Byron is rarely thought of as a spiritual writer. However, as this bold new collection shows, this is the result of an impoverished notion of the ‘spiritual’ and a reflection of biased priorities in Romantic studies. Reflecting on the poet’s claim that ‘immaterialism’s a serious matter’, this interdisciplinary collection of essays, from British and American scholars, calls into question the prevailing ‘materialist’ consensus, and offers a fresh and theoretically inflected reading of Byron’s poetry. Byron’s Ghosts is the first book-length examination of spectrality in Byron’s work. It is on the one hand concerned with what Mary Shelley in her essay ‘On Ghosts’ refers to as ‘the true old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghost’, though it is also a postmodern response to the ‘spectral turn’ in critical theory, which brings into view a range of phantom effects and ‘non-Gothic’ spectres. Focusing attention on these diverse modalities of the ghostly, the specially assembled essays complicate the popular image of Byron as a sceptical or ‘anti-Romantic’ poet and reveal a great deal about his work that could not be uncovered in any other way.

Mexico, 1940. Leon Trotsky, a key charismatic figure in the 1917 Russian Revolution, lives in exile in Mexico after losing power to Josef Stalin in 1924. He resides in a comfortable, fortified villa in Coyoacán in relative peace-until an agent of Stalin assassinates him. Los Angeles, 1990. Fifty years later, Trotsky's memory remains alive for six Americans who lived with him at the time of his death. Now they've gathered together to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. Though they have aged and their bodies no longer have the energy they once possessed, they still passionately believe in Trotsky's cause. For former lovers Byron Lerner and Verna Swartz, the past collides with the present as long-dormant emotions erupt between them, leading them down a road of painful memories. And for the entire group, their brief reunion will uncover betrayal, lies, and secrets so devastating that their perception of history will forever be altered. Rich with historic detail, The Ghost of Leon Trotsky is a brilliant examination of how six people come to terms with their individual and collective pasts and presents.

Haunting’s consequences for the literary imagination. Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language, formations, and sensations, defining an apparitional poetics in the finely grained textures of writing and their effects on present reading. Framed by an introductory chapter on writing and apparition and an afterword on haunted reading, the book includes chapters of sustained, revelatory close attention to the particular, often peculiar, literary imaginations of William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, W. B. Yeats, and John Keats. Wolfson also explores the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a self-confessed Ghost-Theorist), Mary Shelley, and other writers of the Long Romantic era, canonical as well as less familiar. All are encountered in freshly pointed ways on an arc of investigation that builds with generative force. Romantic Shades and Shadows is written with a lucidity, wit, and accessibility that will appeal to general readers, and with a critical sophistication and scholarly expertise that will engage advanced students, critics, and professional peers.

The requisite guide to Blake's ideas and symbols

Biofictions sets out to explore this renewed interest in Romantic artist-figures in the context of the current renaissance of "life-writing."

Explores how the Romantic period gave birth to a seductive cognitive cultural program that retains far reaching implications for contemporary views on individuality and relationships between the individual and larger groups of identification. Established

Contextualizes and annotates the influential, scandalous, and entertaining texts which appeared in the Blackwood's Magazine between 1817 and 1825. This title features a detailed general introduction, volume introductions and endnotes, providing the reader with an understanding of the origins and early history of Blackwood's Magazine.

In almost every town in America there are places where strange things happen. The perfect companion to The International Directory of Haunted Places, this revised and updated edition of Haunted Places is both a fascinating and unusual travel guide as well as an indispensable casebook for those interested in the paranormal. From buildings and parks believed to have resident ghosts and poltergeists to areas where Bigfoot or UFO sightings are most frequently reported, Haunted Places will lead you to more than 2,000 sites of paranormal activity across the United States. Organized alphabetically by state, each entry is referenced to an extensive bibliography of sources-with descriptions, addresses, phone numbers, Web sites, and travel directions provided for all locations.