In the seventeenth century the ancient hope for the physical resurrection of the body and its flesh began an unexpected second life as critical theory, challenging the notion of an autonomous self and driving early modern avant-garde poetry. As an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology transformed the ancient hope for the resurrection of the flesh into the fantasy of a soul or mind living on separately from any body, literature complicated the terms of the debate. Such poets as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson picked up the discarded idea of the resurrection of the flesh and bent it from an apocalyptic future into the here and now to imagine the self already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the resurrection body. Fate of the Flesh explores what happens when seventeenth-century poets posit a resurrection body within the historical person. These poets see the resurrection body as the precondition for the social person’s identities and forms of agency and yet as deeply other to all such identities and agencies, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. This perspective leads seventeenth-century poets to a compelling awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to re-imagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in its light. By developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materiality within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They frame their poems neither as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers assembled around a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Fate and Forever is the fourth title in the A Pound of Flesh series from fan-fiction superstar Sophie Jackson. Fans of Samantha Young, Jodi Ellen Malpas, Jamie McGuire, Katy Evans and Prison Break will find Sophie Jackson's powerful love stories utterly addictive and unforgettable. Tutor and prison student - their love was forbidden but their attraction was impossible to deny. And now Kat Lane is excitedly planning her wedding to the brooding, dangerously tempting love of her life, Wes Carter. Kat and Carter couldn't be happier to be man and wife and start their life together - but it's not long before they realise married life isn't all plain-sailing. Everywhere they turn, couples are becoming parents, and the longing in Kat's eyes worries Carter. After his rough childhood, he's not so sure he has what it takes to be a good parent. But fate has brought Kat and Carter together - can their love survive forever? Loyalty, redemption and all-consuming love against the odds. Check out the whole A Pound of Flesh series: A Pound of Flesh, Love and Always, An Ounce of Hope, Fate and Forever and A Measure of Love.

It is nearly eleven years since Alan Sydney left England, but I have only recently been released from my promise of secrecy. So sacred to me is the memory of our friendship, that, even now, I shrink from the task of narrating his strange and curious history. A strong impulse, however, urges me to break silence. The village of Anstead, near which we both lived, is in Surrey, possibly the best county in England to find mixed society. Here the old-fashioned farmers, the labourers who have never travelled as far as London, and a few country squires are mingled with, and influenced by, retired London shopkeepers, merchant princes--with or without H's--and a sprinkling of literary and scientific dabblers; these last are regarded with suspicion by all, but especially by the retired Army and Navy magnates.