Phantom Desire

Computer expert Carly is tired, burned out and ready to downgrade her hectic lifestyle to something simpler. Her solution—pull up stakes and move to an old farm house in the middle of Wyoming. Her new house is full of old-time charm, and it comes with an unexpected surprise. Dmitri Belakov. Dmitri, a Master Vampire, had an agreement with the former owners of the house to let him live peacefully beneath it in his hidden lair. Now there’s a new owner, and he may have to risk revealing his presence to negotiate a new contract. He moves cautiously because if she won’t deal, he’ll have to kill her once she knows his secret. Carly’s mind is unusually hard to influence, but he makes inroads when she is asleep. Their shared dreams are more erotic than he ever expected, firing a hunger within him to know her feel and taste in the flesh. But doing so risks far too much. Even if Carly can’t deny the attraction arcing between them, loving him will force her to make a choice. An eternity in darkness with him—or life in the sun without him.

Ghosts have made an unexpected reappearance in German literature since 1989. Catherine Smale reads this as symptomatic of writers' attempts to renegotiate their personal and collective identity in the wake of German reunification. Focusing on two major authors from the former GDR, Christa Wolf and Irina Liebmann, Smale examines the ways in which their work adopts notions of haunting in its creative engagement with the double legacy of Socialism and National Socialism. The ghost has long been regarded as a vehicle for making manifest taboo or unauthorized memories. However, Smale goes further, demonstrating how the human subject is destabilized by the return of the phantom and is itself rendered insecure and spectral. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical reference, from the psychoanalytic concept of intergenerational phantoms to Derridean hauntology, Smale's study highlights the particular challenge which Wolf and Liebmann pose to the familiar understanding of how German writers have confronted their country's troublesome past.Catherine Smale is Lecturer in German at King's College London.

Does the supernatural exist? The manager of First American's Zenith Mine calls Kevin Traynor to the rescue: A phantom train is depopulating an Arizona mining town! Are legends of lost treasure and a spooky past the clue to the phantom train mystery? A nosy reporter, an uncooperative sheriff, a young librarian, a strange old Indian, the town gossip - will any of the remaining citizens of the town help Traynor to defend their world against superstition? But is Traynor fighting against superstition - or against the supernatural? The fact that he falls in love with a lady mining engineer who reminds him of his girlfriend back in New York does not make things any easier - or does it? When the phantom train really appears, all bets are off... Kevin Traynor. With the right to be politically incorrect.

Zeitlin's study centers on the seventeenth century, one of the most interesting and creative periods of Chinese literature and politically one of the most traumatic, witnessing the overthrow of the Ming, the Manchu conquest, and the subsequent founding of the Qing. Drawing on fiction, drama, poetry, medical cases, and visual culture, the author departs from more traditional literary studies, which tend to focus on a single genre or author. Ranging widely across disciplines, she integrates detailed analyses of great literary works with insights drawn from the history of medicine, art history, comparative literature, anthropology, religion, and performance studies. The Phantom Heroine probes the complex literary and cultural roots of the Chinese ghost tradition. Zeitlin is the first to address its most remarkable feature: the phenomenon of verse attributed to phantom writers - that is, authors actually reputed to be spirits of the deceased. This book should appeal to readers interested in Chinese studies, gender studies, comparative literature, performance studies, the history of religion, and of course, ghost stories and the occult

Mind traveler Chandra Lamar is on the run, not only from her post-catastrophic dystopian government but from a past she can't remember. A psychic vision pushes her to recall her purpose for being, but it's a ghost that awakens her desires for a life she fears she'll never have. Both push her to remember the past because it threatens what she wants in the now; the Nodin men. Andonis Nodin battles to accept his failures. The heavy burden nearly breaks him when he can't save the one he loves from the grim reaper's grip; he questions his desire for Chandra, the woman he blames for the death around him. Nikias finds true love with Chandra in his arms, but is desperate to stop her from seeking revenge on a mission he knows is a one way trip. Ortello knows for them to recapture the love they once felt for each other, he must be willing to let her go. But overcoming his obsession to make Chandra his and his alone isn't easy. Will Chandra go through with the vengeance in her heart or give it up for love? Who is the powerful woman in her haunting visions and will those revealing apparitions crumble her world with the Nodin clan? Does Chandra find true love in the arms of the Nodin men or does her Phantom Desire forever own her heart?

The Phantom of the Ego is the first comparative study that shows how the modernist account of the unconscious anticipates contemporary discoveries about the importance of mimesis in the formation of subjectivity. Rather than beginning with Sigmund Freud as the father of modernism, Nidesh Lawtoo starts with Friedrich Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical diagnostic of the ego, his realization that mimetic reflexes—from sympathy to hypnosis, to contagion, to crowd behavior—move the soul, and his insistence that psychology informs philosophical reflection. Through a transdisciplinary, comparative reading of landmark modernist authors like Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Georges Bataille, Lawtoo shows that, before being a timely empirical discovery, the “mimetic unconscious” emerged from an untimely current in literary and philosophical modernism. This book traces the psychological, ethical, political, and cultural implications of the realization that the modern ego is born out of the spirit of imitation; it is thus, strictly speaking, not an ego, but what Nietzsche calls, “a phantom of the ego.” The Phantom of the Ego opens up a Nietzschean back door to the unconscious that has mimesis rather than dreams as its via regia, and argues that the modernist account of the “mimetic unconscious” makes our understanding of the psyche new.

Provides encyclopedic coverage of female sexuality in 1940s popular culture. 2015 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Popular culture in the 1940s is organized as patriarchal theater. Men gaze upon, evaluate, and coerce women, who are obliged in their turn to put themselves on sexual display. In such a thoroughly patriarchal society, what happens to female sexual desire? Wolf-Women and Phantom Ladies unearths this female desire by conducting a panoramic survey of 1940s culture that analyzes popular novels, daytime radio serials, magazines and magazine fiction, marital textbooks, Hollywood and educational films, jungle comics, and popular music. In addition to popular works, Steven Dillon discusses many lesser-known texts and artists, including Ella Mae Morse, a key figure in the founding of Capitol Records, and Lisa Ben, creator of the first lesbian magazine in the United States. Steven Dillon is Professor of English at Bates College and the author of Derek Jarman and Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea and The Solaris Effect: Art and Artifice in Contemporary American Film.

In this sequel to Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, the young lovers, Christine and Raoul, leave the Phantom in his lair under the Opera House. After faking his own death to escape the authorities, the Phantom sets out to find Christine again, eventually following her to London. With a detective after the Phantom and Christine endangered when Jack the Ripper begins his killing spree not far from Christine's home, the Phantom must put his life at risk for his love.Will Christine -- desperate for song (which her husband, Raoul, has forbidden in his jealousy) -- finally open her heart to the Phantom as he desires?

Phantom Communities reconsiders the status of the simulacrum--sometimes defined as a copy of a copy, but more rigorously defined as a copy that subverts the legitimacy and authority of its model--in light of recent debates in literature, art, philosophy, and cultural studies. The author pursues two interwoven levels of analysis. On one level, he explores the poetics of the simulacrum, considered as a form that internalizes repetition, through close readings of a number of exemplary literary texts, paintings, and films from both the Anglo-American and French traditions, including works by Jean Genet, Pierre Klossowski, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, J. G. Ballard, Balthus, and Raúl Ruiz. Through his readings of these works, the author follows the transformations of the simulacrum, showing how its vicissitudes provide an optic for remapping the postmodern canon. On another level, the author offers an account of the role played by the simulacrum as a theoretical concept that assumes varying analytical and ideological valences in the writings of such theorists as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In so doing, Phantom Communities intervenes in ongoing interdisciplinary debates concerning the historical and ideological limits of postmodernism, as well as the utopian possibilities of art, literature, and philosophy in a postmodern context. Moving between these debates and the interpretation of individual works, the author shows how they converge on the fundamental aesthetic and ideological problem raised by the postmodern culture of the simulacrum: imagining the virtual communities that, at the margins of postmodern culture, are at once figured and eclipsed by its proliferating images.

Marc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For Redfield, these fictions of character formation demonstrate the paradoxical relation between aesthetics and literature: the notion of the Bildungsroman may be expanded to apply to any text that can be figured as a subject producing itself in history, which is to say any text whatsoever. At the same time, the category may be contracted to include only a handful of novels, (or even none at all), a paradox that has led critics to denigrate the Bildungsroman as a phantom genre.