Romantic Movement

When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, how can I be free? It all began in the 1790s in a quiet university town in Germany when a group of playwrights, poets, and writers put the self at center stage in their thinking, writing, and their lives.

In The Incurable Romantic, Frank Tallis recounts the extraordinary stories of patients who are, quite literally, madly in love: A woman becomes utterly convinced that her dentist is secretly infatuated with her and drives him to leave the country; a man destroys his massive fortune through trysts with more than 3,000 prostitutes - because his ego requires that they fall in love with him; a beautiful woman's pathological jealousy destroys the men who love her.

Not often thought of as a romantic, Poe nonetheless captured the beauty of love in many of his works. In this collection, Poe offers his short poem, aptly titled, "Romance", followed by three short stories, "Morella", "Eleonora", and "Ligeia", ending with the poem, "Annabel Lee".

In this tragic tale of a summer sea voyage, the narrator’s old friend, Cornelius Wyatt, is onboard the Independence, sailing from South Carolina to New York City, with his wife and two sisters and an oblong pine box. A hurricane near Cape Hatteras leads to tragedy, and the truth is revealed about Wyatt’s family.