from Edward Burne-Jones's affair with "the Greek damzel," Mary Zambaco, and Frederick Sandys's appropriation of subjects from his pictures, to his unease over Swinburne's uncontrollable drunkenness, and his ominous hatredof Robert Buchanan, the author of the "Fleshly School" attack on his poetry in the Contemporary Review of October 1871, which became a major cause of the disastrous events of the years 1871-1872.

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Born in 1830, Christina Rossetti began composing verse at the age of eleven and continued to write for the remaining fifty-three years of her life. Her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, himself a poet and painter, soon recognised her genius and urged her to publish her poems. By the time of her death in 1894, Christina had written more than eleven hundred poems and had published over nine hundred of them. Although she is regarded as the greatest woman poet of the Victorian period, there has not been until now and authoritative edition of her poetry.In this second volume of the three-volume The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, R.W. Crump continues the editorial standards she established n Volume I, published in 1979. She gives the reader a comprehensive text with notes revealing Christina's process of composition and revision and her painstaking concern for the technical details of her work. The variant readings in the notes are taken from extant manuscripts, individual poems as published or privately printed before being incorporated into her published collections, and all the English and American editions of her poems through William Michael Rossetti's The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1904). A special feature of both Volumes I and II is a complete list of holographs and their locations.Volume II contains Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), A Pageant and Other Poems (1881), and Verses (1893), as well as the poems added to these volumes after their original publication. Volume III contains poems Christina published but did not include in any of her collections as well as poems that have not previously appeared in print.

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Following the death of Elizabeth Siddal in 1862 and his settling in Chelsea, Rossetti entered on a period of his life -- charted in volume 3 -- that was marked by renewed activity as a painter and increased financial prosperity.The years 1868-1870 covered by volume 4 culminate in his return to writing poetry and the publication in June 1870 of his long-anticipated and widely-read Poems. However, despite the satisfaction that he could take from his standing as a painter and from the fact that he was about to establish himself as a poet, 1868-1870 were troubled years for Rossetti. Problems with his eyesight led him to give up painting for long periods, and to fear that, like his father before him, he would end his days blind. He consulted Sir William Bowman and other leading ophthalmologists, who eased his mind sufficiently for him to return to his easel. This was also the time when he declared his lovefor Jane Morris, the wife of his long-time friend and admirer William Morris. In his long, moving letters to Janey we come face to face with the satisfactions and frustrations of their relationship. The letters to Janey provide acontext for understanding the many paintings and drawings from this period for which she was the model, and for gauging the biographical origins of the sonnets, written at this time for the sequence, The House of Life, an early version of which was included in Poems.Probably the most rewarding letters in the volume concern the preparation of Poems. The letters deal at length with Rossetti's decision to have his poems typeset for distribution to friends,the exhumation of Elizabeth Siddal's coffin to recover the manuscript of his poems, his obsessive care over the physical appearance of the volume, especially the binding , and his efforts at "working the oracle," William Bell Scott's description of his methodically lining up sympathetic reviewers.As with all of Rossetti's correspondence, the letters in volume 4 are replete with pointed and sometimes humorous commentary on an array of people and events, ranging from Edward Burne-Jones's affair with "the Greek damzel," Mary Zambaco, and Frederick Sandys's appropriation of subjects from his pictures, to his unease over Swinburne's uncontrollable drunkenness, and his ominous hatred of Robert Buchanan, the author of the "Fleshly School" attack on his poetry in the Contemporary Review of October 1871, which became a major cause of the disastrous events of the years 1871-1872.

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Born in 1830, Christina Rossetti began composing verse at the age of eleven and continued to write for the remaining fifty-three years of her life. By the time of her death in 1894, Christina had written more than eleven hundred poems and had published over nine hundred of them. Publication of Volume III of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti brings to a conclusion the first definitive, variorum edition of the poems of this greatest woman poet of the Victorian Age.R.W. Crump divides the final volume, containing the poems Christina did not include in her published collections of verse, into three main sections. In the first are those poems Christina published separately in anthologies, periodicals, or her own prose works, such as Commonplace, and Other Short Stories. The second group consists of privately printed poems, including, most notably, those from the 1847 Verses: Dedicated to Her Mother. The extant poems that Christina never published make up the third and by far largest section of Volume III. Crump's voluminous textual notes and appendixes give the variant readings and provide additional information on the poems.A special feature of Volume III is the incorporation of the texts of poems in the hitherto unknown 375-page Verses manuscript of 1893, a major discovery made since Volume II was published in 1986. Some of the material in the appendixes updates the first two volumes in light of this discovery.

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Television has long been a symbol of social and cultural decay, yet many in postwar Europe saw it as the medium with the greatest potential to help build a new society and create a new form of audiovisual art. Utopian Television examines works of the great filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Peter Watkins, and Jean-Luc Godard, all of whom looked to television as a promising new medium even while remaining critical of its existing practices.Utopian Television illustrates how each director imagined television’s improved or “utopian” version by drawing on elements that had come to characterize it by the early 1960s. Taking advantage of the public service model of Western European broadcasting, each used television to realize works that would never have been viable in the commercial cinema. All three directors likewise seized on television’s supposed affinity for information and its status as a “useful” medium, but attempted to join this utility with aesthetic experimentation, suggesting new ways to conceive of the relationship between aesthetics and information.As beautifully written as it is theoretically rigorous, Utopian Television turns to the writing of Fredric Jameson and Ernst Bloch in treating the three directors’ television experiments as enactments of “utopia as method.” In doing so it reveals the extent to which the medium inspired and shaped hopes not only of a better future but of better moving image art as well.

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More than an index to the nine volumes of letters, this volume is a concise guide to an entire cultural era seen through the lens of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Volume 10 of The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the first ever analytical and biographical index to all Rossetti's letters from 1835-82. It gives readers the widest possible contextual access to all names of persons, places, works of art, writings, movements, organizations and activities, both physical and intellectual, mentioned in these letters with their annotations and appendices. But this index, augmenting the partial ones in Vols2 and 5, is far more than a simple listing of names: it also serves as a subject index, providing mini-précis descriptions of the information detailed in the annotated letter texts. Subheadings within entries depend on the complexity of the subject and may include letters to/from (for recipients) and lists of artistic and literary works by Rossetti's correspondents, or predecessors such as Blake, Keats and Coleridge. It is a concise guide to an entire cultural era. Since Rossetti is the lens through which all other entries are filtered, his own entry is divided into multiple subheadings to facilitate easy access. The researcher can quickly locate all references to the sonnet sequence The House of Life, the various versions of the Proserpine picture or the complex relationship of his drug use to Rossetti's life and work.

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In the 15th century a new home was built for the priceless holy relics taken from Jerusalem centuries before - a building that, to the initiated, would explain everything about what had gone before and a structure that would be a recreation of the Herodian Temple on the Mount in Jerusalem. This is Rosslyn Chapel and here are its secrets.

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Genet…Beckett…Burroughs…Miller…Ionesco, Oe, Duras. Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Hubert Selby Jr. and John Rechy. The legendary film I Am Curious (Yellow). The books that assaulted the fort of propriety that was the United States in the 1950s and ’60s, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Tropic of Cancer. The Evergreen Review. Victorian “erotica.” The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A bombing, a sit-in, and a near-fistfight with Norman Mailer. The common thread between these disparate elements, a number of which reshaped modern culture, was Barney Rosset.Rosset was the antidote to the trope of the “gentleman publisher” personified by other pioneering figures of the industry such as Alfred A. Knopf, Bennett Cerf and James Laughlin. If Barney saw a crowd heading one way—he looked the other. If he knew something was forbidden, he regarded it as a plus. Unsurprisingly, financial ruin, along with the highs and lows of critical reception, marked his career. But his unswerving dedication to publishing what he wanted made him one of the most influential publishers ever.Rosset began work on his autobiography a decade before his death in 2012, and several publishers and a number of editors worked with him on the project. Now, at last, in his own words, we have a portrait of the man who reshaped how we think about language, literature—and sex. Here are the stories behind the filming of Norman Mailer’s Maidstone and Samuel Beckett’s Film; the battles with the US government over Tropic of Cancer and much else; the search for Che’s diaries; his romance with the expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, and more.At times appalling, more often inspiring, never boring or conventional: this is Barney Rosset, uncensored.Illustrated with black-and-white photographs; includes index

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When Isabella Rossellini and The Sundance Channel set out to make a series of short films for the internet about the sex lives of animals, they had no idea what was in store. The overwhelming success of the shorts led Sundance to commission a second "Green Porno" series which is to focus on marine animals: shrimp, squid seals etc. (The first series focused primarily on insects). Provocative, hilarious, and truly one of a kind, "Green Porno" is a great gift - for readers of Michael Pollan and fans of independent film alike. Isabella has committed to promoting the book at the time of publication.

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***50 MILLION TERRY BROOKS COPIES SOLD AROUND THE WORLD***THE SHANNARA CHRONICLES IS NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES'Terry's place is at the head of the fantasy world' Philip PullmanAs a Knight of the Word, John Ross has struggled against the tireless dark forces of the Void for twenty-five years. Ross is driven by dreams that show the world reduced to blood and ashes by the Void and its minions. But for all his power, John Ross is only one man, while the demons he battles are legion.Then Ross learns of the birth of a rare and dangerous creature formed from the very essence of wild magics. If he can discover its secret, the creature will be an invaluable weapon against the Void. But the Void also knows its value, and will not rest until the creature has been corrupted - or destroyed. Desperate, Ross turns to Nest Freemark, a young woman with magical abilities of her own. And there they prepare to face an evil more ancient and powerful than anything they have ever encountered.Praise for Terry Brooks:'A master of the craft . . . required reading' Brent Weeks'I can't even begin to count how many of Terry Brooks's books I've read (and re-read) over the years' Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind'I would not be writing epic fantasy today if not for Shannara' Peter V. Brett, author of The Painted Man'If you haven't read Terry Brooks, you haven't read fantasy' Christopher Paolini, author of EragonThe Word and the Void:RUNNING WITH THE DEMONA KNIGHT OF THE WORDANGEL FIRE EAST

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In the Bleak Midwinter explores the power of Advent and the joy of Christmas through the poetry of Christina Rossetti. Best known for her poems-turned-carols In the Bleak Midwinter and Love Came Down at Christmas, Rossetti’s rich and wondrous faith provides an inspiring seasonal companion. For each day from Advent Sunday to the Epiphany, Rachel Mann selects a poem and reflects on it, drawing on Rossetti’s many other writings including her devotional journals and commentary on biblical narratives. At a time when commercial pressures are at their most intense, this volume aims to lead readers to an encounter with God’s time and space, to find our true identity beyond all that would limit and diminish our humanity.

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The Pre-Raphaelite Movement began in 1848, and experienced its heyday in the 1860s and 1870s. Influenced by the then little-known Keats and Blake, as well as Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge, Pre-Raphaelite poetry 'etherialized sensation' (in the words of Antony Harrison), and popularized the notion ofl'art pour l'art - art for art's sake. Where Victorian realist novels explored the grit and grime of the Industrial Revolution, Pre-Raphaelite poems concentrated on more abstract themes of romantic love, artistic inspiration and sexuality. Later they attracted Aesthetes and Decadents like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson, not to mention Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.B. Yeats.

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In this enthralling historical thriller set in post-World War II London, detective John Henry Rossett must stop a murderous ex-SS officer as the German occupation of England begins to falter. Working with the SS in German-occupied Britain was never easy for John Rossett. Though he's returned to his former job, the police inspector has been tainted by his Nazi associations. His suspicious colleagues see him as a collaborator, and he's unwelcome at his old haunts. But the Germans aren't done with Rossett. When decorated SS Captain Karl Bauer kills the US consul in Liverpool, then goes on the run, Generalmajor Neumann orders Rossett to find the missing killer-a swift, cunning, and ruthless man known as "the Bear." While the Nazis still maintain control over London, Liverpool is run by criminal networks and the British resistance. A wasteland of burned-out buildings and mountains of rubble, the northern port city is the perfect place for a clever warrior like Bauer to hide. Neumann and Rossett's search also turns up damning new information: Bauer's superior, Major Theo Dannecker, has been colluding with the US consul and the British resistance to smuggle large amounts of gold out of the country. As for the Bear, the fervent SS officer has repudiated his allegiance to the crumbling Reich and is now focused on destroying Rossett, the famed "British Lion," one innocent victim at a time. To prevent more deaths and protect Britain, Rossett must trap the Bear and uncover a diabolical conspiracy that has brought Nazi officers and the British resistance together.

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A revolutionary figure throughout his career, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s work provides a distinctly revolutionary lens through which the Victorian period can be viewed. Suggesting that Rossetti’s work should be approached through his poetry, Brian Donnelly argues that it is both inscribed by and inscribes the development of verbal as well as visual culture in the Victorian era. In his discussions of modernity, aestheticism, and material culture, he identifies Rossetti as a central figure who helped define the terms through which we approach the cultural productions of this period. Donnelly begins by articulating a method for reading Rossetti’s poetry that highlights the intertextual relations within and between the poetry and paintings. His interpretations of such poems as the 'Mary’s Girlhood' sonnets, the sonnet sequence The House of Life, and 'The Orchard-Pit' in relationship to paintings such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini! shed light on Victorian ideals of femininity, on consumer culture, and on the role of gender hierarchies in Victorian culture. Situating Rossetti’s poetry as the key to all of his work, Donnelly also makes a case for its centrality in its representation of the dominant discourses of the late Victorian period: faith, sex, consumption, death, and the nature of representation itself.

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The first cohesive Faust narrative in facsimile form, German transcription, and (first-ever) English translation, plus a history of Faust illustrations and an assessment of Faust's historicity. The Faust legend, which has come down to us most famously in Goethe's tragedy but also in countless other incarnations since the late sixteenth century, was first collected and presented as a cohesive narrative (in manuscript) byChristoph Rosshirt during the 1570s. Rosshirt was also the first to provide illustrations of Faust, hand-colored by Rosshirt himself. This book offers a critical edition of Rosshirt's six tales, including an introductory chapter,a facsimile of the manuscript, a transcription and first-ever English translation on facing pages, as well as a history of Faust illustrations, with Rosshirt's own illustrations and other examples up through Delacroix, the most complete survey of such illustrations to date. A final chapter rounds out the study with an assessment of Rosshirt's significance for the Faust tradition, a review of the evidence for a historical Faust, and a rejection of his historicity (because it is unprovable) in favor of his existence only in his story - a story Rosshirt helped to tell - and in our imaginations that animate that story. J. M. van der Laan is Professor Emeritus of German at Illinois State University.

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In the early 1800s, Rossini’s operas permeated Italian culture, from the opera house to myriad arrangements heard in public and private. But after Rossini stopped composing new works there was a sharp decline in popularity that drove most of his works out of the repertory. In the past half century, they have made a spectacular return to operatic stages worldwide, but this newly found fame has not been accompanied by a comparable critical reevaluation. Emanuele Senici’s new book provides a fresh look at the motives behind the Rossinian furore and its aftermath by placing his works into the culture and society in which they were conceived, performed, seen, heard, and discussed. The book does so by situating the operas firmly in the context of the social practices, cultural formations, ideological currents, and political events of nineteenth-century Italy, revealing how Rossini’s dramaturgy emerges as a radically new and specifically Italian reaction to the epoch-making changes witnessed in Europe at the time. The first book-length study of Rossini’s Italian operas to appear in English, Music in the Present Tense opens up new ways to explore nineteenth-century music and addresses crucial issues in the history of modernity such as trauma, repetition, and the healing power of theatricality.

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