As the smoky dark sweeps across the capital, strange stories emerge from the night. A seance reveals a ghastly secret in the murk of Regent's Canal. From south of the Thames come chilling reports of a spring-heeled spectre, and in Stoke Newington rumours abound of an opening to another world among the quiet alleys.Join Elizabeth Dearnley on this atmospheric tour through a shadowy London, a city which has long inspired writers of the weird and uncanny. Waiting in the hazy streets are eerie tales from Charlotte Riddell, Lettice Galbraith and Violet Hunt, along with haunting pieces by Virginia Woolf, Arthur Machen, Sam Selvon and many more.

'The sleeping wood had wakened. Her pearl teeth crashed against his with the sound of cymbals and her warm, fragrant breath blew around him like an Italian gale.'Dolls, mannequins, humanoid toys and dummies are the quintessential symbols of the uncanny, referenced by Freud in his foundational essay on the phenomenon of the familiar-turned-unsettling, and remaining a terrifying recurring menace of horror media today.In this new collection, Elizabeth Dearnley revives a sinister troupe of uncannily animated figures from tales across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by authors including E T A Hoffmann, Angela Carter, Vernon Lee, Algernon Blackwood and Rosemary Timperley.Terror and nightmares await when the doors of the doll house swing open and its denizens come out to play.

The stars gave light enough for me to discern the figure as that of a man, but I could scarcely discover more. “Dark night, this,” I said. “Darker below,” he muttered, as though to himself; “darker, darker, darker.”Yorkshire: a land entwined with a distinctive tradition of uncanny literature and folklore, home to twilit towns thronging with restless ghosts, woods alive with the whispers of fairies and vast moorlands stalked by boggarts and barghests after dark.Exploring Yorkshire’s position as a heartland of British supernatural fiction, the stories and poems gathered here trace its weird literary heritage from medieval tales of shapeshifting spirits to the Gothic worlds of the Brontë sisters, and from wartime hauntings to modern folk horror. Including local legends from rare sources and unsettling stories from Arthur Machen, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Andrew Michael Hurley and many more, this collection offers glimpses of a stranger England hidden among the shadows of the dales.

No matter where you are, you're never far from a door to the Otherworld ...From the bloodthirsty baobhan sith of the Scottish Highlands to the mischievous trasgu creeping beneath your floorboards, the world is teeming with hidden, magical beings. The Fairy Spotter's Guide is your essential companion for navigating the world of the uncanny. Journey across continents and cultures as you uncover the origins - both real and mythological - of 80 extraordinary folk creatures, from mermaids and bigfoot to shapeshifters and spectral hounds.Packed with over 100 original, spellbinding illustrations and written by a leading expert in fairy tales and folklore, this is no ordinary field guide. Whether you're a seasoned cryptid hunter or a curious newcomer, this beautifully crafted book will enchant, unnerve and utterly captivate.Watch your step. Not all fairies are friendly.

No matter where you are, you're never far from a door to the Otherworld ...From the bloodthirsty baobhan sith of the Scottish Highlands to the mischievous trasgu creeping beneath your floorboards, the world is teeming with hidden, magical beings. The Fairy Spotter's Guide is your essential companion for navigating the world of the uncanny. Journey across continents and cultures as you uncover the origins - both real and mythological - of 80 extraordinary folk creatures, from mermaids and bigfoot to shapeshifters and spectral hounds.Packed with over 80 original, spellbinding illustrations and written by a leading expert in fairy tales and folklore, this is no ordinary field guide. Whether you're a seasoned cryptid hunter or a curious newcomer, this beautifully crafted book will enchant, unnerve and utterly captivate.Watch your step. Not all fairies are friendly.

An examination of French to English translation in medieval England, through the genre of the prologue.The prologue to Layamon's Brut recounts its author's extensive travels "wide yond thas leode" (far and wide across the land) to gather the French, Latin and English books he used as source material. The first Middle English writer to discuss his methods of translating French into English, Layamon voices ideas about the creation of a new English tradition by translation that proved very durable.This book considers the practice of translation from French into English in medieval England, and how the translators themselves viewed their task. At its core is a corpus of French to English translations containing translator's prologues written between c.1189 and c.1450; this remarkable body of Middle English literary theory provides a useful map by which to chart the movement from a literary culture rooted in Anglo-Norman at the end of the thirteenth century to what, in the fifteenth, is regarded as an established "English" tradition. Considering earlier Romance and Germanic models of translation, wider historical evidence about translation practice, the acquisition of French, the possible role of women translators, and the manuscript tradition of prologues, in addition to offering a broader, pan-European perspective through an examination of Middle Dutch prologues, the book uses translators' prologues as a lens through which to view a period of critical growth and development for English as a literary language.Elizabeth Dearnley gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge.

As the smoky dark sweeps across the capital, strange stories emerge from the night. A seance reveals a ghastly secret in the murk of Regent's Canal. From south of the Thames come chilling reports of a spring-heeled spectre, and in Stoke Newington rumours abound of an opening to another world among the quiet alleys.Join Elizabeth Dearnley on this atmospheric tour through a shadowy London, a city which has long inspired writers of the weird and uncanny. Waiting in the hazy streets are eerie tales from Charlotte Riddell, Lettice Galbraith and Violet Hunt, along with haunting pieces by Virginia Woolf, Arthur Machen, Sam Selvon and many more.

'The sleeping wood had wakened. Her pearl teeth crashed against his with the sound of cymbals and her warm, fragrant breath blew around him like an Italian gale.'Dolls, mannequins, humanoid toys and dummies are the quintessential symbols of the uncanny, referenced by Freud in his foundational essay on the phenomenon of the familiar-turned-unsettling, and remaining a terrifying recurring menace of horror media today.In this new collection, Elizabeth Dearnley revives a sinister troupe of uncannily animated figures from tales across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by authors including E T A Hoffmann, Angela Carter, Vernon Lee, Algernon Blackwood and Rosemary Timperley.Terror and nightmares await when the doors of the doll house swing open and its denizens come out to play.

The stars gave light enough for me to discern the figure as that of a man, but I could scarcely discover more. “Dark night, this,” I said. “Darker below,” he muttered, as though to himself; “darker, darker, darker.”Yorkshire: a land entwined with a distinctive tradition of uncanny literature and folklore, home to twilit towns thronging with restless ghosts, woods alive with the whispers of fairies and vast moorlands stalked by boggarts and barghests after dark.Exploring Yorkshire’s position as a heartland of British supernatural fiction, the stories and poems gathered here trace its weird literary heritage from medieval tales of shapeshifting spirits to the Gothic worlds of the Brontë sisters, and from wartime hauntings to modern folk horror. Including local legends from rare sources and unsettling stories from Arthur Machen, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Andrew Michael Hurley and many more, this collection offers glimpses of a stranger England hidden among the shadows of the dales.

No matter where you are, you're never far from a door to the Otherworld ...From the bloodthirsty baobhan sith of the Scottish Highlands to the mischievous trasgu creeping beneath your floorboards, the world is teeming with hidden, magical beings. The Fairy Spotter's Guide is your essential companion for navigating the world of the uncanny. Journey across continents and cultures as you uncover the origins - both real and mythological - of 80 extraordinary folk creatures, from mermaids and bigfoot to shapeshifters and spectral hounds.Packed with over 100 original, spellbinding illustrations and written by a leading expert in fairy tales and folklore, this is no ordinary field guide. Whether you're a seasoned cryptid hunter or a curious newcomer, this beautifully crafted book will enchant, unnerve and utterly captivate.Watch your step. Not all fairies are friendly.

No matter where you are, you're never far from a door to the Otherworld ...From the bloodthirsty baobhan sith of the Scottish Highlands to the mischievous trasgu creeping beneath your floorboards, the world is teeming with hidden, magical beings. The Fairy Spotter's Guide is your essential companion for navigating the world of the uncanny. Journey across continents and cultures as you uncover the origins - both real and mythological - of 80 extraordinary folk creatures, from mermaids and bigfoot to shapeshifters and spectral hounds.Packed with over 80 original, spellbinding illustrations and written by a leading expert in fairy tales and folklore, this is no ordinary field guide. Whether you're a seasoned cryptid hunter or a curious newcomer, this beautifully crafted book will enchant, unnerve and utterly captivate.Watch your step. Not all fairies are friendly.

An examination of French to English translation in medieval England, through the genre of the prologue.The prologue to Layamon's Brut recounts its author's extensive travels "wide yond thas leode" (far and wide across the land) to gather the French, Latin and English books he used as source material. The first Middle English writer to discuss his methods of translating French into English, Layamon voices ideas about the creation of a new English tradition by translation that proved very durable.This book considers the practice of translation from French into English in medieval England, and how the translators themselves viewed their task. At its core is a corpus of French to English translations containing translator's prologues written between c.1189 and c.1450; this remarkable body of Middle English literary theory provides a useful map by which to chart the movement from a literary culture rooted in Anglo-Norman at the end of the thirteenth century to what, in the fifteenth, is regarded as an established "English" tradition. Considering earlier Romance and Germanic models of translation, wider historical evidence about translation practice, the acquisition of French, the possible role of women translators, and the manuscript tradition of prologues, in addition to offering a broader, pan-European perspective through an examination of Middle Dutch prologues, the book uses translators' prologues as a lens through which to view a period of critical growth and development for English as a literary language.Elizabeth Dearnley gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge.