The trickster, whether in the form of a benign practical joker or a malevolent charlatan, has been a popular literary character for centuries. This volume examines the role of the trickster in works such as 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', 'On the Road', 'The Wife of Bath's Tale', and many other works frequently studied by high school students. Featuring original essays and excerpts from previously published critical analyses, this addition to the Bloom's Literary Themes series gives students valuable insight into the title's subject theme.

The grotesque, often defined as something fantastically distorted that attracts and repels, is a concept that has various meanings in literature. This new volume contains 20 essays that explore the role of the grotesque in such works as 'Candide', 'Frankenstein', 'King Lear', 'The Metamorphosis', and many others. Some essays have been written specifically for the series; others are excerpts of important critical analyses from selected books and journals.

Barley for Food and Health: Science, Technology, and Products

With coverage of chemistry, genetics, and molecular breeding, this book provides comprehensive and current information on barley types, composition, characteristics, processing techniques, and products. Its emphasis on the nutritional and health benefits of barley is especially timely with the FDA s 2005 confirmation of barley s cholesterol-lowering properties. 

This guide provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies.

Supplementary material includes a chronology of key Gothic texts, listing literature and film from 1757 to 2000, and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

This work dissects popular examples from the gothic literary and cinematic canon, exposing the inverted comic paradigm within each text. Rooting his study in comedy as theoretically conceived by Suzanne Langer, C.L. Barber and Mikhail Bakhtin, Morgan analyses the physical and mythological nature of horror in inverted comic terms, identifying a biologically grounded mythos of horror. Motifs such as sinister loci, languishment, masquerade, and subversion of sensual perception are contextualized here as embedded in an organic reality, resonating with biological motives and consequences.