The Popular Press – förlag

In this volume, almost two dozen essays consider political, moral and technological issues raised by the film.

Carol A. Senf traces the vampire's evolution from folklore to twentieth-century popular culture and explains why this creature became such an important metaphor in Victorian England. This bloodsucker who had stalked the folklore of almost every culture became the property of serious artists and thinkers in Victorian England, including Charlotte and Emily BrontË, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. People who did not believe in the existence of vampires nonetheless saw numerous metaphoric possibilities in a creature from the past that exerted pressure on the present and was often threatening because of its sexuality.

A short history of Dame Agatha's life, criticism of her works, and a summary of how critics and reviewers view her work. This book includes a bibliography of all the works of Christie published in either Great Britain or the United States, classified according to the detectives involved; an alphabetical list of Christie detective and mystery book and short-story titles; a short-story finder for Christie collections; and an index of all but the least important of the thousands of characters introduced by the author in the detective and mystery short stories and novels.

Examines the broad and far-ranging sympathies of this versatile and least parochial of contemporary American writers.

This study is the first critical biography in English of Sholem Asch, who did little in his lifetime to make such a task an easy one. Asch was not a "tidy" writer. He lived in many cities and countries, wrote tirelessly, and kept little record of his numerous novels, stories, and essays—much less of the countless Yiddish, Hebrew, and European periodicals and newspapers (most of them now long defunct), or editions and translations, in which his writings appeared.

This study of the technique of Agatha Christie's detective fiction - sixty-seven novels and more than one hundred short stories - is the first extensive analysis of her accomplishments as a writer. Bargainnier demonstrates that Christie thoroughly understood the conventions of her genre and, with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, was able to develop for more than fifty years surprising variations within those conventions.

George Armstrong Custer rode at the head of his cavalry command where he made instantaneous decisions, most of which resulted in victory during the Civil War. The older officers over whom he had jumped in rank soon displayed their animosity. From them, and many others, a series of charges against him were circulated; from these grew the innumerable Custer legends. This volume includes many interesting and unusual Custer legends, which include the alleged fathering of Monahseetah's Indian son; the Annie Jones story buried in the National Archives; Custer's capture of Lee's supply trains at Appomattox Court House that caused Lee to surrender—and much more.

It is to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes, wrote Arthur Conan Doyle to his former professor and mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell, in 1892. A distinguished physician and professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, and a forensic expert for the British Crown, Joseph Bell was well known for his remarkable powers of observation and deduction. In what would become true Sherlockian fashion, he had the ability to deduce facts about his patients from otherwise unremarkable details. In one instance recounted by Arthur Conan Doyle himself - and similar to Sherlock Holmes' own observations in ""The Greek Interpreter"" - Bell took little time to determine that one of his patients had recently served in the army, a non-commissioned officer discharged from his Highland regiment stationed in Barbados: ""The man was a respectful man, but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantitis, which is West Indian and not British."" Based on extensive research into the life of Bell and including tantalizing accounts of the connections between Bell and Conan Doyle, this biography is required reading for anyone interested in Victorian medicine, in the history of detective fiction, and in Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Joseph Bell's relationship to Arthur Conan Doyle was the subject of the television production ""Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes"", originally aired in the United Kingdom in 2000 and on BBC America.