Edgar Allan Poe's eerie stories and poems continue to captivate readers to this day. He not only wrote such gothic classics as 'The Raven', 'The Tell-Tale Heart', and 'The Fall of the House of Usher', he also lived a haunted life worthy of one of his tales. This volume from the Bloom's Classic Critical Views series features fascinating critical essays from the 19th and early 20th centuries that offer a well-rounded historical look at Poe and his timeless works.

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination" was hailed as a path-breaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar's approach.

The Gothic mode, typically preoccupied by questions of difference and otherness, consistently imagines the Other as a source of grotesque horror. The sixteen critical essays in this collection examine the ways in which those suffering from mental and physical ailments are refigured as Other, and how they are imagined to be monstrous. Together, the essays highlight the Gothic inclination to represent all ailments as visibly monstrous, even those, such as mental illness, which were invisible. Paradoxically, the Other also becomes a pitiful figure, often evoking empathy.

The revered author of the fantasy works 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy also had a distinguished career as a professor at Oxford University. This compact book embraces both the gift and the challenge of Tolkien, presenting an accessible portrait of the man and a reliable and useful insight for the general reader into the inner workings of his complex mind.

Best known as the author of 'Gulliver's Travels', Jonathan Swift is one of literature's great satirists. Born and educated in Ireland, Swift became a politician and clergyman in England, where he wrote essays, pamphlets, poems, and fiction that addressed the political issues and social conditions of his time. In 'Gulliver's Travels', he introduced the allegorical settings of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the island of the Houyhnhnms, as well as the term "yahoos" in a playful, but dark, satirical reflection of humankind.