Zofloya: Or the Moor (World's Classics) - Softcover

Dacre, Charlotte

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9780192832399: Zofloya: Or the Moor (World's Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192832395 ISBN 13: 9780192832399

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1997

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"Few venture as thou hast in the alarming paths of sin." This is the final judgement of Satan on Victoria di Loredani, the heroine of "Zofloya", or "The Moor" (1806), a tale of lust, betrayal, and multiple murder set in Venice in the last days of the 15th century. The novel follows Victoria's progress from spoilt daughter of indulgent aristocrats, through a period of abuse and captivity, to a career of deepening criminality conducted under Satan's watchful eye. Charlotte Dacre's narrative deftly displays her heroine's movement from the vitalized position of Ann Radcliffe's heroines to a fully conscious commitment to vice that goes beyond that of `Monk' Lewis's deluded Ambrosio. The novel's most daring aspect is its anatomy of Victoria's intense sexual attraction to her Moorish servant Zofloya that transgresses taboos both of class and race. A minor scandal on its first publication, and a significant influence on Byron and Shelley, Zofloya has been unduly neglected. Contradicting idealized stereotypes of women's writing, the novel's portrait of indulged desire, gratuitous cruelty, and monumental self-absorption retains considerable power to disturb. The introduction to this edition, the first for nearly 200 years, examines why Zofloya deserves to be read alongside established Gothic classics as the highly original work of an intriguing and unconventional writer.

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From the Publisher:

The Broadview Editions series is an effort to represent the ever-changing canon of literature in English by bringing together texts long regarded as classics with valuable, lesser-known literature. Newly type-set and produced on high-quality paper in trade paperback format, the Broadview Editions series is a delight to handle as well as read.

Each volume includes a full introduction, chronology, bibliography, and explanatory notes along with a variety of documents from the period, giving readers a rich sense of the world from which the work emerged.

From the Author:

This edition includes useful supplementary material.
In addition to the full text of Zofloya, this edition includes reviews of the novel, poems by Dacre, and the full text of a pirated chapbook version of the novel from 1810.

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