Horror Stories

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Horror Stories

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Part of Oxford World's Classics series

Summary

This anthology brings together 29 of the greatest horror stories from the British, Irish, American, and European traditions through the long 19th century. It ranges widely across diverse sub-genres including the supernatural, psychological and tales of the uncanny, and features established classics as well as little-known works.

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Horror Stories by Darryl Jones

The modern horror story grew and developed across the nineteenth century, embracing categories as diverse as ghost stories, the supernatural and psychological horror, medical and scientific horrors, colonial horror, and tales of the uncanny and precognition. This anthology brings together twenty-nine of the greatest horror stories of the period, from 1816 to 1912, from the British, Irish, American, and European traditions. It ranges widely across the sub-genres to encompass authors whose terror-inducing powers remain unsurpassed. The book includes stories by some of the best writers of the century - Hoffmann, Poe, Balzac, Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, Zola - as well as established genre classics such as M. R. James, Arthur Machen, Bram Stoker, Algernon Blackwood, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and others. It includes rare and little-known pieces by writers such as William Maginn, Francis Marion Crawford, W. F. Harvey, and William Hope Hodgson, and shows the important role played by periodicals in popularizing the horror story. Wherever possible stories are reprinted in their first published form, with background information about their authors and helpful, contextualizing annotation. Darryl Jones's lively introduction discusses horror's literary evolution and its articulation of cultural preoccupations and anxieties. These are stories guaranteed to freeze the blood, revolt the senses, and keep you awake at night: prepare to be terrified!
Horror Stories is no common schlock-festDarryl Jones has skilfully gathered the most beautifully written, unsettling stories in the English language. * Vulpes Libris, Moira Briggs *
a beautiful collection of nineteenth-century horror with enough set pieces to educate the novice and enough curiosities to delight the connoisseur. * Kirsty Jane McCluskey, Books of the year 2014, Tablet *
It is a beautifully finished book that you just want to take care of ... The content is as good as the production. * Lizzi Thomasson, These Little Words *
[A] superb collection of short fiction * John Connolly, Irish Times *
As well as the general introduction, which provides a useful history of horror from its Gothic origins through a long nineteeth century, each story in the collection is accompanied by a set of notes explaining when and where it was published as well as providing the usual glosses for unfamiliar terms. This contextual emphasis on the nineteeth century periodicals where the readers would first have encounted the work of a writer such as Dickens is particularly illuminating for those interested in horror stories as a meeting of form and content ... Darryl Jone's anthology is a highly accessible guide to the major developments in horror writing during the nineteeth century, and an intriguing reminder that every aspect of Western societies' push for advancement during this period, from industrialization to colonial expansion, produced its own nightmares in the collective unconscious. * Sophie Devlin, The Times Literary Supplement *
As well as the general introduction, which provides a useful history of horror from its Gothic origins through a long nineteenth century, each story in this collection is accompanied by a set of notes explaining when and where it was published as well as providing the usual glosses for unfamiliar terms. Darryl Jones's anthology is a highly accessible guide to the major developments in horror writing during the nineteenth century. * Sophie Devlin, Times Literary Supplement *
Editing an anthology of this sort is a delicate balancing act ... Horror Stories does a good job here, and offers a bracing mixture of the classic but familiar and fresher material. This broad-ranging and well-researched anthology of horror is full of gruesome things: haunting, possession, revenge, witchcraft, vampires, crime even disease and madness. * Nicholas Daly, Guardian *
This compendium of ghoulish stories from 1816-1912 has a bit of everything. All are fab for reading aloud. * Lizzy Dening, Grazia *
Darryl Jones has taught at Trinity College Dublin since 1994. Prior to this he taught in the University of Lodz, Poland. He has held Visiting Professorships at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, Babes Bolyai University, Cluj, Transylvania, and Tongji University, Shanghai. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (Arnold/OUP 2002), It Came From the 1950s!: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties (with Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy, Palgrave Macmillan 2011), and M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories (OUP, 2011, 2013).
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780199685431
ISBN 10 0199685436
Title Horror Stories
Author Darryl Jones
Series Oxford World's Classics
Condition Unavailable
Binding type Hardback
Publisher Oxford University Press
Year published 2014-10-09
Number of pages 552
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note Unavailable