Richard Dury

Along with Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson brought to life the monstrous nature that hides within humanity. For his masterpiece The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the clever manipulator of the dark and gothic mood revealed the duality of human nature with a tale that resonates still today. This new selection gathers together 'The Body Snatcher', 'A Lodging for the Night', 'The Isle of Voices', 'The Bottle Imp', 'Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk', and many other chilling and thrilling stories for readers who delight in the shadows and the mysterious. The Flame Tree Gothic Fantasy, Classic Stories and Epic Tales collections bring together the entire range of myth, folklore and modern short fiction. Highlighting the roots of suspense, supernatural, science fiction and mystery stories, the books in Flame Tree Collections series are beautifully presented, perfect as a gift and offer a lifetime of reading pleasure.

This volume presents the results of a research team of the University of Bergamo, whose aim was the analysis of verbal modality in the Helsinki corpus. This corpus includes a large selection of texts compiled in Middle English and Early Modern English and offers a good diatypic coverage, as it contains a wide range of text-types, genres and registers. Within a common methodological framework, individual chapters measure and analyze the occurrence and semantic values of central modal verbs, relating them to such parameters as text type, speech-relatedness and pragmatic function. This research project is part of a wider national project aiming to register and comment on the formal variety of modal manifestations and their relative frequency in a range of texts covering approximately four centuries, from about 1300 to 1700.