T. J. Lustig - Böcker

A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead. Like the other tales collected here - `Sir Edmund Orme', `Owen Wingrave', and `The Friends of the Friends' - `The Turn of the Screw' is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem? Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave, or victims of the governess's `infernal imagination', which torments but also entrals her? `The Turn of the Screw' is probably the most famous, certainly the most eerily equivocal, of all ghostly tales. Is it a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply, `the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read'? The texts are those of the New York Edition, with a new Introduction and Notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Ghosts - dead and yet alive, absent and yet present - are able to cross the borders of experience; in literature their evocation has been enduringly important. In Henry James and the Ghostly Dr Lustig explores the ghost stories that James produced throughout his career and relates them to the great dynamic forces which may well represent James's most original contribution to literature. The centrepiece of the book is a detailed analysis of James's classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, set in the context of work by earlier Victorian writers, and developments in James's own treatment of the ghostly. Dr Lustig evaluates the ghostly charge attached to the many scenes in James's novels and tales which turn on thresholds, perspectives, windows and doors, and the many moments when James's characters seem almost to encounter the margins of the texts which enclose them.

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. One of James's strangest works, The Sacred Fount, explores ideas of sexual desire and power in an English country house setting. The novel aroused considerable critical bewilderment and hostility on its original publication in 1901 but was retrieved by a subsequent generation of critics who found its ambiguity and stylistic elaboration an instance of James's 'mastery' and an early example of literary modernism. This is the first critical edition of James' landmark text and is supported by a full critical apparatus including introduction, notes, glossary, textual variants and bibliography. The volume will be of interest to researchers, scholars and advanced students of Henry James, and of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American fiction and literature.