Who wrote the supernatural investigation novel which derives its title from a line in the "nunnery scene" soliloquy of the play "Hamlet"?
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What Dreams May Come (1983 novel) What Dreams May Come is a novel by American author Manly Wade Wellman. It is the second of three books featuring supernatural investigator John Thunstone. The book derives its title from a line in Hamlet's famous "To be, or not to be..." soliloquy.
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To be, or not to be To be, or not to be is the opening phrase of a soliloquy spoken by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play "Hamlet". Act III, Scene I.
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Susanna Gregory Susanna Gregory is the pseudonym of Elizabeth Cruwys, a Cambridge academic who was previously a coroner's officer. She writes detective fiction, and is noted for her series of mediaeval mysteries featuring Matthew Bartholomew, a teacher of medicine and investigator of murders in 14th-century Cambridge.
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Critical approaches to Hamlet From its premiere at the turn of the 17th century, "Hamlet" has remained Shakespeare's best-known, most-imitated, and most-analyzed play. The character of Hamlet played a critical role in Sigmund Freud's explanation of the Oedipus complex and thus influenced modern psychology. Even within the narrower field of literature, the play's influence has been strong. As Foakes writes, "No other character's name in Shakespeare's plays, and few in literature, have come to embody an attitude to life [...] and been converted into a noun in this way."
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The Castle (novel) The Castle (German: "Das Schloss" ] ; also spelled "Das Schloß") is a 1926 novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as K. arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle. Kafka died before finishing the work, but suggested it would end with K. dying in the village, the castle notifying him on his death bed that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there". Dark and at times surreal, "The Castle" is often understood to be about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy, the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems, and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal.
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A Maggot A Maggot (1985) is a novel by British author John Fowles. It is Fowles' sixth major novel, following "The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Daniel Martin," and "Mantissa." Its title, as the author explains in the prologue, is taken from the archaic sense of the word that means "whim", "quirk", "obsession", or even a snatch of music (see earworm). Another meaning of the word "maggot" becomes apparent later in the novel, used by a character to describe a white, oblong machine that appears to be a spacecraft. Though the author denied that "A Maggot" is a historical novel, it does take place during a precise historical timeframe, May 1736 to February 1737, in England. It might be variously classified as historical fiction, mystery, or science fiction. Because of the narrative style and various metafictional devices, most critics classify it as a postmodern novel.
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The Lifted Veil The Lifted Veil is a novella by George Eliot, first published in 1859. Quite unlike the realistic fiction for which Eliot is best known, "The Lifted Veil" explores themes of extrasensory perception, the essence of physical life, possible life after death, and the power of fate. The novella is a significant part of the Victorian tradition of horror fiction, which includes such other examples as Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1886), and Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (1897).
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La Religieuse (novel) The Nun (or "Memoirs of a Nun", French: La Religieuse) is an 18th-century French novel by Denis Diderot. Completed in about 1780, the work was not published until 1796, after Diderot's death.
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The Judas Window The Judas Window (also published as "The Crossbow Murder") is a famous locked room mystery novel by the American writer John Dickson Carr (1906–1977), writing under the name of Carter Dickson, published in 1938 and featuring detective Sir Henry Merrivale.
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The Unicorn Murders The Unicorn Murders is a mystery novel by the American writer John Dickson Carr (1906–1977), who published it under the name of Carter Dickson. It is a locked room mystery (more precisely, it is a subset of that group, an impossible mystery) and features his series detective, Sir Henry Merrivale.
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Heavy Lies the Crown "Heavy lies the crown..." is a misquote of the line "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown", from Shakespeare's play "Henry IV, Part 2".
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Gerald Willoughby-Meade Gerald Willoughby-Meade (25 September 1875 - 24 June 1958) was a British author who wrote on the subject of the supernatural in Chinese folklore.
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Kate Fansler Kate Fansler is the main character in a series of fourteen mystery novels written by Carolyn Gold Heilbrun from 1964-2002, under the pseudonym Amanda Cross. Like Heilbrun, Fansler was a literature professor at a prestigious New York university. In the books, she is called upon to solve mysteries set in an academic context, usually involving the murder of a professor or student. Her work is accomplished through conversation with the people involved, rather than through the physically adventurous antics preferred by other fictional detectives. Midway through the series, she married her partner, district attorney Reed Amhearst, but as she tells another character in "A Trap For Fools", she "neither uses his name nor wears his ring". Echoing Heilbrun's personal views, she has little sentimental attachment to children, enjoys smoking, drinking, and fatty food, and in later books such as "Sweet Death, Kind Death", meditates on the nature of middle age and on the liberating nature of death.
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Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" is a soliloquy written by Robert Browning, first published in his collection "Dramatic Lyrics" (1842). It is written in the voice of an unnamed Spanish monk. The poem consists of nine eight-line stanzas and is written in trochaic tetrameter. The plot of the poem centers around the speaker's hatred for "Brother Lawrence", a fellow monk in the cloister.
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Crowley (Supernatural) Crowley is a fictional character on the American paranormal drama television series "Supernatural" who is portrayed by actor Mark A. Sheppard, and is the King of Hell. Introduced in the fifth season, Sheppard has appeared a recurring role in every season since then, and was eventually promoted to series regular in the tenth season. He died in the twelfth season finalie in an act of self-sacrifice. His portrayal of Crowley has been met with positive reception from both critics and fans of the series. His name is inspired by Aleister Crowley.
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Ghosts (Banville novel) Ghosts is a novel by Irish writer John Banville. Published in 1993, it was his first novel since "The Book of Evidence" (1989), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The second in what Banville described as a "triptych", to make "an investigation of the way in which the imagination works." This novel features many of the same characters and relates to events of the previous novel.
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Ann Radcliffe Ann Radcliffe (née Ward, 9 July 1764 – 7 February 1823) was an English author and pioneer of the Gothic novel. Her style is Romantic in its vivid descriptions of landscapes and long travel scenes, yet the Gothic element is obvious through her use of the supernatural. It was her technique, "the explained supernatural" as the final revelation of inexplicable phenomena, which helped the Gothic novel achieve respectability in the 1790s.
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Miss Morison's Ghosts Miss Morison's Ghosts is a 1981 British supernatural television drama broadcast by ITV starring Hannah Gordon and Wendy Hiller. It is based on a book by two Oxford academics, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain who claimed that in 1901, on a day trip to Versailles, they travelled back in time to the 18th century court of Louis XVI of France, in an event known as the Moberly–Jourdain incident.
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Agnes of God Agnes of God is a play by American playwright John Pielmeier which tells the story of a novice nun who gives birth and insists that the child was the result of a virgin conception. A psychiatrist and the mother superior of the convent clash during the resulting investigation. The title is a pun on the Latin phrase Agnus Dei (Lamb of God).
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The Last and the First The Last and the First is Ivy Compton-Burnett's posthumous novel, published in 1971, two years after her death. The work, complete if possibly awaiting revision, was untitled when it was discovered, and was so named as appropriate for her last novel, and also because of the Biblical quotation (Matthew 20:16) uttered (not for the first time in her canon) by one of the characters.
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Agatha Christie bibliography Agatha Christie (1890–1976) was an English crime novelist, short story writer and playwright. Although she wrote six romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, her reputation rests on the 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections that she wrote under her own name, which have sold over two billion copies—an amount only surpassed by the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare. Her works contain several regular characters with whom the public became familiar, including Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Parker Pyne and Harley Quin. Christie wrote more Poirot stories than any of the others, even though she thought the character to be "rather insufferable". Following the publication of the 1975 novel "Curtain", Poirot's obituary appeared on the front page of "The New York Times". The literary historian Howard Haycraft considered that "few fictional sleuths can surpass the amazing little Belgian—with his waxed moustache and egg-shaped head, his inflated confidence in the infallibility of his 'little grey cells', his murderous attacks on the English language—either for individuality or ingenuity."
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The Hatchet (novel) The Hatchet (orig. Romanian: "Baltagul") is a 1930 crime novel written by Mihail Sadoveanu. The main character of the novel is the wife of a shepard living in the Moldavian village of Măgura Tarcăului, Vitoria Lipan, which has a premonition that her husband, Nechifor, on a trip to buy a new flock in the town of Dorna, has died. Her premonitions are dismissed by the village's priest and by the prefect of the county, but for Vitoria the archaic symbols and superstitions of the paysant world are more trustworthy then the books of the priests or the science of the government's officials. She calls home her son Gheorghiţă, who was also on business in Jijia, a village in Wallachia, where he waited for news from his father to pay some debts, and together they embark on a mythical journey at the end of which they find Nechifor's dead body and take their revenge on the bandits who killed him. The determined and energetic Vitoria Lipan is a unique female character in the Romanian traditionalist novel. "The Hatchet" is considered Sadoveanu's greatest work and a creative adaptation of many themes from a famous Romanian piece of folklore, the ballad Mioriţa.