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Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Klaus Dermutz
Anselm Kiefer and Klaus Dermutz
Seagull Books, 2018
In the ten conversations with the writer and theologian Klaus Dermutz collected here, Kiefer returns to the essential elements of his art, his aesthetics, and his creative processes.

The only visual artist to have won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Anselm Kiefer is a profoundly literary painter. In these conversations, Kiefer describes how the central materials of his art—lead, sand, water, fire, ashes, plants, clothing, oil paint, watercolor, and ink—influence the act of creation. No less decisive are his intellectual and artistic touchstones: the sixteenth-century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria, the German Romantic poet Novalis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, Marcel Proust, Adalbert Stifter, the operas of Richard Wagner, the Catholic liturgy, and the innovative theater director and artist Tadeusz Kantor. Kiefer and Dermutz discuss all of these influential thinkers, as well as Kiefer’s own status as a controversial figure. His relentless examination of German history, the themes of guilt, suffering, communal memory, and the seductions of destruction have earned him equal amounts of criticism and praise. The conversations in this book offer a rare insight into the mind of a gifted creator, appealing to artists, critics, art historians, cultural journalists, and anyone interested in the visual arts and the literature and history of the twentieth century.
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Answerable Style
Essays on Paradise Lost
Arnold Stein
University of Minnesota Press, 1953

Answerable Style was first published in 1953. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

By the use of both new and traditional techniques of critical analysis, Arnold Stein presents in this volume of six essays a fresh interpretation of Milton's epic.

Beginning with the assumption that style is "answerable" to idea, he has tried to trace Milton's epic vision as it is bodied forth in patterns of structure (the ideas tested in action) and patterns of expression (the ideas tested in style). Mr. Stein explains: "My approach is in part based on an attempt to accept as fact both that I am a twentieth century reader and that this is a seventeenth-century poem. Milton is, I think, illuminated by some modern critical considerations; and some of those considerations are in turn illuminated, and some are found wanting."
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An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets
Valentina Polukhina
University of Iowa Press, 2005
Based on an exhaustive review of Russian poetry, An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets is the first comprehensive collection of its kind. Editors Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort read some one thousand collections and manuscripts and thoroughly surveyed the vibrant Russian literary Internet, gathering works by women poets from Moscow to Vladivostok, those living abroad, and those domiciled in former republics of the Soviet Union. The resulting anthology presents English translations of works by more than eighty poets.

Focusing on the middle generation, with major figures such as Olga Sedakova, Svetlana Kekova, Vera Pavlova, and Tatyana Shcherbina, the collection also includes work by the youngest generation—born after 1970 and not yet known outside of Russia—as well as senior poets such as Bella Akhmadulina and Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Translators include such poets as Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Fainlight, Carol Rumens, and Daniel Weissbort as well as Russianists and scholars Peter France, Catriona Kelly, Robert Reid, and Stephanie Sandler.

A significant and extensive bibliography lists the major works of prominent Russian women poets. A preface by Stephanie Sandler, a concluding note by Dmitry Kuzmin on the online Vavilon project, a postface by Elena Fanailova, and biographical notes on the poets and translators complete the anthology, which is sure to be of great interest to students and scholars of Russian literature.
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An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry
Wes Davis
Harvard University Press, 2010

Never before has there been a single-volume anthology of modern Irish poetry so significant and groundbreaking as An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry.

Collected here is a comprehensive representation of Irish poetic achievement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from poets such as Austin Clarke and Samuel Beckett who were writing while Yeats and Joyce were still living; to those who came of age in the turbulent ’60s as sectarian violence escalated, including Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley; to a new generation of Irish writers, represented by such diverse, interesting voices as David Wheatley (born 1970) and Sinéad Morrissey (born 1972). Scholar and editor Wes Davis has chosen work by more than fifty leading modern and contemporary Irish poets. Each poet is represented by a generous number of poems (there are nearly 800 poems in the anthology). The editor’s selection includes work by world-renowned poets, including a couple of Nobel Prize winners, as well as work by poets whose careers may be less well known to the general public; by poets writing in English; and by several working in the Irish language (Gaelic selections appear in translation). Accompanying the selections are a general introduction that provides a historical overview, informative short essays on each poet, and helpful notes—all prepared by the editor.

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An Anthology of Old Spanish
Tatiana Fotitch
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
In this book, Tatiana Fotitch compiles some of the most fascinating Spanish-language texts from the late-ninth or early tenth century through to the fifteenth century. The selections are specifically aimed to garner the interests of students as they begin the study of Old Spanish, and hence covers a wide variety of different types of material. The anthology includes examples of Mozarabic poetry; the twelfth century Auto de los Reyes Magos and Cantar de Mio Çid; as well as the thirteenth century Roncesvalles, which tells of how Charlemagne, after the battle, mourns his chieftains. Fotitch also includes Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora and several works by Alfonso the Wise, including his Libro de las partidas. Fotitch also includes the famous poem El Libro de Buen Amor as well as the playful set of fables known as El Libro de los Gatos.
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The Anti-Journalist
Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe
Paul Reitter
University of Chicago Press, 2008
In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration and outrage. Kraus’s spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his fellow Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. The Anti-Journalist overturns this view with unprecedented force and sophistication, showing how Kraus’s criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Kraus’s modernist journalistic style.
Paul Reitter’s study of Kraus’s writings situates them in the context of fin-de-siècle German-Jewish intellectual society. He argues that rather than stemming from anti-Semitism, Kraus’s attacks constituted an innovative critique of mainstream German-Jewish strategies for assimilation. Marshalling three of the most daring German-Jewish authors—Kafka, Scholem, and Benjamin—Reitter explains their admiration for Kraus’s project and demonstrates his influence on their own notions of cultural authenticity.
 
The Anti-Journalist is at once a new interpretation of a fascinating modernist oeuvre and a heady exploration of an important stage in the history of German-Jewish thinking about identity.
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Anti-Nazi Modernism
The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction
Mia Spiro
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Mia Spiro's Anti-Nazi Modernism marks a major step forward in the critical debates over the relationship between modernist art and politics. Spiro analyzes the antifascist, and particularly anti-Nazi, narrative methods used by key British and American fiction writers in the 1930s. Focusing on works by Djuna Barnes, Christopher Isherwood, and Virginia Woolf, Spiro illustrates how these writers use an "anti-Nazi aesthetic" to target and expose Nazism’s murderous discourse of exclusion. The three writers challenge the illusion of harmony and unity promoted by the Nazi spectacle in parades, film, rallies, and propaganda. Spiro illustrates how their writings, seldom read in this way, resonate with the psychological and social theories of the period and warn against Nazism’s suppression of individuality.  Her approach also demonstrates how historical and cultural contexts complicate the works, often reinforcing the oppressive discourses they aim to attack. This book explores the textual ambivalences toward the "Others" in society—most prominently the Modern Woman, the homosexual, and the Jew. By doing so, Spirouncovers important clues to the sexual and racial politics that were widespread in Europe and the United States in the years leading up to World War II.

 

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Antipodean Early Modern
European Art in Australian Collections, c. 1200-1600
Edited by Anne Dunlop
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
A Prayer Book owned by the Rothschilds, an Italian bronze casket by Antico, a lavishly illustrated Carnival chronicle from sixteenth-century Germany, an altarpiece by Pieter Brueghel the Younger - much of the artwork in this book, held by Australian collections, is essentially unknown beyond the continent. The authors of these essays showcase these extraordinary objects to their full potential,revealing a wide range of contemporary art and historical research. This collection of essays will surprise even specialists.
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Antiquarian Voices
The Roman Academy and the Commentary Tradition on Ovid's Fasti
Angela Fritsen
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
Ovid’s Fasti, his poem on the Roman calendar, became especially influential during the fifteenth century as a guide to classical Roman culture. Ovid’s treatment of mythological and astronomical lore, his investigation of anniversaries and customs, and his charting of monuments and history offered humanist poets and intellectuals an abundance of material to unravel. They could identify with Ovid as vates operosus, or hard-working seer–poet, suggesting both researcher and inspired authority.
 
Angela Fritsen’s Antiquarian Voices:The Roman Academy and the Commentary Tradition on Ovid’s Fasti offers the first study of the Renaissance exegesis and imitation of Ovid as antiquarian. Fritsen analyzes the Fasti commentaries by Paolo Marsi (1440–1484) and Antonio Costanzi (1436–1490) as well as the connections between the two works. It situates Ovidian Fasti studies in the Roman Academy under the mentorship of Pomponio Leto. Nowhere could the investigation of the Fasti be carried out better than in Rome. The humanists had a guide to the City in Ovid. They also regarded the Fasti as well suited to the ideology of the ancient Roman imperium’s renewal in modern papal Rome.
 
Antiquarian Voices illustrates how in reviving the Fasti, the humanists returned Rome to its original splendor. The book demonstrates that the humanists were eager to relate the Fasti to their antiquarian pursuits—as well as to their rising personal fame.
 
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Antisatire
In Defense of Women, against Francesco Buoninsegni
Arcangela Tarabotti
Iter Press, 2020
Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652), Venetian nun and polemicist, was known for her protest against forced monachization and her advocacy for the education of women and their participation in public life. She responded to Francesco Buoninsegni’s Against the Vanities of Women (1638) with the Antisatire (1644), a defense of women’s fashions and a denunciation of men, but also a strong condemnation of men’s treatment of women and of the subordination of women in society. Both Buoninsegni and Tarabotti write with the exaggeration and absurd arguments typical of Menippean satire; they flaunt their knowledge of ancient and contemporary literature in a prose interspersed with poetry and replete with the astonishing Baroque conceits that delighted their contemporaries.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Women: The Toronto Series volume 70
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Antonin Artaud
Man Of Vision
Bettina L. Knapp
Ohio University Press, 1980

The extraordinary actor–director–writer who developed his talent for self-torture into art to become one of the most vital creative forces of the century.

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Antonio Buero-Vallejo
Four Tragedies of Conscience
Antonio Buero-Vallejo
University Press of Colorado, 2008
This masterful translation of four tragedies by Antonio Buero-Vallejo (1916 -2000), Spain 's most important dramatist since the 1930s, will allow English-speaking audiences to experience the most deeply moving and intellectually rich works of one of the twentieth-century 's great authors. Patricia W. O'Connor complements vivid translations with generous supporting materials, including a reader-friendly introduction to the playwright's life and work, commentaries on the plays, and photographs of productions and playwright.

Buero-Vallejo's emblematic first play, Story of a Stairway (1949), chronicling decades in the lives of struggling Madrid families, catapulted the young author into prominence. Appearing here for the first time in English, Before Dawn (1953) is a whodunit and the riveting odyssey of one woman 's search for truth that recalls Greek tragedy. The Basement Window (1967), an Orwellian science-fiction experiment, portrays the moral climate of the late twentieth century as judged by ethically enlightened researchers of a distant future. In the first English translation of the author's poignantly relevant final play, Mission to the Deserted Village (1999), a wartime attempt to save an El Greco painting raises questions about how much of its own treasure a culture will destroy to keep it out of enemy hands.

Readers who know Buero-Vallejo's plays will celebrate O'Connor 's sparkling translations. Those who haven't yet read Buero-Vallejo will find a very moving introduction in this collection.

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Antonio Machado
Selected Poems
Alan S. Trueblood
Harvard University Press

Regarded by many as the finest poet of twentieth-century Spain, Antonio Machado y Ruiz (1875–1939) is not well known outside the Spanish-speaking world. This volume will introduce him to Anglo-American readers, enabling them to experience at first hand the subtle nuances of his verse. Some two hundred fifty poems in Spanish, drawn from Machado’s entire oeuvre, are accompanied on facing pages by sensitive and beautifully fluent translations which render the originals accessible to the mind and the ear.

Alan S. Trueblood annotates the individual poems, placing them in context and illuminating their allusions and undertones. In addition, he provides a substantial biographical and critical Introduction. This gives an overview of Machado’s life, as a poet and teacher and wide-ranging commentator on cultural, political, and social affairs. (Forced into exile at the end of the Civil War, he crossed the Pyrenees on foot and died a month later.) The Introduction also discusses the qualities of Machado’s predominantly quiet and reflective verse, as well as the development of the thought of this major poet.

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Antony and Cleopatra
William Shakespeare
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2023
A lively contemporary translation of Shakespeare’s sexiest play.
 
In Antony and Cleopatra, Christopher Chen tackles the sweeping epic of love and betrayal at the center of the story of the rulers Antony of Rome and Cleopatra of Egypt. In this contemporary translation of the play, Chen brings the political intrigue and historical storytelling of Shakespeare to modern audiences while preserving the poetic foundation of the play’s language.
 
This translation of Antony and Cleopatra was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.
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Apocalypse Mix
Jane Satterfield
Autumn House Press, 2017
Jane Satterfield’s fourth poetry collection, Apocalypse Mix, dives into a musical, war-torn, elegiac past.
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Apocalyptic Ecologies
From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature
Shannon Gayk
University of Chicago Press
A meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency.
 
When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge.
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Apocryphal Lorca
Translation, Parody, Kitsch
Jonathan Mayhew
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) had enormous impact on the generation of American poets who came of age during the cold war, from Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg to Robert Creeley and Jerome Rothenberg. In large numbers, these poets have not only translated his works, but written imitations, parodies, and pastiches—along with essays and critical reviews. Jonathan Mayhew’s Apocryphal Lorca is an exploration of the afterlife of this legendary Spanish writer in the poetic culture of the United States.

            The book examines how Lorca in English translation has become a specifically American poet, adapted to American cultural and ideological desiderata—one that bears little resemblance to the original corpus, or even to Lorca’s Spanish legacy. As Mayhew assesses Lorca’s considerable influence on the American literary scene of the latter half of the twentieth century, he uncovers fundamental truths about contemporary poetry, the uses and abuses of translation, and Lorca himself.

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Apollo and Vulcan
The Art Markets in Italy, 1400-1700
Guido Guerzoni
Michigan State University Press, 2011
Guido Guerzoni presents the results of fifteen years of research into one of the more hotly debated topics among historians of art and of economics: the history of art markets. Dedicating equal attention to current thought in the fields of economics, economic history, and art history, Guerzoni offers a broad and far-reaching analysis of the Italian scene, highlighting the existence of different forms of commercial interchange and diverse kinds of art markets. In doing so he ranges beyond painting and sculpture, to examine as well the economic drivers behind architecture, decorative and sumptuary arts, and performing or ephemeral events.
     Organized by thematic areas (the ethics and psychology of consumption, an analysis of the demand, labor markets, services, prices, laws) that cover a large chronological period (from the 15th through the 17th century), various geographical areas, and several institution typologies, this book offers an exhaustive and up-to-date study of an increasingly fascinating topic.
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Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works
Marie le Jars de Gournay
University of Chicago Press, 2002
During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565-1645) was celebrated as one of the "seventy most famous women of all time" in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). The adopted daughter of Montaigne, as well as his editor, Gournay was a major literary force and a pioneering feminist voice during a tumultuous period in France.

This volume presents translations of four of Gournay's works that address feminist issues. Two of these appear here in English for the first time—The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne and The Apology for the Woman Writing. One of the first modern psychological novels, the best-selling Promenade was also the first to explore female sexual feeling. With the autobiographical Apology, Gournay defended every aspect of her life, from her moral conduct to her household management. The book also includes Gournay's last revisions (1641) of her two best-known feminist treatises, The Equality of Men and Women and The Ladies' Complaint. The editors provide a general overview of Gournay's career, as well as individual introductions and extensive annotations for each work.
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Apology to Apostrophe
Autobiography and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation in Spain
James D. Fernandez
Duke University Press, 1992
Who writes "I"? To whom are autobiographies addressed? What kinds of readers are inscribed in autobiographical narratives? In Apology to Apostrophe, James D. Fernández's offers a lucid and powerful meditation on the nature of autobiographical writing through his investigation of the historical conditions and literary stagings of autobiographical writing in Spain.
As Fernández demonstrates, recent developments in critical theory provide new and fruitful approaches to autobiographical works that have long been neglected, misunderstood, or, in some cases, virtually unknown. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on nineteenth-century Spain, Fernández exposes a rhetorical tension that often occurs in autobiographical discourse, between self-justification, or "apology," and the transcendence of this worldly impulse, or "apostrophe." This tension, he argues, is of particular interest in the case of Spain, but not peculiar to that nation, and his attention to the theoretical nature of autobiography leads to insightfl considerations of many canonical European autobiographies, including those of Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Saint Teresa, and Cardinal Newman.
Considering Spanish autobiography in the context of first-person narrative in Europe and in the terms of current debates on the relationship between writing and selfhood, Apology to Apostrophe marks a significant advance in our historical understanding and critical discussion of the genre. The book will be of great value not only to Hispanists but also to those interested in autobiography and cultural history.
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An Appetite for Poetry
Frank Kermode
Harvard University Press, 1989

Frank Kermode is the preeminent practitioner of the art of criticism in the English-speaking world. As such his task entails the readiness to evaluate in general terms the widest range of texts, both ancient and modern, and also the ability to make public sense of the seemingly arcane debates about theories of literature as they pertain to the ongoing process of evaluation. It has been Kermode’s distinction to make a virtue—as all the best critics have done—of the necessarily occasional nature of his profession. That virtue is evident in every page of this set of essays.

This is a book in which Kermode asks the reader to share his pleasure in the literature of a set of major writers—Milton, Eliot, Stevens. He vividly evokes Milton after the Restoration of Charles II, with a fine speculative discussion of the interplay between his personal and political circumstances and the preoccupations of his poetry. He sets before us T. S. Eliot living in a condition of permanent exile, Wallace Stevens in his old age dwelling poetically in Connecticut, and author/critic William Empson, whose singular career was marked by both the pleasure of the text and the delight in conceptual issues that characterizes so much of the contemporary taste for theory. Other essays draw our attention to debates on the literary canon and problems of biblical criticism and their implications for the study of narrative in particular and the interpretation of secular literary texts in general.

These are professional essays that nevertheless defy the excesses of modern professionalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the polemical Prologue to the book, in which Kermode sorts out the good from the meretricious in contemporary criticism. He argues that some proclaimed theorists “seem largely to have lost interest in literature,” while the best, like Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, have never lost what Kermode prizes most highly, the very appetite or hunger for poetry and literature. Always readable, elegant even on gnarled matters, and courteous in contexts where others are bad-tempered, An Appetite for Poetry is the work of one of the most distinguished minds of our time. In reaffirming the professional responsibilities of criticism now being neglected, it displays a generous hospitality to new ideas.

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Approaches to Ulysses
Ten Essays
Thomas F. Staley
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970

Scholars of James Joyce offer critical analysis of his work Ulysses. Five essays interpret the character of the novel; four deal with the literary style of presentation, the last focuses on the problems of translation.

Contributors: Robert R. Boyle, S.J.; David Hayman; Richard M. Kain; Darcy O’Brien; Weldon Thornton; Erwin R. Steinberg; William M. Schutte; Fritz Senn; H. Frew Waidner; and the editors.

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Apropos of Something
A History of Irrelevance and Relevance
Elisa Tamarkin
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A history of the idea of “relevance” since the nineteenth century in art, criticism, philosophy, logic, and social thought.
 
Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin’s sweeping meditation on a key shift in consciousness: the arrival of relevance as the means to grasp how something that was once disregarded, unvalued, or lost to us becomes interesting and important. When so much makes claims to our attention every day, how do we decide what is most valuable right now?

Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was an Anglo-American concept, derived from a word meaning “to raise or to lift up again,” and also “to give relief.” It engaged major intellectual figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatists and philosophers—William James, Alain Locke, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead—as well as a range of critics, phenomenologists, linguists, and sociologists. Relevance is a struggle for recognition, especially in the worlds of literature, art, and criticism. Poems and paintings in the nineteenth century could now be seen as pragmatic works that make relevance and make interest—that reveal versions of events that feel apropos of our lives the moment we turn to them.

Vividly illustrated with paintings by Winslow Homer, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and others, Apropos of Something is a searching philosophical and poetic study of relevance—a concept calling for shifts in both attention and perceptions of importance with enormous social stakes.  It remains an invitation for the humanities and for all of us who feel tasked every day with finding the point.
 
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The Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin
Harvard University Press, 1999

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

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Archaeologies of Modernity
Avant-Garde Bildung
Rainer Rumold
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Archaeologies of Modernity explores the shift from the powerful tradition of literary forms of Bildung—the education of the individual as the self—to the visual forms of “Bildung” (from Bild) that characterize German modernism and the European avant-garde. Interrelated chapters examine the work of Franz Kafka, Jean/Hans Arp, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein, and of artists such as Oskar Kokoschka or Kurt Schwitters, in the light of the surge of an autoformation (Bildung) of verbal and visual images at the core of expressionist and surrealist aesthetics and the art that followed. In this first scholarly focus on modernist avant-garde Bildung in its entwinement of conceptual modernity with forms of the archaic, Rumold resituates the significance of the poet and art theorist Einstein and his work on the language of primitivism and the visual imagination. Archaeologies of Modernity is a major reconsideration of the conception of the modernist project and will be of interest to scholars across the disciplines.

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The Archaeology of Anxiety
The Russian Silver Age and its Legacy
Galina Rylkova
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007

The “Silver Age” (c. 1890-1917) has been one of the most intensely studied topics in Russian literary studies, and for years scholars have been struggling with its precise definition. Firmly established in the Russian cultural psyche, it continues to influence both literature and mass media. The Archaeology of Anxiety is the first extended analysis of why the Silver Age occupies such prominence in Russian collective consciousness.

Galina Rylkova examines the Silver Age as a cultural construct-the byproduct of an anxiety that permeated society in reaction to the social, political, and cultural upheavals brought on by the Bolshevik Revolution, the fall of the Romanovs, the Civil War, and Stalin's Great Terror. Rylkova's astute analysis of writings by Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak and Victor Erofeev reveals how the construct of the Silver Age was perpetuated and ingrained.

Rylkova explores not only the Silver Age's importance to Russia's cultural identity but also the sustainability of this phenomenon. In so doing, she positions the Silver Age as an essential element to Russian cultural survival.

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An Archaeology of Sympathy
The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema
James Chandler
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people’s very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being.
 
In what is sure to become a critical classic, An Archaeology of Sympathy challenges Sergei Eisenstein’s influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. James Chandler begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, he reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra’s It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Chandler then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work.
 
Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, An Archaeology of Sympathy casts new light on the long eighteenth century and the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.
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Archipelagoes
Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel
Simone Pinet
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Archipelagoes examines insularity as the space for adventure in the Spanish book of chivalry, much like the space of the forest in French chivalric romance. In this innovative work, Simone Pinet explores the emergence of insularity as a privileged place for the location of adventure in Spanish literature in tandem with the cartographic genre of the isolario.

Pinet looks closely at Amadís de Gaula and the Liber insularum archipelagi as the first examples of these genres. Both isolario and chivalric romance (libros de caballerías) make of the island a flexible yet cohesive framework that becomes intrinsic to the construction of their respective genres. The popularity of these forms throughout the seventeenth century in turn bears witness to the numerous possibilities the archipelagic structure offered, ultimately taken up by the grand genres of each discipline—the atlas and the novel.

Moving from verbal descriptions to engravings and tapestry weavings, and from the chivalric politics and ethics proposed in the Amadís de Gaula to the Insula Barataria episode in Don Quixote, Pinet’s analysis of insularity and the use of the island structure reveals diverging roles for fiction, illuminating both the emergence of the novel and contemporary philosophical discussion on fiction.
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Architectural Representation in Medieval Textual and Material Culture
Hannah M. Bailey
Arc Humanities Press, 2023
Exploring the work of writers, illuminators, and craftspeople, this volume demonstrates the pervasive nature of architecture as a category of medieval thought. The architectural remnants of the past—from castles and cathedrals to the lowliest village church—provide many people with their first point of contact with the medieval period and its culture. Such concrete survivals provide a direct link to both the material experience of medieval people and the ideological and imaginative worldview which framed their lives. The studies collected in this volume show how attention to architectural representation can contribute to our understanding of not only the history of architectural thought but also the history of art, the intersection between textual and material culture, and the medieval experience of space and place.
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Architecture and Power in Early Central Europe
Marta Graczynska
Arc Humanities Press, 2022
The book presents the panorama of social, cultural, and religious changes in the states of the Piast, Přemyslid, and Arpad dynasties. Major change occurred in the tenth century and again at the turn of the eleventh century. Given the scarcity of written sources, the author employs an analysis of architectural forms which she applies to buildings founded by dukes, kings, and nobles at this period. Architecture serves as a reliable source of knowledge and can be successfully read as a text using comparative analysis, iconology, and semiotics. No piece of art appeared without an historical context: forms, functions, and styles are all documents created by its founders and creators. The conclusions of this research help us to understand the era that shaped the foundations of the Polish, Czech, and the Hungarian states.
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Archival Afterlives
Cixous, Derrida, and the Matter of Friendship
Laura Hughes
Northwestern University Press, 2024

A capacious analysis of a legendary intellectual friendship and the material legacies it left behind

Over the course of their decades-long friendship, Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida assembled overlapping archives of written experiments and exchanges that document a shared interest in their literary afterlives. In this incisive account, Laura Hughes shows how pushing against the limits of writing and of life itself means not only imagining but manifesting a community of future readers.

Archival Afterlives: Cixous, Derrida, and the Matter of Friendship examines the embodied nature of literary creation, taking letters, fragments, notes, and other ephemera as objects of critical analysis and care. Combining close readings of key texts and previously unexamined archival materials, Hughes traces critical connections between Cixous and Derrida, between the theoretical and the autobiographical, and between life writing and its limits. In putting deconstruction into dialogue with new material analyses and archive studies, Archival Afterlives positions this historical and intellectual relationship as a lens through which to reexamine the legacy of critical theory itself.

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Arcimboldo
Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
University of Chicago Press, 2010

In Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man’s chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together on canvas and panel to assemble the strange heads and faces that constitute one of Renaissance art’s most striking oeuvres. The first major study in a generation of the artist behind these remarkable paintings, Arcimboldo tells the singular story of their creation. 

Drawing on his thirty-five-year engagement with the artist, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann begins with an overview of Arcimboldo’s life and work, exploring the artist’s early years in sixteenth-century Lombardy, his grounding in Leonardesque traditions, and his tenure as a Habsburg court portraitist in Vienna and Prague. Arcimboldo then trains its focus on the celebrated composite heads, approaching them as visual jokes with serious underpinnings—images that poetically display pictorial wit while conveying an allegorical message. In addition to probing the humanistic, literary, and philosophical dimensions of these pieces, Kaufmann explains that they embody their creator’s continuous engagement with nature painting and natural history. He reveals, in fact, that Arcimboldo painted many more nature studies than scholars have realized—a finding that significantly deepens current interpretations of the composite heads.

Demonstrating the previously overlooked importance of these works to natural history and still-life painting, Arcimboldo finally restores the artist’s fantastic visual jokes to their rightful place in the history of both science and art.

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Are We There Yet?
Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism
Alison Byerly
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism connects the Victorian fascination with "virtual travel" with the rise of realism in nineteenth-century fiction and twenty-first-century experiments in virtual reality. Even as the expansion of river and railway networks in the nineteenth century made travel easier than ever before, staying at home and fantasizing about travel turned into a favorite pastime. New ways of representing place—360-degree panoramas, foldout river maps, exhaustive railway guides—offered themselves as substitutes for actual travel. Thinking of these representations as a form of "virtual travel" reveals a surprising continuity between the Victorian fascination with imaginative dislocation and twenty-first -century efforts to use digital technology to expand the physical boundaries of the self.

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Ariosto and the Arabs
Contexts for the Orlando Furioso
Mario Casari, Monica Preti, and Michael Wya
Harvard University Press

Among the most dynamic and influential literary texts of the European sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532) emerged from a world whose horizons were rapidly changing. The poem is a prism through which to examine various links in the chain of interactions that characterized the Mediterranean region from late antiquity through the medieval period into early modernity and beyond. Ariosto and the Arabs takes as its point of departure Jorge Luis Borges’s celebrated short poem “Ariosto y los Arabes” (1960), wherein the Furioso acts as the hinge of a past and future literary culture circulating between Europe and the Middle East. The Muslim “Saracen”—protagonist of both historical conflict and cultural exchange—represents the essential “Other” in Ariosto’s work, but Orlando Furioso also engages with the wider network of linguistic, political, and faith communities that defined the Mediterranean basin of its time.

The sixteen contributions assembled here, produced by a diverse group of scholars who work on Europe, Africa, and Asia, encompass several intertwined areas of analysis—philology, religious and social history, cartography, material and figurative arts, and performance—to shed new light on the relational systems generated by and illustrative of Ariosto’s great poem.

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Armed Ambiguity
Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe
Julie Koser
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Armed Ambiguity is a fascinating examination of the tropes of the woman warrior constructed by print culture—including press reports, novels, dramatic works, and lyrical texts—during the decades-long conflict in Europe around 1800.

In it, Julie Koser sheds new light on how women’s bodies became a battleground for competing social, cultural, and political agendas in one of the most pivotal periods of modern history. She traces the women warriors in this work as reflections of the social and political climate in German-speaking lands, and she reveals how literary texts and cultural artifacts that highlight women’s armed insurrection perpetuated the false dichotomy of "public" versus "private" spheres along a gendered fault line. Koser illuminates how reactionary visions of "ideal femininity" competed with subversive fantasies of new femininities in the ideological battle being waged over the restructuring of German society.

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Armenia
Masterpieces from an Enduring Culture
Theo Maarten van Lint and Robin Meyer
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2015
Between East and West, Armenian culture bears the influence of the country’s long history of foreign occupation, with a vibrant national art and literature that reinterprets elements from a wide variety of cultures, from the Sasanian dynasty of Iran to the Byzantine Empire.
           
Published to accompany an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Armenia: Masterpieces from an Enduring Culture draws on the Libraries’ magnificent collection of Armenian manuscripts and early printed books, as well as works of art and religious artifacts to tell the story of the region. The book contains nearly two hundred color illustrations of some of the most treasured masterpieces, from philosophical treatises to splendidly illuminated gospel manuscripts. Also including four essays by experts in the field, the book affords ample insight into the perseverance of the Armenian people in the face of tremendous adversity.
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Arms and the Woman
Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance
Francesca D'Alessandro Behr
The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Arms and the Woman: Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance by Francesca D’Alessandro Behr focuses on the classical reception in the works of female authors active in Venice during the Early Modern Age. Even in this relatively liberal city, women had restricted access to education and were subject to deep-seated cultural prejudices, but those who read and wrote were able, in part, to overcome those limitations.
 
In this study, Behr explores the work of Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella and demonstrates how they used knowledge of texts by Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle to systematically reanalyze the biased patterns apparent both in the romance epic genre and contemporary society. Whereas these classical texts were normally used to bolster the belief in female inferiority and the status quo, Fonte and Marinella used them to envision societies structured according to new, egalitarian ethics. Reflecting on the humanist representation of virtue, Fonte and Marinella insisted on the importance of peace, mercy, and education for women. These authors took up the theme of the equality of genders and participated in the Renaissance querelle des femmes, promoting women’s capabilities and nature.
 
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The Army of Truth
Selected Poems
Henrik Wergeland
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

One of Norway’s most celebrated literary figures of the nineteenth century, Henrik Wergeland worked tirelessly for the civil rights of Jews in Norway. He used the words and structure of his poetry to enliven the ideals of truth, freedom, and equality. This translated volume, containing several of Wergeland’s most prominent poems, beautifully encapsulates the compelling force of his message, allowing its enduring influence to benefit a wider contemporary audience.

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Arras Hanging
The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama
Rebecca Olson
University of Delaware Press, 2014
Textiles have long provided metaphors for storytelling: a compelling novel “weaves a tapestry” and we enjoy hearing someone “spin” a tale. To what extent, however, should we take these metaphors seriously? Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama reveals that in the early modern period, when cloth-making was ubiquitous and high-quality tapestries called arras hangings were the most valuable objects in England, such metaphors were literal. The arras in particular provided a narrative model for writers such as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, who exploited their audience’s familiarity with weaving to engage them in highly idiosyncratic and “hands on” ways. Specifically, undescribed or “blank” tapestries in the period’s fiction presented audiences with opportunities to “see” whatever they desired, and thus weave themselves into the story. Far more than background objects, literary and dramatic arras hangings have much to teach us about the intersections between texts and textiles at the dawn of print, and, more broadly, about the status of visual art in post-Reformation England.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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Art after Philosophy
Boris Pasternak's Early Prose
Elena Glazov-Corrigan
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Art after Philosophy: Boris Pasternak’s Early Prose, by Elena Glazov-Corrigan, redefines an area in Slavic studies which has suffered from neglect for several decades, namely, Pasternak’s early prose narratives. In her bold new study, Glazov-Corrigan analyzes the conceptual networks of thought Pasternak developed when he turned to literature after abandoning the study of Neo-Kantianism in Marburg during the summer of 1912. This book shows conclusively that Pasternak’s knowledge of philosophy is inseparable from his prose works, even though in his early stories and novellas (1913–1918) philosophical ideas operate neither as discrete textual units nor as micro-elements or clusters of possible signification. In the early Pasternak, philosophy becomes a narrative art, a large-scale narrative frame, a manner of seeing rather than of constructing reality.
 
After Roman Jakobson’s famous 1935 essay, which characterized the early Pasternak as a “virtuoso of metonymy,” in contrast to the metaphoric Mayakovsky, no other approach has been able to generate comparable scholarly influence. The present study takes up the implicit challenge of this critical impasse. Entering into a debate with Jakobson’s findings, Art after Philosophy illuminates Pasternak’s boldest artistic experiments and suggests to his readers entirely new ways of approaching not only his early but also his later writing.
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Art and Artifact in Austen
Anna Battigelli
University of Delaware Press, 2020
Jane Austen distinguished herself with genius in literature, but she was immersed in all of the arts. Austen loved dancing, played the piano proficiently, meticulously transcribed piano scores, attended concerts and art exhibits, read broadly, wrote poems, sat for portraits by her sister Cassandra, and performed in theatricals. For her, art functioned as a social bond, solidifying her engagement with community and offering order. And yet Austen’s hold on readers’ imaginations owes a debt to the omnipresent threat of disorder that often stems—ironically—from her characters’ socially disruptive artistic sensibilities and skill. Drawing from a wealth of recent historicist and materialist Austen scholarship, this timely work explores Austen’s ironic use of art and artifact to probe selfhood, alienation, isolation, and community in ways that defy simple labels and acknowledge the complexity of Austen’s thought.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance
A Contribution to the History of Collecting
Julius von Schlosser
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021

For the first time, the pioneering book that launched the study of art and curiosity cabinets is available in English.

Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance) is a seminal work in the history of art and collecting. Originally published in German in 1908, it was the first study to interpret sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of wonder as precursors to the modern museum, situating them within a history of collecting going back to Greco-Roman antiquity. In its comparative approach and broad geographical scope, Schlosser’s book introduced an interdisciplinary and global perspective to the study of art and material culture, laying the foundation for museum studies and the history of collections. Schlosser was an Austrian professor, curator, museum director, and leading figure of the Vienna School of art history whose work has not achieved the prominence of his contemporaries until now.
 
This eloquent and informed translation is preceded by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s substantial introduction. Tracing Schlosser’s biography and intellectual formation in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, it contextualizes his work among that of his contemporaries, offering a wealth of insights along the way.

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The Art and Government Service of Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei (c. 1421 - c. 1495)
Visual Propaganda and Undercover Agency for the Republic of Siena
Anabel Thomas
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
In 1454 the Sienese painter Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei faced litigation from the Mercanzia in Siena for defaulting on a contract from one of the leading Franciscan confraternities in the city. Two fellow Sienese artists, Giovanni di Paolo and Sano di Pietro, had recently completed a new altarpiece for the same entity. Anabel Thomas considers how the two commissions were linked and questions why Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei’s brief to fresco the confraternity chapel remained unfinished. In a wide ranging analysis of mainly unpublished records, focussing on the artist’s association with key members of Sienese society, fellow artisans and government officials, Thomas concludes that Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei might have honoured his contract had he not become immersed in the military strategy, diplomacy and visual propaganda of the Republic of Siena. +
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Art and Its Geographies
Configuring Schools of Art in Europe (1550-1815)
Ingrid Vermeulen
Amsterdam University Press

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Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia
Shells, Bodies, and Materiality
Anna K Grasskamp
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, and European practices of oceanic exploitation in the framework of a transcultural history of art with an understanding of maritime material culture as gendered. Perceiving the ocean as mother of all things, as womb and birthplace, Chinese and European artists and collectors exoticized and eroticized shells’ shapes and surfaces. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production, source and supply between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and maritime networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical boundaries. It also links the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and creative practices.
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Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Nigel Aston
Reaktion Books, 2009
Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed monumental upheavals in both the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the repercussions rippled down to the churches’ religious art forms. Nigel Aston now chronicles here the intertwining of cultural and institutional turmoil during this pivotal century.

            The sustained popularity of religious art in the face of competition from increasingly prevalent secular artworks lies at the heart of this study. Religious art staked out new spaces of display in state institutions, palaces, and private collections, the book shows, as well as taking advantage of patronage from monarchs such as Louis XIV and George III, who funded religious art in an effort to enhance their monarchial prestige. Aston also explores the motivations and exhibition practices of private collectors and analyzes changing Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward art. The book also examines purchases made by corporate patrons such as charity hospitals and religious confraternities and considers what this reveals about the changing religiosity of the era as well.
 
An in-depth historical study, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe will be essential for art history and religious studies scholars alike.
 
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Art and Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy
Guy Tal
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
The figure of the witch is familiar from the work of early modern German, Dutch, and Flemish artists, but much less so in the work of their Italian counterparts. Art and Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy seeks to explore the ways in which representations of witchcraft emerged from and coincided with the main cultural currents and artistic climate of an epoch chiefly celebrated for its humanistic and rational approaches. Through an in-depth examination of a panoply of arresting paintings, engravings, and drawings—variously portraying a hag-ridden colossal phallus, a horror-stricken necromancer dodging the devil’s scrabbling claws, and a nocturnal procession presided over by an infanticidal crone—Guy Tal offers new ways of reading witchcraft images through and beyond conventional iconography. Artists such as Parmigianino, Alessandro Allori, Leonello Spada, and Angelo Caroselli effected visual commentaries on demonological notions that engaged their audience in a tantalizing experience of interpretation.
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Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich
Edited by Richard A. Etlin
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich explores the ways in which the Nazis used art and media to portray their country as the champion of Kultur and civilization. Rather than focusing strictly on the role of the arts in state-supported propaganda, this volume contributes to Holocaust studies by revealing how multiple domains of cultural activity served to conceptually dehumanize Jews and other groups.

Contributors address nearly every facet of the arts and mass media under the Third Reich—efforts to define degenerate music and art; the promotion of race hatred through film and public assemblies; views of the racially ideal garden and landscape; race as portrayed in popular literature; the reception of art and culture abroad; the treatment of exiled artists; and issues of territory, conquest, and appeasement. Familiar subjects such as the Munich Accord, Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, and Lebensraum (Living Space) are considered from a new perspective. Anyone studying the history of Nazi Germany or the role of the arts in nationalist projects will benefit from this book.

Contributors:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
David Culbert
Albrecht Dümling
Richard A. Etlin
Karen A. Fiss
Keith Holz
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Paul B. Jaskot
Karen Koehler
Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien
Jonathan Petropoulos
Robert Jan van Pelt
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Gröning
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Art in a Disrupted World
Poland 1939–1949
Agata Pietrasik
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2020
With Art in a Disrupted World, art historian Agata Pietrasik presents a study of artistic practices that emerged in Poland during and after World War II. Pietrasik highlights examples of artworks by a number of Polish-born artists that were created in concentration camps and ghettos, in exile, and during the years of social, political, and cultural disintegration immediately following the war. She draws attention to the ethics of artistic practice as a method of fighting to preserve one’s own humanity amid even the most dehumanizing circumstances. Breaking out of entrenched historical timelines and traditional forms of narration, this book brings together drawings, paintings, architectural designs, and exhibitions, as well as literary and theatrical works created in this time period, to tell the story of Polish life in wartime.

​Employing an accessible, essayistic style, Pietrasik offers a new look at life in the ten years following the outbreak of World War II and features artists—including Marian Bogusz, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, and Józef Szajna—whose work has not yet found substantial audiences in the English-speaking world. Her reading of the art and artists of this period strives to capture their autonomous artistic language and poses critical questions about the ability of traditional art history writing to properly accommodate artworks created in direct response to traumatic experiences.
 
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Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 2008
From the European revolutions of 1848 through the Italian independence movement, the American Civil War, and the French Commune, the era Albert Boime explores in this fourth volume of his epic series was, in a word, transformative. The period, which gave rise to such luminaries as Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, was also characterized by civic upheaval, quantum leaps in science and technology, and the increasing secularization of intellectual pursuits and ordinary life. In a sweeping narrative that adds critical depth to a key epoch in modern art’s history, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle shows how this turbulent social environment served as an incubator for the mid-nineteenth century’s most important artists and writers.

Tracing the various movements of realism through the major metropolitan centers of Europe and America, Boime strikingly evokes the milieus that shaped the lives and works of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Émile Zola, Honoré Daumier, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and the earliest photographers, among countless others. In doing so, he spearheads a powerful new way of reassessing how art emerges from the welter of cultural and political events and the artist’s struggle to interpret his surroundings. Boime supports this multifaceted approach with a wealth of illustrations and written sources that demonstrate the intimate links between visual culture and social change. Culminating at the transition to impressionism, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle makes historical sense of a movement that paved the way for avant-garde aesthetics and, more broadly, of how a particular style emerges at a particular moment.
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Art Inscribed
Essays on Ekphrasis in Spanish Golden Age Poetry
Emilie L. Bergmann
Harvard University Press, 1979

Emilie Bergmann discusses the poetic tradition of ekphrasis, the description of visual works of art, from Garcilaso de la Vega to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The first two essays give a historical perspective: Lope de Vega reflects a traditional hierarchical view of the artist in harmony with the divine creator, while the controversial Luis de Góngora projects a Promethean image.

The remaining three essays concern the relationship between verbal and visual systems of signs: Góngora and Paravicino write inscriptions upon the work of El Greco; Lope and Góngora interpret allegorical paintings, and several Baroque poets exploit the possibilities of the Petrarchan portrait. Dr. Bergmann demonstrates that ekphrasis exposes the boundaries between the arts and the limitations of artistic imitation, while using that limitation as a source for poetic wit.

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The Art of Childbirth
A Seventeenth-Century Midwife’s Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant: A Bilingual Edition
Marie Baudoin
Iter Press, 2022
The extraordinary story of a seventeenth-century French midwife and her treatise on childbirth.
 
In 1671, Marie Baudoin (1625–1700), head midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu of Clermont-Ferrand, sent a treatise on the art of childbirth to her powerful Parisian patron, Dr. Vallant. The story of how Baudoin’s knowledge and expertise as a midwife came to be expressed, recorded, and archived raises the question: Was Baudoin exceptional because she was herself extraordinary, or because her voice has reached us through Vallant’s careful archival practices? Either way, Baudoin’s treatise invites us to reconsider the limits of what we thought we knew midwives “could be and do” in seventeenth-century France. Grounding Marie Baudoin’s text in a microanalysis of her life, work, and the Jansenist network between Paris and Clermont-Ferrand, this book connects historiographies of midwifery, Jansenism, hospital administration, public health, knowledge and record-keeping, and women’s work, underscoring both Baudoin’s capabilities and the archival accidents and intentions behind the preservation of her treatise in a letter.
 
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Art of Death
Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500 - c.1800
Nigel Llewellyn
Reaktion Books, 1991
How did our ancestors die? Whereas in our own day the subject of death is usually avoided, in pre-Industrial England the rituals and processes of death were present and immediate. People not only surrounded themselves with memento mori, they also sought to keep alive memories of those who had gone before. This continual confrontation with death was enhanced by a rich culture of visual artifacts. In The Art of Death, Nigel Llewellyn explores the meanings behind an astonishing range of these artifacts, and describes the attitudes and practices which lay behind their production and use.

Illustrated and explained in this book are an array of little-known objects and images such as death's head spoons, jewels and swords, mourning-rings and fans, wax effigies, church monuments, Dance of Death prints, funeral invitations and ephemera, as well as works by well-known artists, including Holbein, Hogarth and Blake.
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The Art of Describing
Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century
Svetlana Alpers
University of Chicago Press, 1983
"The art historian after Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich is not only participating in an activity of great intellectual excitement; he is raising and exploring issues which lie very much at the centre of psychology, of the sciences and of history itself. Svetlana Alpers's study of 17th-century Dutch painting is a splendid example of this excitement and of the centrality of art history among current disciples. Professor Alpers puts forward a vividly argued thesis. There is, she says, a truly fundamental dichotomy between the art of the Italian Renaissance and that of the Dutch masters. . . . Italian art is the primary expression of a 'textual culture,' this is to say of a culture which seeks emblematic, allegorical or philosophical meanings in a serious painting. Alberti, Vasari and the many other theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance teach us to 'read' a painting, and to read it in depth so as to elicit and construe its several levels of signification. The world of Dutch art, by the contrast, arises from and enacts a truly 'visual culture.' It serves and energises a system of values in which meaning is not 'read' but 'seen,' in which new knowledge is visually recorded."—George Steiner, Sunday Times

"There is no doubt that thanks to Alpers's highly original book the study of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century will be thoroughly reformed and rejuvenated. . . . She herself has the verve, the knowledge, and the sensitivity to make us see familiar sights in a new light."—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books
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The Art of Distances
Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-Century Literature
Corina Stan
Northwestern University Press, 2018

In The Art of Distances, Corina Stan identifies an insistent preoccupation with interpersonal distance in a strand of twentieth-century European and Anglophone literature that includes the work of George Orwell, Paul Morand, Elias Canetti, Iris Murdoch, Walter Benjamin, Annie Ernaux, Günter Grass, and Damon Galgut. Specifically, Stan shows that these authors all engage in philosophical meditations, in the realm of literary writing, on the ethical question of how to live with others and how to find an ideal interpersonal distance at historical moments when there are no obviously agreed-upon social norms for ethical behavior.

Bringing these authors into dialogue with philosophers such as Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Helmuth Plessner, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas, Peter Sloterdijk, Guillaume le Blanc, and Pierre Zaoui, Stan shows how the question of the right interpersonal distance became a fundamental one for the literary authors under consideration and explores what forms and genres they proposed in order to convey the complexity of this question. Albeit unknowingly, she suggests, they are engaged in fleshing out what Roland Barthes called “a science, or perhaps an art, of distances.”

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The Art of Experiment
Parmigianino at The Courtauld
Edited by Ketty Gottardo and Guido Rebecchini
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022
A showcase of the Courtauld Gallery’s outstanding Parmigianino collection.

Accompanying an exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery, this stunning catalog presents works by the Renaissance artist Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino (1503–1540).

Fundamentally a draftsman at heart, Parmigianino drew relentlessly during his relatively short life, and around a thousand of his drawings have survived. The Courtauld’s collection comprises twenty-four sheets. In preparation for the catalog, new photography and technical examinations have been carried out on all the works, revealing two new drawings that were previously unknown, hidden underneath their historic mounts. They have also helped to better identify connections between some of the drawings and the finished paintings for which they were conceived. This stunning illustrated catalog presents the whole Courtauld collection and sheds light on an artist who approached every technique with unprecedented freedom and produced innovative works that are still admired by artists and collectors today.
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The Art of Good Manners
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014
While many bemoan the lack of good manners in society today, the most courteous among us would feel mightily out of place across the dining table from a Dowager Countess. Upholding the highest standards of social decorum was of utmost importance for the 1920s British upper class and even more so for the aspiring middle class that sought to emulate it. Yet the path to perfect comportment seemed strewn—then as now—with pitfalls, from befuddling arrays of silverware to less-than-gracious houseguests. Originally published in the 1920s, this petite guide offers time-honored advice to avoid such pitfalls.
           
The Art of Good Manners ranges broadly across topics including courtship, children’s behavior, and civilized conversation before taking the reader through each course at a dinner party, where readers are reminded to neither gurgle the soup nor to make haste with the fruit course since “to peel an orange, apple or pear with a fruit knife and fork requires some practice.”
           
Charmingly presented, The Art of Good Manners is by turns humorously old-fashioned and timeless, and it makes the perfect gift for all who miss this elegant bygone era.
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The Art of Letter Writing
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014
While many bemoan the lack of good manners in society today, the most courteous among us would feel mightily out of place across the dining table from a Dowager Countess. Upholding the highest standards of social decorum was of utmost importance for the 1920s British upper class and even more so for the aspiring middle class that sought to emulate it. Yet the path to perfect comportment seemed strewn—then as now—with pitfalls, from befuddling arrays of silverware to less-than-gracious houseguests. Originally published in the 1920s, the petite guides in the Bodleian Library’s series offer time-honored advice to avoid such pitfalls.

The Art of Letter Writing provides more than fifty examples of well-crafted correspondence that will lend confidence whether one needs to break off an engagement, accept an invitation to a country house weekend, complain about a courier, or write to a countess.
           
Charmingly presented, The Art of Good Letter Writing is by turns humorously old-fashioned and timeless, and it makes the perfect gift for all who miss this elegant bygone era.
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The Art of Lobbying the EU
More Machiavelli in Brussels (revised edition)
M. P. C. M. van Schendelen
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
Every day in Brussels, countless governmental and civil society interest groups seek to influence the policies of the European Union (EU). Many groups, once they have established themselves in the EU capital, apply the insights of Public Affairs (PA) management, the modern art of lobbying. Many PA practitioners in the EU as well as academics specialised in EU and PA studies developed fresh insights on ‘how to influence the EU better’. This manual brings together the most up-to-date collection of PA expertise available to anyone desiring to enhance the success of their efforts to influence the EU. This new edition of the best-selling title is filled with new details, cases, findings and practices. This fully revised and updated fourth edition of the 2002 bestseller offers compelling new insights into the most advanced practices of influencing the decision-making in the European Union’s corridors of power. The author’s uniquely privileged position as advisor to a wide range of lobby groups from several different countries throws much-needed light on best practice and success in public affairs management.
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The Art of Memory in Exile
Vladimir Nabokov & Milan Kundera
Hana Pichova
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001
In The Art of Memory in Exile, Hana Pí chová explores the themes of memory and exile in selected novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera. Both writers, Pí chová argues, stress how personal and cultural memory serves as a creative means of overcoming the artist’ s and exile’ s loss of homeland. In their virtuoso displays of literary talent, Nabokov and Kundera showcase the strategies that allow their protagonists to succeed as é migré s: a creative fusing of past and present through the prism of the imagination.
 
Pí chová closely analyzes two novels by each author: the first written in exile (Nabokov's Mary and Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) and a later, pivotal novel in each writer's career (Nabokov's The Gift and Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being). In all four texts, these authors explore how the kaleidoscope of personal and cultural memory confronts a fragmented and untenable present, contrasting the lives of fictional é migré s who fail to bridge the gap between past and present with those é migré s whose rich artistic vision allows them to transcend the trials of homelessness.
 
By juxtaposing these novels and their authors, Pí chová provides a unique perspective on each writer's vast appeal and success. She finds that in the work of Nabokov and Kundera, the most successful exiles express a vision that transcends both national and temporal boundaries.
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The Art of Renaissance Venice
Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, 1460-1590
Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In the first contemporary single-volume survey of the three arts of Venice—painting, sculpture, and architecture—Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters offer an important counterbalance to the traditional orientation toward painting as the city's preeminent art by focusing on architecture as the essential Venetian art. They begin their study in 1460, when Venice was one of the key powers of Italy, and end with the death of Tintoretto in 1594, a period of waning international power. In the process, they define the distinctly Venetian terms by which the city and its culture should be understood. With over three hundred illustrations and an exhaustive bibliography, this volume makes an impressive contribution to art historical scholarship.

"The historical aspect of this book is splendid, but where it excels is in its fearless and thought-provoking critical judgements. . . . it will lead both beginners and experts to new joys."—David Ekserdjian, Times Literary Supplement

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The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 1997

Helen Vendler, widely regarded as our most accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as an incomparable guide to some of the best-loved poems in the English language.

In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, Vendler reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out not only new levels of import in particular lines, but also the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect. The commentaries—presented alongside the original and modernized texts—offer fresh perspectives on the individual poems, and, taken together, provide a full picture of Shakespeare’s techniques as a working poet. With the help of Vendler’s acute eye, we gain an appreciation of “Shakespeare’s elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical imaginative intent.”

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The Art of Telling
Essays on Fiction
Frank Kermode
Harvard University Press, 1983
Frank Kermode assesses the revolutionary transformations in literary criticism over the last fifteen years and places them in historical perspective. Examining novels ranging in scope from a 1907 bestseller to the avant-garde works of various periods, he includes such writers as Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Michel Butor, and Thomas Pynchon.
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The Art of the Sonnet
Stephanie Burt and David Mikics
Harvard University Press, 2010

Few poetic forms have found more uses than the sonnet in English, and none is now more recognizable. It is one of the longest-lived of verse forms, and one of the briefest. A mere fourteen lines, fashioned by intricate rhymes, it is, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it, “a moment’s monument.” From the Renaissance to the present, the sonnet has given poets a superb vehicle for private contemplation, introspection, and the expression of passionate feelings and thoughts.

The Art of the Sonnet collects one hundred exemplary sonnets of the English language (and a few sonnets in translation), representing highlights in the history of the sonnet, accompanied by short commentaries on each of the poems. The commentaries by Stephanie Burt and David Mikics offer new perspectives and insights, and, taken together, demonstrate the enduring as well as changing nature of the sonnet. The authors serve as guides to some of the most-celebrated sonnets in English as well as less-well-known gems by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets. Also included is a general introductory essay, in which the authors examine the sonnet form and its long and fascinating history, from its origin in medieval Sicily to its English appropriation in the sixteenth century to sonnet writing today in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other English-speaking parts of the world.

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The Art of Thomas Bewick
Diana Donald
Reaktion Books, 2013
The Art of Thomas Bewick is the first book to interpret the art of the wood engraver Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) and set it in the context of history, revealing the connections between Bewick’s political and religious views—reflections of the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment—and the character of his images.
 
Bewick was both an important contributor to the history of British ornithology and a highly original artist and printmaker. His depictions of the natural world, particularly of British birds, set new standards of realism and authenticity, while his graphic scenes of country life were unparalleled in their thoughtfulness, mingling humor and tragedy. His lively depictions of dogs, horses and other animals can also be seen as the expression of a new insight and sensibility: part of the growing movement for the prevention of cruelty to animals.
 
Allowing Bewick’s art to be viewed in a broad context of the artistic and scientific culture of his age, this lavishly illustrated book will appeal to naturalists, especially ornithologists and birdwatchers; historians of science, art and country life; those interested in the history of animal rights and protection; and students of painting and print media. 
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The Art of Time
Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Peninsular Novel
Nina L. Molinaro
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question “what should I do?” has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. One of the foremost theorists of ethics during the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that “the ethical” is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Levinas’s voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or “otherness,” which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness.

Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Art, Politics, and Development
Philipp H Lepenies
Temple University Press, 2013
In his groundbreaking study, Art, Politics and Development, Philipp Lepenies contributes to the ongoing controversy about why the track record of development aid is so dismal. He asserts that development aid policies are grounded in a specific way of literally looking at the world. This “worldview” is the result of a mental conditioning that began with the invention of linear perspective in Renaissance art. It not only triggered the emergence of modern science and brought forth our Western notion of progress, but ultimately, development as well.
Art, Politics, and Development examines this process by pulling from a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, literature, and social science. Lepenies not only explains the shortcomings of modern aid in a novel fashion, he also proposes how aid could be done differently.

In the series Politics, History and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey
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Artaud 1937 Apocalypse
Letters from Ireland
Antonin Artaud
Diaphanes, 2019
Antonin Artaud’s journey to Ireland in 1937 marked an extraordinary—and apocalyptic—turning point in his life and career. After publishing the manifesto The New Revelations of Being about the “catastrophic immediate-future,” Artaud abruptly left Paris for Ireland, remaining there for six weeks without money. Traveling first to the isolated island of Inishmore off Ireland’s western coast, then to Galway, and finally to Dublin, Artaud was eventually arrested as an undesirable alien, beaten by the police, and summarily deported back to France. On his return, he spent nine years in asylums, remaining there through the entire span of World War II.

During his fateful journey, Artaud wrote letters to friends in Paris which included several “magic spells,” intended to curse his enemies and protect his friends from the city’s forthcoming incineration and the Antichrist’s appearance. (To André Breton, he wrote: “It’s the Unbelievable—yes, the Unbelievable—it’s the Unbelievable which is the truth.”) This book collects all of Artaud’s surviving correspondence from his time in Ireland, as well as photographs of the locations he traveled through. Featuring an afterword and notes by the book’s translator, Stephen Barber, this edition marks the seventieth anniversary of Artaud’s death.
 
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Artaud and His Doubles
Kimberly Jannarone
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Artaud and His Doubles is a radical re-thinking of one of the most influential theater figures of the twentieth century. Placing Artaud's writing within the specific context of European political, theatrical, and intellectual history, the book reveals Artaud's affinities with a disturbing array of anti-intellectual and reactionary writers and artists whose ranks swelled catastrophically between the wars in Western Europe.

Kimberly Jannarone shows that Artaud's work reveals two sets of doubles: one, a body of peculiarly persistent received interpretations from the American experimental theater and French post-structuralist readings of the 1960s; and, two, a darker set of doubles---those of Artaud's contemporaries who, in the tumultuous, alienated, and pessimistic atmosphere enveloping much of Europe after World War I, denounced the degradation of civilization, yearned for cosmic purification, and called for an ecstatic loss of the self. Artaud and His Doubles will generate provocative new discussions about Artaud and fundamentally challenge the way we look at his work and ideas.

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Artaud the Mômo
Antonin Artaud
Diaphanes, 2020
Artaud the Mômo is Antonin Artaud’s most extraordinary poetic work from the brief final phase of his life, from his return to Paris in 1946 after nine years of incarceration in French psychiatric institutions to his death in 1948. This work is an unprecedented anatomical excavation carried through in vocal language, envisioning new gestural futures for the human body in its splintered fragments. With black humor, Artaud also illuminates his own status as the scorned, Marseille-born child-fool, the “mômo” (a self-naming that fascinated Jacques Derrida in his writings on this work). Artaud moves between extreme irreligious obscenity and delicate evocations of his immediate corporeal perception and his sense of solitude. The book’s five-part sequence ends with Artaud’s caustic denunciation of psychiatric institutions and of the very concept of madness itself.

This edition is translated by Clayton Eshleman, the acclaimed foremost translator of Artaud’s work. This will be the first edition since the original 1947 publication to present the work in the spatial format Artaud intended. It also incorporates eight original drawings by Artaud—showing reconfigured bodies as weapons of resistance and assault—which he selected for that edition, after having initially attempted to persuade Pablo Picasso to collaborate with him. Additional critical material draws on Artaud’s previously unknown manuscript letters written between 1946 and 1948 to the book’s publisher, Pierre Bordas, which give unique insights into the work from its origins to its publication.
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Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe
Mary D. Garrard
Reaktion Books, 2023
An accessible introduction to the life of the seventeenth-century's most celebrated women artists, now in paperback.

Artemisia Gentileschi is by far the most famous woman artist of the premodern era. Her art addressed issues that resonate today, such as sexual violence and women’s problematic relationship to political power. Her powerful paintings with vigorous female protagonists chime with modern audiences, and she is celebrated by feminist critics and scholars.
 
This book breaks new ground by placing Gentileschi in the context of women’s political history. Mary D. Garrard, noted Gentileschi scholar, shows that the artist most likely knew or knew about contemporary writers such as the Venetian feminists Lucrezia Marinella and Arcangela Tarabotti. She discusses recently discovered paintings, offers fresh perspectives on known works, and examines the artist anew in the context of feminist history. This beautifully illustrated book gives for the first time a full portrait of a strong woman artist who fought back through her art.
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Arthur Schnitzler in Great Britain
An Examination of Power and Translation
Nicole Robertson
University of London Press, 2022
An examination of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s reception in Great Britain.
 
The “amoral voice” of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was one of the major figures of European modernist literature. Throughout his lifetime and after his death, his writing enjoyed substantial domestic and international success, yet the arrival of his dramatic works in Great Britain was plagued by false starts, short runs, and inconsistencies. Only with Tom Stoppard’s adaptations of Das weite Land and Liebelei, as Undiscovered Country and Dalliance respectively, were Schnitzler’s plays finally produced at the National Theatre.

This fascinating book studies the history of Schnitzler’s reception in Great Britain to unearth evidence of power in transcultural and translingual migrations. Surveying the field from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day, Nicole Robertson’s analysis of published translations, critical reviews, correspondence, and unpublished drafts provides expansive insight into the process of translating from page to stage. This book presents exhaustive and detailed scholarship on a fascinating, if far from smooth, journey, raising fundamental questions about the nature of authorship.
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Articulating Difference
Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth Century
Sophie Salvo
University of Chicago Press
Enriches contemporary debates about gender and language by probing the histories of the philosophy and sciences of language.
 
Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers the prehistories of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors but, rather, the inheritors and adaptors of the notion of gender and language’s interrelation. Particularly during the long nineteenth century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated “women’s languages” and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined “feminine” sign systems, and in doing so they not only deemed sex a necessary category of language but also produced a plethora of gendered tropes and fictions, which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines.
 
Articulating Difference charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded by highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities.
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Artificial Generation
Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity
Christina Parker-Flynn
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Artificial Generation: Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity investigates the intersection of film theory and nineteenth-century literature, arguing that the depth of amalgamation that occurred within literary representation during this era aims to replicate an illusion of life and its sensations, in ways directly related to broader transitions into our modern cinematic age.  A key part of this evolution in representation relies on the continual re-emergence of the artificial woman as longstanding expression of masculine artistic subjectivity, which, by the later nineteenth century, becomes a photographic and filmic drive. Moving through the beginning of film history, from Georges Méliès and other “silent” filmmakers in the 1890s, into more contemporary movies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the book analyzes how films are often structured around the prior century’s mythic and literary principles, which now serve as foundation for film as medium—a phantom form for life’s re-presentation. Artificial Generation provides a crucial reassessment of the longstanding, mutual exchange between cinematic and literary reproduction, offering an innovative perspective on the proto-cinematic imperative of simulation within nineteenth-century literary symbolism.
 
 
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Artisans, Objects and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy
The Material Culture of the Middling Class
Paula Hohti Erichsen
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Did ordinary Italians have a ‘Renaissance’? This book presents the first in-depth exploration of how artisans and small local traders experienced the material and cultural Renaissance. Drawing on a rich blend of sixteenthcentury visual and archival evidence, it examines how individuals and families at artisanal levels (such as shoemakers, barbers, bakers and innkeepers) lived and worked, managed their household economies and consumption, socialised in their homes, and engaged with the arts and the markets for luxury goods. It demonstrates that although the economic and social status of local craftsmen and traders was relatively low, their material possessions show how these men and women who rarely make it into the history books were fully engaged with contemporary culture, cultural customs and the urban way of life.
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The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality
Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth Century Novel
Susan Mooney
The Ohio State University Press, 2008

Through the twentieth century, from colonial Ireland to the United States, and from Franco's Spain to late Soviet Russia, to include sexuality in a novel signaled social progressiveness and artistic innovation, but also transgression. Certain novelists—such as James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Luis Martín-Santos, and Viktor Erofeev—radicalized the content of the novel by incorporating sexual thoughts, situations, and fantasies and thus portraying repressed areas of social, cultural, political, and mental life.


In The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel, Susan Mooney extensively examines four modernist and postmodernist novels that prompted in their day harsh external censorship because of their sexual content—Ulysses, Lolita, Time of Silence, and Russian Beauty. She shows how motifs of censorship, with all its restrictions, pressures, rules, judgments, and forms of negation, became artistically embedded in the novels' plots, characters, settings, tropes, and themes. These novels contest censorship's status quo and critically explore its processes and power. This study reveals the impact of censorship on literary creation, particularly in relation to the twentieth century's growing interest in sexuality and its discourses.
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Artists' Things
Rediscovering Lost Property from Eighteenth-Century France
Katie Scott
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
Histories of artists’ personal possessions shed new light on the lives of their owners.

Artists are makers of things. Yet it is a measure of the disembodied manner in which we generally think about artists that we rarely consider the everyday items they own. This innovative book looks at objects that once belonged to artists, revealing not only the fabric of the eighteenth-century art world in France but also unfamiliar—and sometimes unexpected—insights into the individuals who populated it, including Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun.

From the curious to the mundane, from the useful to the symbolic, these items have one thing in common: they have all been eclipsed from historical view. Some of the objects still exist, like Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s color box and Jacques-Louis David’s table. Others survive only in paintings, such as Jean-Siméon Chardin’s cistern in his Copper Drinking Fountain, or in documents, like François Lemoyne’s sword, the instrument of his suicide. Several were literally lost, including pastelist Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s pencil case. In this fascinating book, the authors engage with fundamental historical debates about production, consumption, and sociability through the lens of material goods owned by artists.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is at www.getty.edu/publications/artists-things/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.
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Arts of Dying
Literature and Finitude in Medieval England
D. Vance Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2020
People in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory—but they were still unable to talk about death. Their inability wasn’t due to religion, but philosophy: saying someone is dead is nonsense, as the person no longer is. The one thing that can talk about something that is not, as D. Vance Smith shows in this innovative, provocative book, is literature.

Covering the emergence of English literature from the Old English to the late medieval periods, Arts of Dying argues that the problem of how to designate death produced a long tradition of literature about dying, which continues in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot, and Gillian Rose. Philosophy’s attempt to designate death’s impossibility is part of a literature that imagines a relationship with death, a literature that intensively and self-reflexively supposes that its very terms might solve the problem of the termination of life. A lyrical and elegiac exploration that combines medieval work on the philosophy of language with contemporary theorizing on death and dying, Arts of Dying is an important contribution to medieval studies, literary criticism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy.
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Arts of Impoverishment
Beckett, Rothko, Resnais
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit
Harvard University Press, 1993

“How almost true they sometimes almost ring!” Samuel Beckett’s character rues his words. “How wanting in inanity!” A person could almost understand them! Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett’s writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko’s paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais’s films sometimes will? Why, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows us how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original—and profoundly anti-modernist—renunciation of art’s authority.

Our culture, while paying little attention to art, puts great faith in its edifying and enlightening value. Yet Beckett’s threadbare plays Company and Worstward Ho, so insistent on their poverty of meaning; Rothko’s nearly monochromatic paintings in the Houston Chapel; Resnais’s intensely self-contained, self-referential films Night and Fog and Muriel all seem to say, “I have little to show you, little to tell you, nothing to teach you.” Bersani and Dutoit consider these works as acts of resistance; by inhibiting our movement toward them, they purposely frustrate our faith in art as a way of appropriating and ultimately mastering reality.

As this book demonstrates, these artists train us in new modes of mobility, which differ from the moves of an appropriating consciousness. As a form of cultural resistance, a rejection of a view of reality—both objects and human subjects—as simply there for the taking, this training may even give birth to a new kind of political power, one paradoxically consistent with the renunciation of authority. In its movement among these three artists, Arts of Impoverishment traces a new form of movement within art.

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The Arts of Iran in Istanbul and Anatolia
Seven Essays
Olga M. Davidson
Harvard University Press

Many spectacular examples of Persianate art survive to the present day, safeguarded in Istanbul and beyond—celebrating the glory of the Persian Empire (and, later, the Ottoman Empire). These include illustrated books, featuring exquisitely painted miniatures artfully embedded in the texts of literary masterpieces, as well as tile decorations in medieval Anatolian architecture.

Because of their beauty, many Persianate books were deliberately disassembled, their illustrations re-used in newer books or possessed as isolated art objects. As fragments found their way to collections around the world, the essential integration of text and image in the original books was lost. Six art historians and a literary historian—instrumental in reconstruction efforts—trace the long journey from the destructive dispersal of fragments to the joys of restoration.

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The Arundel Lyrics. The Poems of Hugh Primas
Christopher J. McDonough
Harvard University Press, 2010

This volume presents two complementary medieval anthologies containing lyrics by two outstanding Latin poets of the second half of the twelfth century. The poet Peter of Blois was proclaimed by a contemporary of his to be a master composer of rhythmic verse. Peter’s secular love-lyrics gathered in the Arundel manuscript give substance to that claim. Written with a technical virtuosity that rivals the metrical display of Horatian lyric, the poems give eloquent and learned expression to the cult of secular love that emerged in the twelfth ­century.

The collection is further augmented by verse as varied as Christmas poems and satires on the venality of the Roman Curia and immoral bishops, including a famous lament about church corruption by Walther of Châtillon.

The cleric Hugh Primas won recognition and fame for compositions in which he reflects upon his experiences, good and bad, while traveling around the cities of northern France (such as the important sees of Rheims and Sens) in search of patronage. Artistic in conception and execution, the poems are memorable for the witty and often acerbic tone with which Primas engages the holders of ecclesiastical power.

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as mornings and mossgreen I. Step to the window
Friederike Mayröcker
Seagull Books, 2023
Poetic prose meditations translated superbly into English.
 
Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The last book of hers to be published during her lifetime, as mornings and moosgreen I. Step to the window is an elliptical and, if at times cryptic, deeply personal, playful, and highly poetic collection of experiences, memories, dreams, desires, fears, visions, observations, and peregrinations through landscapes both real and imagined. The volume bears witness to her unique late lyrical style of pyrotechnical cut-up. Among many others, her beloved Derrida, Duchamp, Hölderlin, and Jean-Paul all appear, almost like guides, as Mayröcker bravely makes her way through infirmity, old age, and loneliness, prolonging her time as a prolific writer as much as possible.
 
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Asinou across Time
Studies in the Architecture and Murals of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Cyprus
Annemarie Weyl Carr
Harvard University Press, 2012
The church of Asinou is among the most famous in Cyprus. Built around 1100, the edifice, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is decorated with accretions of images, from the famous fresco cycle executed shortly after initial construction to those made in the early seventeenth century. During this period the church served the adjacent monastery of the Mother of God ton Phorbion ("of the vetches"), and was subject to Byzantine, Lusignan (1191-1474), Venetian (1474-1570), and Ottoman rule. This monograph is the first on one of Cyprus's major diachronically painted churches. Written by an international team of renowned scholars, the book sets the accumulating phases of Asinou's art and architecture in the context of the changing fortunes of the valley, of Cyprus, and of the eastern Mediterranean. Chapters include the first continuous history of the church and its immediate setting; a thorough analysis of its architecture; editions, translations, and commentary on the poetic inscriptions; art-historical studies of the post-1105/6 images in the narthex and nave; a detailed comparative analysis of the physical and chemical properties of the frescoes; and a diachronic table of paleographical forms.
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At No Time
Scenes and Dialogues
Ilse Aichinger
Seagull Books, 2023
Dramatic sketches full of surprising, unpredictable twists and turns from a major twentieth-century German-language author.
 
A member of the Gruppe 47 writers’ group which sought to renew German-language literature after World War II, Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016) achieved great acclaim as a writer of fiction, poetry, prose, and radio drama. The vignettes in At No Time each begin in recognizable situations, often set in Vienna or other Austrian cities, but immediately swerve into bizarre encounters, supernatural or fantastical situations. Precisely drawn yet disturbingly skewed, they are both naturalistic and disjointed, like the finest surrealist paintings. Created to be experienced on the page or on the radio rather than the stage, they echo the magic realism of her short stories. Even though they frequently take a dark turn, they remain full of humor, agility, and poetic freedom.
 
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At Play in the Tavern
Signs, Coins, and Bodies in the Middle Ages
Andrew Cowell
University of Michigan Press, 1999
At Play in the Tavern is a lively study of the tavern, inn, and brothel in the literature of medieval France. Cowell's original treatment of the medieval tavern as a counterpoint to orthodox institutions considers such delicious transgressions as drinking, gambling, prostitution, theft, usury, and "foile" (a peculiar combination of madness and sinfulness). This innovative study of both market-place values and literary culture unveils a raucous culture opposed to the dominant models of society coming out of the Augustinian tradition. Cowell contrasts the literary domains of the carnal and the orthodox and innovatively assigns physical space to each. The literature of the tavern is shown to represent the possibility of escape from ecclesiastical models of economic and literary exchange that insisted on equality, utility, and charity by offering a vision of exuberant excess. Cowell concludes that drama, poetry, and other secular texts, when considered as a whole, are ultimately complicit in a revolution favoring an ethic of profit.
Drawing on recent work in medieval literature, history, popular culture, gender studies, and sign theory, Andrew Cowell employs a wide range of traditional and, until now, little known sources to show the unity and importance of a countercultural literary mode.
Andrew Cowell is Assistant Professor, Department of French and Italian, University of Colorado at Boulder.
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At the Limit of the Obscene
German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter
Erica Weitzman
Northwestern University Press, 2021

As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.

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Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science
Georges Didi-Huberman
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929) is a prescient work of mixed media assemblage, made up of hundreds of images culled from antiquity to the Renaissance and arranged into startling juxtapositions. Warburg’s allusive atlas sought to illuminate the pains of his final years, after he had suffered a breakdown and been institutionalized. It continues to influence contemporary artists today, including Gerhard Richter and Mark Dion.
 
In this illustrated exploration of Warburg and his great work, Georges Didi-Huberman leaps from Mnemosyne Atlas into a set of musings on the relation between suffering and knowledge in Western thought, and on the creative results of associative thinking. Deploying writing that delights in dramatic jump cuts reminiscent of Warburg’s idiosyncratic juxtapositions, and drawing on a set of sources that ranges from ancient Babylon to Walter Benjamin, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science is rich in Didi-Huberman’s trademark combination of elan and insight.
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Auftritt Schweiz
Das Lesebuch
Edited by Franziska Schläpfer
Scheidegger and Spiess, 2014

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The Author and His Publisher
Lectures Delivered in Mainz and Austin
Siegfried Unseld
University of Chicago Press, 1980
As head of Suhrkamp Verlag, a premier German publishing house, Siegfried Unseld is eminently qualified to write about the relationship between authors and their publishers—and he does so here with engaging partisan enthusiasm. Long familiar with what he terms the Janus-headed nature of the publishing profession, Unseld considers the dual responsibilities of a publisher: in one direction, his responsibility for the material success of his firm; and in the other, his responsibility to the intellectual ideals and spiritual requirements of his authors.

Through close examination of four writers, Unseld shows how the author's personality can affect the publisher's dilemma. Hermann Hesse, by virtue of his loyalty and his desire for financial independence, enjoyed an exemplary relationship with his publishers. With Bertolt Brecht it was all confusion; with Rainer Maria Rilke, a one-author-one-publisher lifetime alliance; with Swiss poet Robert Walser, a mire of difficulties ("Each book printed," he once said, was "a grave for its author").
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Authoring the Past
History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia
Jaume Aurell
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Authoring the Past surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and politics during the period. Jaume Aurell examines texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century—including the Latin Gesta comitum Barcinonensium and four texts in medieval Catalan: James I’s Llibre dels fets, the Crònica of Bernat Desclot, the Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, and the Crònica of Peter the Ceremonious—and outlines the different motivations for the writing of each. 

For Aurell, these chronicles are not mere archaeological artifacts but rather documents that speak to their writers’ specific contemporary social and political purposes. He argues that these Catalonian counts and Aragonese kings were attempting to use their role as authors to legitimize their monarchical status, their growing political and economic power, and their aggressive expansionist policies in the Mediterranean. By analyzing these texts alongside one another, Aurell demonstrates the shifting contexts in which chronicles were conceived, written, and read throughout the Middle Ages.

The first study of its kind to make medieval Catalonian writings available to English-speaking audiences, Authoring the Past will be of interest to scholars of history and comparative literature, students of Hispanic and Romance medieval studies, and medievalists who study the chronicle tradition in other languages.

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Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century
Dustin Griffin
University of Delaware Press, 2014
This book deals with changing conditions and conceptions of authorship in the long eighteenth century, a period often said to have witnessed the birth of the modern author. It focuses not on authorial self-presentation or self-revelation but on an author’s interactions with booksellers, collaborators, rivals, correspondents, patrons, and audiences. Challenging older accounts of the development of authorship in the period as well as newer claims about the “public sphere” and the “professional writer,” it engages with recent work on print culture and the history of the book. Methodologically eclectic, it moves from close readings to strategic contextualization. The book is organized both chronologically and topically. Early chapters deal with writers – notably Milton and Dryden – at the beginning of the long eighteenth century, and later chapters focus more on writers — among them Johnson, Gray, and Gibbon — toward its end. Looking beyond the traditional canon, it considers a number of little-known or little-studied writers, including Richard Bentley, Thomas Birch, William Oldys, James Ralph, and Thomas Ruddiman. Some of the essays are organized around a single writer, but most deal with a broad topic – literary collaboration, literary careers, the republic of letters, the alleged rise of the “professional writer,” and the rather different figure of the “author by profession.”

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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front cover of Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun
Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun
María Vela y Cueto
Iter Press, 2016

When María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.

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Avenues of Translation
The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing
Galasso, Regina
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 SAMLA Studies Book Award — Edited Collection

Cities both near and far communicate in a variety of ways. Travel between, through, and among urban centers initiates contact, and cities themselves are sites of ever-changing cultural and historical encounters. Predictable and surprising challenges and opportunities arise when city borders are crossed, voices meet, and artistic traditions find their counterparts. Using the Latin word for “translation,” translatio, or “to carry across,” as a point of departure, Avenues of Translation explores how translation perpetuates, diversifies, deepens, and expands the literary production of cities in their greater cultural context, and how translation shapes an understanding of and access to a city's past and present literary and cultural practices. Thinking about translation and the city is a way to tell the backstories of the cities, texts, and authors that are united by acts of translation.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Axion Esti
Odysseus Elytis
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979
The Axion Esti is probably the most widely read volume of verse to have appeared in Greece since World War II and remains a classic today. Those who follow the music of Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis have been especially drawn to Odysseus Elytis's work, his prose is widely considered a mirror to the revolutionary music of Theodorakis. The "autobiographical" elements are constantly colored by allusion to the history of Greece, thus, the poems express a contemporary consciousness fully resonant with those echoes of the past that have served most to shape the modern Greek experience.
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The Azure Cloister
Thirty-Five Poems
Carlos Germán Belli
Swan Isle Press, 2021
New translations of poems by prominent Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli.
 
This selection of poems by internationally renowned Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly injustice with the “red midnight sun” of hope. Belli’s contemplative verses express faith in language, in bodily joy, and in artistic form. These thirty-five poems explore public and domestic spaces of confinement and freedom, from paralysis to the ease of a bird in its “azure cloister.” 
 
Translations by Karl Maurer retain Belli’s original meter, follow his complex syntax, and meet the challenges of his poetic language, which ranges from colloquial Peruvian slang to the ironic use of seventeenth-century Spanish. This bilingual edition also includes notes and reflections on Belli and on the art of translation. Beyond introducing American readers to a major presence in world poetry, The Azure Cloister offers a fresh approach to the translation of contemporary verse in Spanish.
 
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