A Looking Glass Tragedy

The story behind a sensational historical controversy

From the fictional world of vampires, zombies, and invaders from other worlds, to the very real world of revolutionary France and in between, the nature of the monster encompasses the very quality that makes them so believable - that which we perceive as 'other'. While there is a commonality in this otherness, the monster lurking in the shadows, concealed in darkness or conjured with a few lines from a horror novel suggests the monster as one onto which we are free to project the most distorted and un-human features. In each chapter of this volume, you will discover that the way in which we project what is monstrous is not a singular other but is in fact a part of our own self-identity. The greatest horror of the monster is not that it stands apart, but that once we pull it from the shadow of our own projected imagination we discover that that the monster we fear is also bound to our own mirror image. To look at the monster, to name that which must never be named, is to look upon a reflection and embrace a part of our nature we do not wish to see.

Situated within contemporary posthumanism, this volume offers theoretical and practical approaches to materiality in Greek tragedy. Established and emerging scholars explore how works of the three major Greek tragedians problematize objects and affect, providing fresh readings of some of the masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The so-called new materialisms have complemented the study of objects as signifiers or symbols with an interest in their agency and vitality, their sensuous force and psychosomatic impact-and conversely their resistance and irreducible aloofness. At the same time, emotion has been recast as material "affect,†? an intense flow of energies between bodies, animate and inanimate. Powerfully contributing to the current critical debate on materiality, the essays collected here destabilize established interpretations, suggesting alternative approaches and pointing toward a newly robust sense of the physicality of Greek tragedy.

Over the six decades it remained in print in Tudor and Stuart England, William Baldwin's collection of tragic verse narratives A Mirror for Magistrates captivated readers and led numerous poets and playwrights to create their own Mirror-inspired works on the fallen figures of England's past. This modernized and annotated edition of Baldwin's collection - the first such edition ever published - provides modern readers with a clear and easily accessible text of the work. It also provides much-needed scholarly elucidations of its contents and glosses of its most difficult lines and unfamiliar words. The volume permits students of early modern literature and history to view Baldwin's work in a new light, allowing them to re-assess its contents and its poems' appeal to several generations of early modern readers and authors, including William Shakespeare, Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel.

In "The Lovely Bones," the spirit of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon describes her murder and her family's efforts to find the killer; and in "Looking Glass," Susie's story is integrated with cases of actual missing children.

A much darker look into the Alice's fantasy world beyond the Looking Glass. After Alice returns from her adventure, she becomes deathly ill and finds herself in the constant care of her older sister, Lorina. Believing the cause her ailing symptoms to originate from Wonderland, Alice implores Lorina to venture to the world beyond the Looking Glass. Contrary to the childish descriptions of her sister, Lorina discovers a realm of horror; full of nightmarish monsters and ruled by a malicious Sorcerer.

Shakespeare's idiom is an aggregate of archaic modes of speech and codes of conduct. This book attempts to make that idiom more accessible and, in the process, to illuminate the significance of heroic concepts to a study of Shakespeare's tragedies and histories.