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When the networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden on Saturday, November 7, 2020, people from coast to coast exhaled—and danced in the streets. This quick-turnaround volume, a collection of 38 personal essays from writers all over the country—“many of America's most thoughtful voices,” as Jon Meacham puts it on the back cover—captures the week Trump was voted out, a unique juncture in American life, and helps point toward a way forward to a nation less divided. An eclectic lineup of contributors—from Rosanna Arquette to Anthony Scaramucci—puts a year of transition into perspective, and summons the anxieties and hopes so many have for better times ahead. As award-winning columnist Mary C. Curtis writes in the lead essay, “Saying you're not interested in politics is dangerous because, like it or not, politics is interested in you.” Novelist Christopher Buckley, a former speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, laments, “The Republican Senate, with one exception, has become a stay of ovine, lickspittle quislings, degenerate descendants of such giants as Everett Dirksen, Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker and John McCain.” Nero Award-winning mystery novelist Stephen Mack Jones writes, to Donald Trump, “Remember: You live in my house. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is my house. My ancestors built it at a cost of blood, soul and labor. I pay my taxes every year to feed you, clothe you and your family and staff and fly you around the country and the world in my tricked-out private jet. If you violate any aspect of your four-year lease—any aspect—Lord Jesus so help me, I will do everything in my power to kick yo narrow ass to the curb.” As Publisher Steve Kettmann writes in the Introduction: “The hope is that in putting out these glimpses so quickly, giving them an immediacy unusual in book publishing, we can help in the mourning for all that has been lost, help in the healing (of ourselves and of our country), and help in the pained effort, like moving limbs that have gone numb from inactivity, to give new life to our democracy. We stared into the abyss, tottered on the edge, and a record-setting surge of voting and activism delivered us from the very real threat of plunging into autocracy.”

Critical Religious Education in Practice serves as an accessible handbook to help teachers put Critical Religious Education (CRE) into practice. The book offers straightforward guidance, unpicking some of the key difficulties that teachers encounter when implementing this high-profile pedagogical approach.In-depth explanations of CRE pedagogy, accompanied by detailed lesson plans and activities, will give teachers the confidence they need to inspire debate in the classroom, tackling issues as controversial as the authority of the Qur'an and the relationship between science and religion. The lesson plans and schemes of work exemplify CRE in practice and are aimed at empowering teachers to implement CRE pedagogy across their curriculum. Additional chapters cover essential issues such as differentiation, assessment, the importance of subject knowledge and tips for tackling tricky topics. The accompanying resources, including PowerPoint presentations and worksheets, are available via the book's companion website.Key to developing a positive classroom culture and promoting constructive attitudes towards Religious Education, this text is essential reading for all practising and future teachers of Religious Education in secondary schools.

Mary Shelley reappraises the significance of Frankenstein alongside other works by Shelley which could be considered to revise the significance and fluctuating meanings of ‘Gothic'during the Romantic period. It offers scholarly, fresh readings of the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein, as well as chapters upon the fiction that Shelley composed in between both editions, and during the same decade as its second edition. In its broader examination of Mary Shelley's work, this study is the first of its kind within the field of Gothic studies. Alongside sustained explorations of Frankenstein, Matilda, Valperga and The Last Man, the volume Mary Shelley reappraises some of the shorter essays and tales that the author composed for contemporary magazines. Angela Wright argues that the time is now right for a re-examination of the extent to which Shelley participated in and redirected the Gothic tradition.

Though once conceived of as mutually exclusive categories, Romanticism and the Gothic share a long and complex history of reaction and interaction, avowal and disavowal, influence and exchange. Extending recent critical interrogations of the Gothic / Romantic divide, this collection of essays provides a thorough overview of the manifestly Gothic impulses in Romantic-era literary culture, from the graveyard verse of the 1740s, through the heady politics of the later eighteenth century, and into the writings of the second-generation Romantic poets. Divided into three sections †“ Gothic Modes and Forms'; ‘National and International Borders'; and ‘Reading the Romantic Gothic'†'the volume comprises 18 original essays and a detailed introductory essay by an international cast of new and established scholars in the field. As much an introduction to Gothic writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as it is a contribution to scholarly debates concerning the relationship between the Gothic and the Romantic, Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion is an indispensable resource for both students and scholars of British, American and European literary culture in the period 1740†'1830.

This book offers unique and fresh perspectives upon the literary productions of one of the most highly remunerated and widely admired authors of the Romantic period, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823). While drawing upon, consolidating and enriching the critical impulses reflected in Radcliffe scholarship to date, this collection of essays, composed by a range of renowned scholars of the Romantic period, also foregrounds the hitherto neglected aspects of the author's work. Radcliffe's relations to Romantic-era travel writing; the complex political ideologies that lie behind her historiographic endeavours; her poetry and its relation to institutionalised forms of Romanticism; and her literary connections to eighteenth-century women's writing are all examined in this collection. Offering fresh considerations of the well-known Gothic fictions and extending the appreciation of Radcliffe in new critical directions, the collection reappraises Radcliffe's full oeuvre within the wider literary and political contexts of her time.

In describing his proto-Gothic fiction, The Castle of Otranto (1764), as a translation, Horace Walpole was deliberately playing on national anxieties concerning the importation of war, fashion and literature from France in the aftermath of the Seven Years'War. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Britain went to war again with France, this time in the wake of revolution, the continuing connections between Gothic literature and France through the realms of translation, adaptation and unacknowledged borrowing led to strong suspicions of Gothic literature taking on a subversive role in diminishing British patriotism. Angela Wright explores the development of Gothic literature in Britain in the context of the fraught relationship between Britain and France, offering fresh perspectives on the works of Walpole, Radcliffe,'Monk'Lewis and their contemporaries.

What is the Gothic? Few literary genres have attracted so much praise and critical disdain simultaneously. This Guide returns to the Gothic novel's first wave of popularity, between 1764 and 1820, to explore and analyse the full range of contradictory responses that the Gothic evoked. Angela Wright appraises the key criticism surrounding the Gothic fiction of this period, from 18th century accounts to present-day commentaries. Adopting an easy-to-follow thematic approach, the Guide examines:- Contemporary criticism of the Gothic- The aesthetics of terror and horror - The influence of the French Revolution- Religion, nationalism and the Gothic- The relationship between psychoanalysis and the Gothic- The relationship between gender and the Gothic.Concise and authoritative, this indispensable Guide provides an overview of Gothic criticism and covers the work of a variety of well-known Gothic writers, such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and many others.