History of art Books
John Wiley & Sons Jacksons Wars A.Y. Jackson the Birth of the
Book SynopsisA captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada’s best-known artists, Jackson’s Wars follows A.Y. Jackson’s education and progress as a painter at home and in Europe. Douglas Hunter captures the life of a complex man and the crucial events and relationships behind the creation of Canada’s best-known art collective.Trade Review“Douglas Hunter offers a fresh narrative that deepens our understanding not only of A.Y. Jackson’s personality and artistic development but also of the broader cultural history of Canada before and during the First World War. Meticulously researched, full of sharp insights and compelling, little-known details, Jackson’s Wars is a wonderfully immersive read – and a huge contribution to the study of Canadian art and history.” Ross King, author of Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven and Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of Water Lilies"This is a superbly researched book on a period in the life of A.Y. Jackson that is too often lightly treated, yet was crucial to the development of his social and artistic ideals. Douglas Hunter brings to this study his knowledge of military history, biography and art, and it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the work of A.Y. Jackson and the history of the Group of Seven.” Charles C. Hill, retired senior curator of Canadian Art, National Gallery of Canada
£42.75
John Wiley & Sons Expo 67 and Its World Staging the Nation in the
Book SynopsisExpo 67 and Its World brings together Québécois, Canadian, First Nations, and international scholars to propose a reappraisal of Expo 67 as an opportunity for collective re-imagining across a range of social spaces, from the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples to the increasingly global ambit of youth culture, medicine, film, and finance.
£103.50
McGill-Queen's University Press Expo 67 and Its World
Book SynopsisExpo 67 and Its World brings together Québécois, Canadian, First Nations, and international scholars to propose a reappraisal of Expo 67 as an opportunity for collective re-imagining across a range of social spaces, from the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples to the increasingly global ambit of youth culture, medicine, film, and finance.
£999.99
McGill-Queen's University Press Atiqput Inuit Oral History and Project Naming
Book SynopsisAtiqput is the first book-length study of Project Naming, the photo-based history research initiative established by the Inuit school Nunavut Sivuniksavut in collaboration with Library and Archives Canada. Through oral testimony and photography, Atiqput rewrites settler societies’ historical record and challenges a legacy of colonial visualization.Trade Review“Atiqput brings together statements by Inuit artists, elders, and activists with work by project facilitators and scholars to produce a vibrant tapestry that at once mourns the losses of the past, treasures the traces that can be regained, and celebrates the continued power of Inuit cultural forms.” Peter Kulchyski, University of Manitoba and author of Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice: Begade Shutagot’ine and the Sahtu Treaty
£32.40
McGill-Queen's University Press The Architecture of Empire
Book SynopsisThis book considers the large-scale public architecture associated with French imperialism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India, Siam, and Vietnam, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indochina. A comprehensive study of structures that rank among the most fascinating examples of intercultural exchange in the history of global empires.Trade Review“Erudite and engaging, The Architecture of Empire is a major achievement in the fields of architectural history and postcolonial studies. One of its most interesting contributions is the way it shows how nostalgia for the past – or for an imagined past – informed French colonial and architectural policy in later eras.” Meredith Martin, New York University
£58.90
McGill-Queen's University Press Made for the Eye of One Who Sees
Book SynopsisBringing together recent scholarship on Islamic art, architecture, and archaeology being conducted in Canada and by Canadian scholars, Made for the Eye of One Who Sees provides the first survey of the Canadian contributions to this developing field. It covers topics from across the Islamic world dating from the eighth century to the present.Trade Review“A book for the times, Made for the Eye of One Who Sees presents an engaging account of the successes and diversity in the field of Islamic art, architecture, and archaeology in Canada.” Alan Walmsley, director of the Materiality in Islam Research Initiative, University of Copenhagen“Made for the Eye of One Who Sees represents a significant advance in Islamic art and history, bringing new materials and new interpretations into view.” Margaret Graves, Indiana University and author of Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam
£48.60
McGill-Queen's University Press Configurations of a Cultural Scene
Book SynopsisIn the 1920s, a remarkable number of young writers and artists lived and worked in Madrid, resulting in a tightly-woven network of both personal and artistic relationships. Configurations of a Cultural Scene explores this growing community of artists with a focus on how sites of face-to-face interaction fostered creative work and forged identities.Trade Review“Configurations of a Cultural Scene is a major step forward in illuminating the vibrant and often radical cultural activities of the 1920s. Moreover, it demonstrates the crucial importance of collective engagement in fomenting artistic innovation.” Juli Highfill, University of Michigan and author of Modernism and Its Merchandise: The Spanish Avant-Garde and Material Culture, 1920–1930
£71.10
McGill-Queen's University Press Hush Little Baby The Invention of Infant Sleep
Book SynopsisHush Little Baby details the transformation of infant sleep from an unremarkable event to a precarious stage of life that attracted interest from medical experts, artists, parents, and entrepreneurs. Ventura shows how ideas about babies’ sleep that circulated in nineteenth-century France created many of the expectations keeping parents awake today.Trade Review“Hush Little Baby is path-breaking in its use of material culture – baby cradles, bedding, clothing – to explore the development of ideas around infant sleep and their relationship to art. Gal Ventura reads both images and texts skilfully, with reference to theoretical modes of understanding, showing how they created many of the standards and expectations that still keep parents awake today.” Sarah Curtis, San Francisco State University
£71.10
McGill-Queen's University Press Variable Conditions Paracomputational Arts in
Book SynopsisVariable Conditions recovers Canadian instances of early encounters between computational media and contemporary art in the late twentieth century. The book provides valuable new perspectives and new contexts for understanding computer art pioneers, sketching a new landscape of surprising connections between scientific and artistic institutions.Trade Review“By celebrating and reminding readers of artists who are well-known but underappreciated – such as Michael Snow, Robert Adrian X, David Rokeby, and Les Levine – as well as introducing unknown artists who deserve recognition, Variable Conditions shows how early developments in computational arts in Canada were of global significance. It will appeal to anyone interested in the history of contemporary art, especially given how artists working in this area in the 1960s and onwards did so much to anticipate our current digital cultural condition.” Charlie Gere, author of Digital Culture
£71.10
McGill-Queen's University Press Women Environment and Networks of Empire
Book SynopsisWomen, Environment, and Networks of Empire is the first detailed study of the art and correspondence of Elizabeth Gwillim and her sister Mary Symonds in South India. The book explores what their work reveals about natural history, the natural environment, colonialism, and women’s lives at the turn of the nineteenth century.Trade Review“For those who value close historical study of a time and a place and new historical sources, this book – and the trove of primary materials unearthed by the researchers of the Gwillim project that it contains – gives us a window onto British, Indian, and imperial worlds, nineteenth-century material culture, foodways, clothing and textiles, and natural history, as well as women's work in art and science.” Ann Shteir, York University and editor of Flora's Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada
£52.70
McGill-Queen's University Press The Movers
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£31.50
Columbia University Press East Asian Art American Culture
Book SynopsisThis is a discussion of the contribution and effects of East Asian art on American culture. The author portrays the assembling of the great American collections of East Asian art and explains how this art became part of the cultural consciousness of the people of the USA.
£70.40
Columbia University Press Old Taoist The Life Art and Poetry of Kodôjin
Book SynopsisIn the literary and artistic milieu of early modern Japan the Chinese and Japanese arts flourished side by side. Kodojin, the Old Taoist (1865-1944), was the last of these great poet-painters in Japan. This book brings together 150 of Kodojin's Chinese poems (introduced and translated by Jonathan Chaves).Trade Review"The story of Addiss's patient unearthing of this unusual life and work, very nearly lost to history, itself makes a gripping narrative, and is a triumph of modern scholarship." - David Pollack, University of Rochester "This richly informative volume bring the reclusive painter-poet to life." - Karen M. Gerhart, Northern Arizona UniversityTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments 1. Kodojin's Life and Art 2. Kodojin's Japanese Poetry 3. Kodojin and the T'ao Ch'ien Tradition in Kanshi Poetry, by Jonathan Chaves 4. Kodojin's Chinese Poetry, translated by Jonathan Chaves 5. A Note on Kodojin and the Art and Literature of His Period, by J. Thomas Rimer Epilogue Notes Index
£28.80
Columbia University Press Geometries of Silence
Book SynopsisBased on little-known or hitherto unpublished material, and enhanced by a wealth of rarely seen illustrations, this book offers access to the aesthetics of neoclassical Europe from a new perspective: landscape painting and interior decoration.Trade ReviewMany years ago, Emil Kauffman illuminated the topic of the architects of the Age of Reason; Anna Ottani Cavina's [title] is a new episode of the very same history, the history of modernity. -- Enrico Castelnuovo L'Indice The success of Anna Ottani Cavina's enterprise, allowing us henceforth to look differently at some luminous drawings and paintings, makes one yearn all the more to be able one day to look at the ambitious history paintings of the late eighteenth-century with the same penetration and sympathy. -- Philippe Bordes Burlington MagazineTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Antiquity as Future: The Past as a Model for Aesthetic Renewal 2. Living in the "Ancient Style": European Residences and the Italian Model 3. Landscapes of Reason: The Quest for Basic Geometric Forms in Landscape Painting from David to Corot Notes Index
£46.75
Columbia University Press The Invention of Painting in America Leonard
Book SynopsisShows how early American painters transformed themselves from provincial followers of the established traditions of Europe into some of the innovative artists in the world. This book explores not only the status of artists and their personal relationship to their work but also the dialogue between the artist and society.Trade ReviewWithin the modest confines of this trim and attractive volume...Columbia art historian Rosand...tells the big story of how American painting grew and struggled from colonial obscurity to its stunning mid-20th-century coming-of-age. Publishers Weekly Readers will be reinspired, and their souls and minds reinvented...Highly recommended. Choice Indispensable...Rosand provides a unifying, and uniquely satisfying, view of painting in America. -- Margaret Moorman Columbia Magazine An academic treatise that will stimulate artists and fellow scholars. -- Stephen May American Arts QuarterlyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Illustrations Foreword 1. Declarations of Independence 2. Style and the Puritan Aesthetic 3. Artists of Recognized Standing 4. Subjects of the Artist Afterword Notes Index
£70.40
Columbia University Press Philosophers on Art from Kant to the
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsPreface Introduction: Art and Philosophy 1. Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant 2. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 3. How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error | The Will to Power as Art, by Friedrich Nietzsche 4. Beyond the Pleasure Principle | Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, by Sigmund Freud 5. The Lugubrious Game, by Georges Bataille 6. A Small History of Photography, by Walter Benjamin 7. Nietzsche's Overturning of Platonism | The Origin of the Work of Art, by Martin Heidegger 8. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I | Of the Gaze as Object Petit a, by Jacques Lacan 9. Las Meninas, by Michel Foucault 10. Society, by Theodor Adorno 11. The Work of Art and Fantasy, by Sarah Kofman 12. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, by Roland Barthes 13. Giotto's Joy | Holbein's Dead Christ, by Julia Kristeva 14. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, by Jacques Derrida 15. Hysteria, by Gilles Deleuze 16. Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?, by Jean-Francois Lyotard 17. Privation Is Like a Face, by Giorgio Agamben 18. The Vestige of Art, by Jean-Luc Nancy 19. Art and Philosophy, by Alain Badiou 20. The Janus-Face of Politicized Art, by Jacques Ranciere Notes Bibliography Index
£27.00
Columbia University Press The Aesthetics of Uncertainty
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA salutary reminder of a fact often sensed but rarely articulated: the uncertain, the indirect, and the oblique are especially at home in our contemporary context of artistic creation and interpretation, and we would do well to investigate them for what they are in and of themselves, rather than seeing them merely as obstacles to be gotten beyond in pursuit of something more perceptually stable and, we too easily think, epistemologically worthy. -- Garry L. Hagberg CAA ReviewsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Desire for Certainty-and the Timeliness of Doubt 1. Groundless Beauty: Feminism and the Aesthetics of Uncertainty 2. English Art and Principled Aesthetics 3. The Iconic and the Allusive: The Case for Beauty in Post-Holocaust Art 4. The Impolite Boarder: Kitaj's "Diasporist" Art and Its Critical Response 5. "Degenerate Art" in Britain: Refugees, Internees and Visual Culture 6. The Sociological Image Afterword: Aesthetics and Ethics in the Twenty-first Century Notes Index
£55.00
Columbia University Press Unnatural Wonders
Book SynopsisArgues that aesthetic considerations no longer play a central role in the experience and critique of art. Instead art addresses us in our humanity, as men and women who seek meaning in the unnatural wonders of art, a meaning that philosophy and religion are unable to provide.Trade ReviewBorrowing his concept from Hegel, respected critic Arthur C. Danto observes that unlike the centuries of art made for spiritual needs, the art of our time has generally lost the power to communicate on its own and must be explained, because we have only an external relationship with it. Danto sympathetically assesses Damien Hirst (sliced-up sharks suspended in formaldehyde) and eloquently explains why some initially impenetrable art might have compelling statements to make, but he doesn't spare artists he feels are not pulling their weight... among the most sensible, intelligent, logical, and accessible art criticism of the last five years. Kirkus Danto uses his revered position to illuminate his subjects' cultural and art-historical contexts in order to give the public helpful tools for thinking about the art they are experiencing... This enlightened collection of essays is an essential documentation of recent art history, brimming with valuable reminders of how art has gotten where it is today. RES magazine His musings on art in the wake of 9/11 are incisive and moving. Booklist A welcome respite for insiders and a friendly introduction to aesthetics. Publishers Weekly One of our pre-eminent art critics... [Unnatural Wonders] serves as a good introduction to his work, as well as a good introduction to contemporary art. -- Kenny Tanemure Asian Week To look at a work with Danto is to see it within the context of contemporary art. -- Barry Gewen New York Times Book Review [A] brilliant, provocative collection of essays. -- Jackie Wullschlager Financial Times Magazine A valuable collection of art criticism. The Art BookTable of ContentsPreface to the Columbia University Press Edition Preface Introduction: Art Criticism After the End of Art Whitney Biennial 2000 "Making Choices" at MoMA Chardin Tilman Riemenschneider Damien Hirst Barbara Kruger Yoko Ono Sean Scully Paul McCarthy Sol LeWitt Renee Cox: Yo Mama's Last Supper William Kentridge Picasso Erotique Art and 9/11 Philip Guston Philip Guston: The Nixon Drawings Alberto Giacometti Norman Rockwell Surrealism and Eroticism Artemisia Gentileschi Gerhard Richter Barnett Newman and the Heroic Sublime Joan Mitchell The Art of 9/11: One Year Later Reflections on Robert Mangold's Curled Figure and Column Paintings The Park Avenue Cubists Leonardo's Drawings Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle Christian Schad and the Sachlichkeit of Sex Kazimir Malevich Max Beckmann Whitney Biennial 2004 John Currin Dieter Roth Banality and Celebration: The Art of Jeff Koons Two Installations by Joshua Neustein Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art; Or: What Ever Happened to Beauty? The World as Warehouse: Fluxus and Philosophy Painting and Politics The Fly in the Fly Bottle: The Explanation and Critical Judgment of Works of Art Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press A Brief History of the Masses Three Revolutions
Book SynopsisDrawing on examples from literature, politics, philosophy, and additional pieces of art, this book reveals surprising parallels between the people's political representation and their aesthetic representation.Trade ReviewA compact yet comprehensive survey... Jonsson's globally wide-ranging and rich discussion raises important questions. Choice "From his detailed analyses of three monumental works of art, Stefan Jonsson constructs an erudite and elegant meditation on the developments of modern European art and literature, out of which emerges, throughout the course of the book, an intriguing and illuminating view of the possibilities of revolution and democracy that remain for us today. -- Michael HardtTable of ContentsList of Illustrations 1789: Jacques-Louis David, The Tennis Court Oath 1. Seizing the Floor 2. The Shadow of Democracy 3. The Number of People 4. The Swinish Multitude 5. Social Depths 6. The Hydra 7. Marianne 8. Les Miserables 9. The Barricade 10. Making Monkey 11. Smokescreens 12. Mass Grave 1889: James Ensor, Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889 13. The Crucified 14. The Belgian's Glory 15. Divorce 16. Hallucinations 17. Society Degree Zero 18. The Nigger 19. The Modern Breakthrough 20. Songs of the Fool 21. Homo Sacer 1989: Alfredo Jaar, They Loved It So Much, the Revolution 22. The Beloved 23. The Backside of the State 24. The Empty Throne 25. Political Violence 26. With Nails of Gold 27. Of Men and Beasts 28. Desperados 29. Autoimmunity 30. Saints 31. Complaints 32. The Baggage of the Barbarians 33. Departure Afterword Notes Index
£42.75
Columbia University Press Sacred Exchanges
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewSacred Exchanges is beautifully written. One of its main strengths lies in its nuanced, interdisciplinary, and comparative approach. It skillfully negotiates among different cultural perspectives and theoretical approaches to art and politics, ranging from indigenous studies, feminism, and postcolonial studies to psychoanalysis and philosophy. Equally at home in all of these modes of interpretation, Robyn Ferrell at the same time exposes their limitations in the context of intercultural encounter with Western and non-Western art forms. This book strikes a felicitous balance between innovative theoretical analysis, the engaging interpretation of particular artists, and timely discussions of specific legal cases regarding the recognition of aboriginal rights. -- Ewa Ziarek, State University of New York, Buffalo, and author of An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy Through the lens of the Australian Aboriginal art movement Ferrell confronts the reader with some surprising truths about the world we live in and the myopic and murderous callousness which makes us inattentive to these realities. -- Joshua Paetku Evening HazeTable of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Photographs Writing on Art Art Utopia Dreaming Abstraction Striking Color The Real Power of Color How Painting Began Culture Global Art, Local Knowledge The Idea of the Museum In Translation A White Thing Image Logic Photojournalism Gender Stolen Culture Litte Children Are Sacred Mum's the Word Crisis in Representation Race and Gender Law Common Law Feeling for Justice Apartheid Discovery Radical Difference Emily Inc. References Index
£46.75
Columbia University Press Dialectical Passions
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewGail Day's Dialectical Passions is a uniquely important book. Day argues persuasively that the powerful negations that characterize the finest Marxist thinking about art architecture to come from the postwar New Left is characterized by real--and passionate--dialectical instability. It is largely this, in her view, that prevents it from being fully subsumed by the hegemonic forms of late capitalist culture. The negations practiced by these writers, most notably T. J. Clark and Manfredo Tafuri, have been uncompromisingly realistic and resolutely non-romantic. At the same time, she argues, they share with Marx a belief, however endangered it now is, in the necessity of a genuinely radical political alternative. Day's book makes evident the value of such thinking in resisting the fixed polarities and relentless pessimism of much present-day cultural theory and its increasingly empty critiques of capitalist commodification. -- Alexander Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor, Department of History of Art, University of Michigan A wonderfully enjoyable examination of some of the key figures, debates, and points of intrigue in art theory influenced by the New Left. -- Matthew Flisfeder PUBLICTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. T. J. Clark and the Pain of the Unattainable Beyond 2. Looking the Negative in the Face: Manfredo Tafuri and the Venice School of Architecture 3. Absolute Dialectical Unrest, Or, the Dizziness of a Perpetually Self-Engendered Disorder 4. The Immobilization of Social Abstraction Afterword: Abstract and Transitive Possibilities Notes Index
£52.70
Columbia University Press The Homoerotics of Orientalism
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA masterpiece and rare achievement; a completely new and convincing reading of a body of politicized knowledge that has dominated much of the field in the last thirty years. The entire concept of Orientalism will have to be totally rethought following Boone's book. -- Moshe Sluhovsky, Vigevani Chair in European Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem This book offers an erudite and timely interpretation of the phenomenon of homoeroticism in orientalism in the Near and Middle East. Treating a broad range of Western representations of the "Orient", Boone provides an important corrective to Edward Said's Orientalism by addressing the powerful ways in which Europeans writers' and artists' representations of homoeroticism in the "Orient" have covertly enabled the appeal of orientalism as a predominantly male mode of discourse. -- Ali Behdad, John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature at UCLA; author of Belated Travelers and A Forgetful Nation. Joseph Boone has opened a triple dialogue between Western perceptions (and fantasies) of Middle-Eastern homoeroticism, queer theory as it has evolved over the past decade, and the growing field of sexual studies in the Islamic world. Read The Homoerotics of Orientalism and discover that Boone has taken the necessary steps in offering oneself up to unsuspected, multiple ways of being. As he says, "how might the terms 'homoeroticism' and 'Orientalism', the two operative words of my title, each find itself refigured, wrenched apart and re-conjoined to create new meanings? -- Richard Howard, Poet, Columbia University A veritable tour de force. Boone's groundbreaking, timely book challenges us to revisit a wide range of orientalist visual and textual artifacts produced over the last four hundred and fifty years in which the recurrence of homoerotic desire contests heterosexual norms, colonial control, and race and gender hierarchies. The wealth of textual and visual materials and the broad selection of figures are, in and of themselves, extraordinary contributions to scholarship. A must read for scholars both of Anglo-European-American and Middle-Eastern and Islamicate gender and sexuality studies. -- Sahar Amer, Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies, University of Sydney Orientalism will never be the same after Boone's extraordinary book, which disrupts the heterosexual template implicit in Edward Said's and refashions the cultural traffic between East and West as inescapably reciprocal, dialectical, and multiple-in a word, global. As much an intervention in visual culture as it is a revelatory history of the literatures of both West and East, The Homoerotics of Orientalism with its staggering erudition and critical finesse courageously recasts the stark divide of Occident and Orient that produced Orientalism as mutually constitutive, creative, and informing as it has been destructive, and it does so in the form of a critical gift-a book of utmost generosity, judiciousness, and political imagination- that carries its own charge of love. -- Jennifer Wicke, Professor of English, University of Virginia Boone shatters the old binaries of Western Orientalist discourses AND the field of postcolonial studies and offers much needed insight for the field of sexuality studies in the Muslim world. A remarkable achievement! -- Janet Afary, Mellichamp Chair in Global Religion and Modernity and Professor of Religious Studies and Feminism, University of California, Santa Barbara Once every decade or so, a book appears that revolutionizes the field of GLBT studies... [The Homoerotics of Orientalism] is a book that post-colonialists will seize immediately and argue over endlessly--but one that will also permeate the wider GLBT intellectual landscape. Every reader will benefit. Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide This remarkable study models an ethics of cross-cultural reading that exposes, with nuance and economy, the crucial role played by the homoerotics of Orientalism in shaping the world as we know it today. -- Christopher Harrity The Advocate [A] substantial and fascinating book. -- Robert Aldrich H-Histsex The Homoerotics of Orientalism is an outstanding and bold intellectual discussion of transgressive sexualities in both the Islamic and the Western worlds... A well-researched book that puts forth a new thinking on Orientalism... Highly recommended. Choice Important and engaging volume. Journal of Modern History Meticulously researched. Modern PhilologyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Preface: Re-Orienting Sexuality Part I: Theory and History 1. Histories of Cross-Cultural Encounter, Orientalism, and the Politics of Sexuality 2. Beautiful Boys, Sodomy, and Hamams: A Textual and Visual History of Tropes Part II: Geographies of Desire 3. Empire of 'Excesse,' City of Dreams: Homoerotic Imaginings in Istanbul and the Ottoman World 4. Epic Ambitions and Epicurean Appetites: Egyptian Stories I 5. Colonialism and Its Aftermaths, Gide to Chahine: Egyptian Stories II Part III: Modes and Genres 6. Queer Modernism and Middle Eastern Poetic Genres: Appropriations, Forgeries, and Hoaxes 7. Looking Backward: Homoeroticism in Miniaturist Painting and Orientalist Art 8. Looking Again: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Visual Cultures Notes Index
£102.00
Columbia University Press Refiguring the Spiritual
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewBy its inventive hybridization of traditional academic specialties, Mark C. Taylor's work as a whole has forced questions which few other present-day writers, especially in America, have been able to do. In this regard, Refiguring the Spiritual is not simply a significant contribution to a specific field, but to the arts and letters in total. -- Carl Raschke, University of Denver, and senior editor, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory Promiscuously interdisciplinary, Mark C. Taylor weaves together a multitude of sources in Refiguring the Spiritual-taking from poetry, art history, critical theory, philosophy, science, economics, and theology-and demonstrates how the visual arts can reveal fundamental truths about existence in the world-a world that lies beyond the limits of mimetic representation and language. -- Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation In a climate in which the art market is continuing to break records without explanation, Mark C. Taylor offers a unique parallel between the workings of finance and the fine art arena. The initial pages of this book contain the clearest description I've read regarding the mechanics of finance in this new millennium. Moreover, Taylor's appreciation of work by Jim Turrell and Andy Goldsworthy, two of my favorite artists, caught me completely off guard with his philosophic depth and aesthetic sensitivity, all from recounted personal experiences. -- Stephen Hannock, painter Taylor leaves readers to wonder if "art might redeem the world." Recommended. Choice a book that will stimulate and provoke to a deeper engagement with the works discussed. -- George Pattison Art and ChristianityTable of Contents1. Financialization of Art 2. Fat: Living Art 3. Creative Morphogenesis 4. Creation of the World 5. Cure of Ground 6. After thought Notes Credits and Permissions Index
£999.99
Columbia University Press Facing the Abyss
Book SynopsisGeorge Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment. Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and connections across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions.Trade ReviewBringing together art, literature, philosophy, and music, Hutchinson has created a kind of critical mosaic that produces insights that open up the 1940s as a cultural field, grounded in the ungrounded processes of art as incalculable experience. The juxtapositions of unconnected figures induce in the reader a new vision of the era and new dimensions of the authors and works discussed. It is a work of exceptionally deft intellectual choreography, conducted with enviable precision and concision. -- Ross Posnock, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. When Literature Mattered2. Popular Culture and the Avant-Garde3. Labor, Politics, and the Arts4. The War5. America! America! A Jewish Renaissance?6. A Rising Wind: “Literature of the Negro” and Civil Rights7. Queer Horizons8. Women and Power9. Culture and EcologyEpilogue: One WorldNotesIndex
£28.50
Columbia University Press Lasting Impressions
Book SynopsisJesse Matz considers its two legacies—positive and negative—to explain impressionism’s true contemporary significance.Trade ReviewLasting Impressions shrewdly explores a fascinating, strikingly under-researched topic, namely that impressionism remains a powerful cultural presence in ways that have tended to elude definition. Examining a variety of areas such as advertising, painting, music, and postcolonial and contemporary fiction, Jesse Matz argues that impressionism's seminal configuration of the project of modern representation has continued to shape cultural discourses and practices long after modernism. An extremely interesting and important work. -- Max Saunders, King's College London Lasting Impressions revitalizes our understanding of impressionism by showing just how strong its legacies are. Ranging widely across painting, music, narrative, and film, Matz argues in eloquent readings that in opening a gap between the authority of our perceptions and the stories we construct from them, impressionism leads to the most vibrant and intractable aesthetic problems we inherit today. This book will be invaluable to anyone interested in the unstable divide between art and its co-optation, high culture and kitsch, real experience and artistic fraud. -- Tamar Katz, author of Impressionist Subjects: Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England Brilliant and original in its arguments, impressive in its range and command of reference, and written in an invigorating style, Lasting Impressions will be essential reading for anyone interested in impressionism, the modernist movement in the arts, and the wider question of how modern culture has imagined and reimagined the status of art and the aesthetic. Every chapter is full of rewarding insights and provocative, challenging ideas. -- Adam Parkes, University of Georgia Written with the same elegance that characterizes its enduring subject, Lasting Impressions moves nimbly across time to uncover the indomitable energy with which impressionism informs new critical and transmedial configurations. By revealing how the perceptual problem of the impression continues to inspire charismatic narratives of cultural and aesthetic emergence, Jesse Matz deftly shows that impressionism remains a living mode of reflection on the very possibilities of contemporary art and literature. -- David James, Queen Mary, University of London and author of Modernist Futures Lasting Impressions poses two elemental questions: what makes art relevant, and how do we know things? Matz answers these questions in this landmark study, which traces the cultural contradictions surrounding impressionism from its origins in the nineteenth century to its manifestations in the twenty-first century. Matz's capacious aesthetic history, his second study of impressionism, will be essential for scholars seeking to understand modernism's multiple legacies. -- Urmila Seshagiri, author of Race and the Modernist ImaginationTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. First and Lasting: Histories for the Tache 2. The Impressionist Advertisement 3. Photogenie from Renoir to Gance to Renoir 4. The "Image of Africa" from Conrad to Achebe to Adichie 5. Impressionist Fraud: Klein, Saito, Frey 6. Contemporary Impressions and Kitsch Aesthetics: Kinkade/Doig 7. The Pseudo-Impressionist Novel: Sebald, Toibin, Cunningham 8. Thinking Medium: The Rhetoric of Popular Cognition Conclusion Notes Index
£46.75
Columbia University Press This Place These People
Book SynopsisA photographic and vernacular portrait of disappearing midwestern farm places.Trade ReviewI was very moved by this evocative, literate, and informative book. Warner's beautiful-and painful-photographs are a perfect companion to Stark's writing and the 'voices' of the Nebraskans that are included. I am very grateful for this sensitive and sad look back. -- Ruth Silverman, former associate curator of the International Center of Photography and two-time winner of the Photography-Book-of-the-Year award for The Dog and Athletes Richly nuanced. Publishers Weekly A melancholy, touching look at a vanishing way of life. -- Sarah Bryan Miller St. Louis Post-Dispatch Each photo presents a snapshot of a place vacated. Together, they tell a larger story of an America fading into the landscape... Conversations, captured by Stark, are sprinkled throughout the book, bringing insight and understated humor to the inanimate beauty of Warner's photographs. -- Casey Logan The Omaha World Herald A moving collection... The country and the book are spacious, the stories are moving, and the photographs are wonderful. RALPH magazine Quietly evocative Billings GazetteTable of ContentsPreface Photographs and Voices Afterword List of Photographs List of Voices Acknowledgments
£29.75
Columbia University Press Chaos Imagined
Book SynopsisA sweeping historical and intellectual genealogy of our struggle to represent disorder from the classical period to the twentieth century.Trade ReviewMeisel has a unique perspective, remarkable command of examples, and astute use of etymologies. His discussions of Sophocles, Calderon, Chekhov, Beckett, and Stoppard are matched by equally detailed and thoughtful considerations of graphics by Otto Dix, the landscapes of Turner, War and Peace, Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and Haydn's Creation. -- Ross Hamilton, Barnard College Meisel's magnum opus is a heroic act of defiance against its own subject matter: an enlightening, judicious, cohesive history of three millennia of thought about the terrors and attractions of chaos. The book moves with steady confidence through literature, science, art, and philosophy, illuminating many varieties of darkness and finding convincing and original connections across centuries and continents. With authority and energy, Meisel creates a whole new field of study. -- Edward Mendelson, Columbia University This extraordinary, encyclopedic exploration of how artists, poets, philosophers, and scientists have imagined and represented chaos explores not chaos in the abstract but those crucial transitions to (and from) chaos that are so intricately represented in the most complex artworks. The unpredictable is then made not predictable but endlessly fascinating. Martin Meisel's is a bravura performance, one of those rare critical studies not for one but for all seasons. -- Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University This exhilarating masterpiece can only have emerged from a mind steeped in physics as an undergraduate and theater as a graduate student, followed by the broadest explorations in a lifetime of scholarship. The world may have emerged from the quantum 'chaos' of the Big Bang, but Meisel has ordered everything since beautifully. -- David Helfand, author of A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age [An] ambitious multidisciplinary work. Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsList of Illustrations OMEGA. Uncertainty and Complexity: An Untethered Epilogue After Entropy Incompleteness and Incongruity The Message of the Quantum Lost Horizons Chaos Everywhere Looking Askance Chaosmos 1. Shaping Chaos 2. Nothing and Something Something out of Nothing? Nothing in Something "The Nurse of Becoming" Saying Nothing Nothing as Nothing The Middle of Nowhere Positive Negation 3. Number: The One and the Many Division and Multiplication Sophocles' Thought Experiment Imagining the Worst Taking the Measure One World or Many? "Number-Worlds" A Glance Into the Abyss Truth and Poetry Sightlines Everything by One and One 4. Carnival Monstrous Confusion Going to the Fair Dreamworks Lords of Misrule Parody Refram'd The Wild God 5. War Representation Conscripting War Emblematics Condition Soldiers and Peasants: Callot Goya's Nightmare Dix and the Chaos Within Consummation Managing the Chaos The Fog of Battle Armageddon and Apocalypse 6. Energy Matter in Motion (Inertia, Friction, Noise) Statics and Dynamics The Homeostatic Universe Friction and Noise Nebular Hypotheses Energy Unbound Wirrwarr Petrific Chaos Energy's Epic Energy's Image Postlude: Energy's Acolytes 7. Entropy Time and Tide Conservation and Convertibility Double-Entry Physics The Death of the Universe Ancestral Voices A Question of Time A Sense of Direction Second Thoughts Tristes Entropics Nature Decay'd Chekhov's Fiddle Entartung Zola's Fevers Vox clamantis Anarchy and Endgame Resistance and Complementarity Beckett and the Shape of Chaos Sights and Sounds 8. Coda, or Da capo al fine Notes Bibliography Index
£35.70
Columbia University Press A History of Virility
Book SynopsisHow has the meaning of manhood changed over time? A History of Virility proposes a series of answers to this question by describing a trajectory that begins with ancient conceptions of male domination and privilege and examining how it persisted, with significant alterations, for centuries. While the mainstream of virility was challenged during the Enlightenment, its preeminence was restored by social forms of male bonding in the nineteenth century. Pacifist, feminist, and gay rights movements chipped away at models and codes of virility during the next hundred years, leading to the twentieth century's disclosing of a virility on edge, or virility as an unstable entity dispossessed of any automatic claim to power. These original essays, written by an international group of scholars including Arlette Farge, Jean-Paul Bertaud, Christelle Taraud, and Fabrice Virgili, add an intriguing sociohistorical dimension to our understanding of the evolution of virility. Unsettling received notioTrade ReviewAn innovative contribution to the cultural history of gender, with literature as a central element, A History of Virility provides a complete and coherent sense of the trajectory of French notions of virility from and across all periods. Readers interested in masculinity or gender more broadly will read with great interest. -- Todd W. Reeser, University of Pittsburgh A sweeping history of masculinity in the tradition of Aries and Duby's A History of Private Life that complements and enriches English-language perspectives on gender and sexuality. -- Lewis Seifert, Brown University Highly recommended. ChoiceTable of ContentsTranslator's Note Preface 1. Greek Virilities, by Maurice Sartre 2. Roman Virilities: Vir, Virilitas, Virtus, by Jean-Paul Thuillier 3. Barbarian and Knight The Barbarian World: Hybridity and Transformation of Virility, by Bruno Dumezil The Medieval: Strength and Blood, by Claude Thomasset 4. Absolute Virility in the Early Modern World Modern Virility: Convictions and Questionings, by Georges Vigarello Virility and Its "Others": The Representation of Paradoxical Masculinity, by Lawrence D. Kritzman Examples from Painting, by Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen 5. The Virile Man and the Savage in the Lands of Exploration, by Georges Vigarello 6. Uneasy Virility in the Age of Enlightenment Common Folks' Virility, by Arlette Farge Men of Fiction, by Michel Delon 7. The Code of Virility: Inculcation The Triumph of Virility in the Nineteenth Century, by Alain Corbin Childhood, or the "Journey Toward Virility," by Ivan Jablonka 8. The Duel and the Defense of Virile Honor, by Francois Guillet 9. The Necessary Manifestation of Sexual Energy, by Alain Corbin 10. Military Virility, by Jean-Paul Bertaud 11. Virility in the Colonial Context, from the Late Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, by Christelle Taraud 12. The Burden of Virility The Injunction of Virility, Source of Anguish and Anxiety, by Alain Corbin Homosexuality and Virility, by Regis Revenin 13. The Great War and the History of Virility, by Stephane Andoin Rouzeau 14. Origins and Transformations of Male Domination Impossible Virility, by Jean-Jacques Courtine Anthropology of Virility: The Fear of Powerlessness, by Claudine Haroche 15. Virilities on Edge, Violent Virilities, by Fabrice Virgili 16. Virility Through the Looking Glass of Women, by Christine Bard 17. "One Is Not Born Virile, One Becomes So," by Arnaud Bauberot 18. Fascist Virility, by Johann Chapoutot 19. Working-Class Virility, by Thierry Pillon 20. Homosexual Transformations, by Florence Tamagne 21. Exhibitions: Virility Stripped Bare, by Bruno Nassim Aboudar 22. Brawn in Civilization: Virile Myth and Muscular Power, by Jean-Jacques Courtine Notes Index
£91.52
Columbia University Press Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts
Book SynopsisThe idea that Japanese art is produced through rote copy and imitation is an eighteenth-century colonial construction, with roots in Romantic ideals of originality. Michael Lucken demonstrates the distinct character of Japanese mimesis and its dynamic impact on global culture through several twentieth-century masterpieces.Trade ReviewImitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts is a sophisticated and complex meditation on the nature of Japanese creativity and. by extension, on the nature of artistic creativity in general. Michael Lucken's writing is a performance, and it is dazzling. -- Thomas Rimer, coeditor, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature A well-written and rigorously researched analysis that is grounded in both Continental and Japanese theoretical literature. The book will offer a perspective that is fresh for many readers and will be a significant contribution to the current literature on modern Japanese art and visual culture. -- Jonathan Reynolds, Barnard College Lucken skillfully takes on the powerful and persistent stereotype of the Japanese as imitative and derivative. His erudite and measured treatment not only debunks this misrepresentation once and for all but also authoritatively demonstrates its insidious ideological legacy. -- Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University This book is an erudite, far-reaching, and deftly transnational inquiry into the philosophical bases and artistic practices of imitation and creativity. Lucken mounts an effective critique of one of the most fundamental underpinnings of discourses privileging Euro-American modernism and offers conceptual alternatives for rethinking modernist studies. This elegantly translated book is a must-read for anyone interested in modernism and is particularly essential for scholars working on multiple modernisms. -- Ming Tiampo, author of Gutai: Decentering Modernism Lucken questions the very 'orientalist' hegemonic structure of, in the words of Edward Said, 'grasping the other,' which has woven up the discourses on things Japanese in mutual dependence. Therefore, his book endeavors to overcome the dominant academic framework, which has been concocted in the midst of Western imperialism, and the reactions against it from the rest of the world. -- Shigemi Inaga, International Research Center for Japanese Studies Thoroughly documented, and including a select bibliography, Lucken's book is required reading for artists and for historians and connoisseurs of Japanese arts... Essential. ChoiceTable of ContentsIntroduction Part I. A Historical Construction 1. Copycat Japan 2. The West and the Invention of Creation 3. The Denial, Rejection, and Sublimation of Imitation 4. No Poaching 5. Seen from Japan 6. The Logic of Reflection in Nakai Masakazu Part II. A New Place for Imitation 7. Kishida Ryusei's Portraits of Reiko, or, How Can Ghosts Be at Work? 8. Kurosawa Akira's Ikiru, or, the Impossibility of Metaphor 9. Araki Nobuyoshi's Sentimental Journey-Winter, or, Eternal Bones 10. Miyazaki Hayao's Spirited Away, or, the Adventure of the Obliques Conclusion Notes Select Bibliography Index
£46.75
Columbia University Press Doing Aesthetics with Arendt
Book SynopsisConstructs an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopher’s fragmentary writings on art and perception.Trade ReviewCecilia Sjoholm provides an original and provocative reinterpretation of the difficult and controversial philosophical issues in Hannah Arendt's studies, such as embodiment, realness, appearance, judgment, and the role of sense experience. Doing Aesthetics with Arendt is written with admirable clarity, elegance, and a sense of its own unique voice. -- Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism In addition to filling a significant hole in existing scholarship, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt performs a powerful double gesture with far-reaching consequences. The double entendre of the title means both cultivating an account of aesthetics in which there appeared to be none and, perhaps more fundamentally, transforming the aesthetic apertures that pre-conceptually determine how a body of work appears. Cecilia Sjoholm has truly done what appeared impossible by doing aesthetics with Arendt. -- Gabriel Rockhill, author of Radical History and the Politics of Art With its insistent references to the spaces of appearances and new beginnings, to judgment and narrative, and to perspectives and plurality, Hannah Arendt's philosophy is thoroughly and emphatically structured by aesthetic categories, which no reader could have failed to notice. Bringing these categories-and some new ones: the sense of 'realness' and the 'sounding' of the language of love-into orderly, pointed, and illuminating focus, Cecilia Sjoholm has compellingly and beautifully constructed for us Arendt's unwritten aesthetics. By allowing Arendt's aesthetic doctrine to so perspicuously come into view, Sjoholm has placed us all in her debt. -- J. M. Bernstein, New School for Social ResearchTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Sensing Space: Art and the Public Sphere 2. The Work of Art 3. The Encroachment of Others 4. Tensions of Law: Tragedy and the Visibility of Lives 5. Comedy in the Dark: Arendt, Chaplin, and Anti-Semitism Notes Bibliography Index
£42.50
Columbia University Press Cinema by Design
Book SynopsisCinema by Design traces Art Nouveau’s long history in films from various decades and global locales, appreciating the movement’s enduring avant-garde aesthetics. Lucy Fischer explains why an art movement embedded in modernist sensibilities can flourish in contemporary film through its visions of nature, gender, sexuality, and the exotic.Trade ReviewCinema by Design uncovers the hitherto marginalized influence of Art Nouveau on cinema and adds to Lucy Fischer's already impressive work on the mutual influence of cinema and the arts. Drawing on key moments in the history of art and architecture, and putting them up against episodes in film and film theory, Fischer shows how Art Nouveau often served a visual style that could be used to convey various associations, not only aesthetic but also political. Cinema by Design is a compelling, erudite account that provides not only a new path into the interweaving of cinema and the arts but also a demonstration of how a cross-media influence functions as a building of film style and meaning. -- Daniel Morgan, University of Chicago Lucy Fischer rescues Art Nouveau from the taint it suffered as excessive, horrific, and degenerate, detailing its unique styles, themes and tropes; its uses of nature; its links to modernism and cinema history, as well as the way it energized new art forms for more than a century. A trove of brilliant interconnections amongst cinema and the arts, Cinema by Design will both entertain and inform. -- E. Ann Kaplan, Stony Brook University A leading scholar in so many fields within cinema and media studies, Lucy Fischer demonstrates and celebrates here-intellectually and passionately-a topic that she owns: the architectural and design world of cinematic art nouveau. -- Timothy Corrigan, coeditor of Essays on the Essay Film Lucy Fischer significantly realigns much of what we know about design in cinema by offering an illuminating account of Art Nouveau as an international style devoted to aesthetic display, visual excess, and sensory gratification. Often considered the first modernist movement, Art Nouveau celebrated natural beauty and sensuality, but did not reject modernity or industry. Instead, as Fischer so persuasively shows, it endeavored to merge industry with art and thus to re-enchant the world by augmenting industrial, scientific reality with beauty, sensuality, mystery, and pleasure. Cinema by Design is a brilliant work of film history. -- Patrice Petro, University of California at Santa BarbaraTable of ContentsContents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Art Nouveau and the Age of Attractions 2. Art Nouveau and American Film of the 1920s: Prestige, Class, Fantasy, and the Exotic 3. Architecture and the City: Barcelona, Gaudi, and the Cinematic Imaginary 4. Art Nouveau, Chambers of Horror, and "The Jew in the Text" 5. Art Nouveau, Patrimony, and the Art World Epilogue: The 1960s and the Art Nouveau Revival Notes Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press At the Mercy of Their Clothes
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIn At the Mercy of Their Clothes, Celia Marshik deftly weaves together high, low, and middlebrow culture, archival and literary sources, fashion studies, social history, and philosophy. The result is a volume that illuminates the overwhelming, charged power of clothes in the modernist era. Marshik tackles the biggest issues: how fashion conveys meaning; how clothes create or dismantle social identity; the role of material culture in art, literature, and history; and finally, how we live both with and through objects. A work of superb, wide-ranging research offering an intriguing new perspective. -- Rhonda Garelick, Author of Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History This is a marvelous book. At The Mercy of Their Clothes is timely, original, and ranges widely. Marshik dexterously puts current conversations in fashion studies into serious dialogue with the literary-alongside the archival, the visual, the journalistic and the psychological. Moreover, in sewing together under-read middlebrow and popular writers with what we thought we knew about modernism, Marshik lets us hear these "garment-things" speak. -- Jessica Burstein, author of Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art Marshik convincingly demonstrates that few things are more worrisomely lively than the clothes we wear. More than simply magical talismans or fetish objects, they are potentially hazardous wights that can leech away human subjectivity. The inward turn of modernism, when seen this way, becomes less about a Freudian discovery of inner riches than about an ongoing retrenchment in which the self becomes ever more subject to things-and particularly to those things we wear every day. This book is far more than just a study of clothing... it is a significant rethinking of modernism, combining cultural history and theoretical innovation on almost every page. -- Sean Latham, University of Tulsa Clothes are dangerous. Instead of presenting dress as a form of self-expression, Marshik reveals its power to diminish, imperil and undo the modern self. In this highly original and exciting book, she ranges from Ulysses to the Sunday Pictorial, from Mrs. Dalloway to The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, demonstrating the potentiality of garments across modernist, middlebrow and popular cultures in Britain. A superb achievement. -- Faye Hammill, University of Strathclyde, GlasgowTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: At the Mercy of Their Clothes 1. What Do Women Want? At the Mercy of the Evening Gown 2. Wearable Memorials: Into and Out of the Trenches with the Modern Mac 3. Aspiration to the Extraordinary: Materializing the Subject Through Fancy Dress 4. Serialized Selves: Style, Identity, and the Problem of the Used Garment Coda: Precious Clothing Notes Bibliography Index
£69.26
Columbia University Press Bachelor Japanists Japanese Aesthetics and
Book SynopsisChallenging clichés of Japanism as a feminine taste, Bachelor Japanists argues that Japanese aesthetics were central to contests over the meanings of masculinity in the West. Christopher Reed draws attention to the queerness of Japanist communities of writers, collectors, curators, and artists between the 1860s and the 1960s.Trade ReviewIn this ground-breaking work, Reed brings eloquence, intellectual rigor, and trenchant insights to a revisionist interpretation of Japanism from its early manifestations in the circles of Edmond de Goncourt and William Bigelow in nineteenth-century Paris and Boston to its post-war reinterpretations in the work of Seattle artist Mark Tobey. Bachelor Japanists brilliantly illuminates the criticality of homosocial networks and subversion of heteronormative sexuality to the diffusion of Japanism. -- Christine Guth, author of Longfellow's Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan Chris Reed's Bachelor Japanists extols the often eccentric routes that non-conformists took to escape bourgeois strictures around home and family. Mapping the homoerotic pleasures attendant upon the discovery of the Far East by the West, Reed finds that sexual difference was enabled by geographic distance and cultural (mis)translation. Never before has queer theory been brought to bear this powerfully on the Western fantasy of Japan, and vice versa, than in the three case studies-1870/80s Paris, Boston around 1900, and Seattle at mid-century-of Reed's immanently readable and now indispensible book. -- Andre Dombrowski, University of Pennsylvania Christopher Reed's luminous study offers a crucial and timely reappraisal of the Orientalism thesis. Reed shows that the early twentieth-century fascination with Japan was as a social as well as an aesthetic phenomenon. The intellectuals, curators, and makers whom Reed calls 'bachelor Japanists' challenged ideas of the West and the West's relationship to and distinctness from the East. Imagining Japan created new opportunities for fantasy, visuality, social domesticity, and collaboration. Not only an occasion for a new kind of art, Japan became an occasion for a new kind of living. -- Rebecca Walkowitz, Rutgers University Bachelor Japanists is about the queer power of the foreign, the hypo-primitive, and the hyper-civilized to unmake and remake what we think of as the self, and as the state. Beautifully written and generously, incisively critical, this is a book that not only teaches you what to think; it teaches you how to think. -- Eric Hayot, Penn State Meticulously researched and eloquently written, Bachelor Japanists brings the values of queer theory to bear on both its objects of study and the writing of art history. Focusing on how diverse japonismes provided opportunities to unlearn the West, Reed's immediately important book reconstructs and illuminates the sometimes outrageous, sometimes slyly implicit "structures of dissent" they inspired and facilitated: alternative forms of beauty, collecting, domesticity, and belonging. -- Christopher Bush, Northwestern UniversityTable of ContentsA Note on Names and Terms Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Originating Japanism: Fin-de-Siecle Paris 2. Bachelor Brahmins: Turn-of-the-Century Boston 3. Sublimation and Eccentricity in the Art of Mark Tobey: Seattle at Midcentury Conclusion: On the End of Japanism Notes Bibliography Index
£95.00
Columbia University Press Bachelor Japanists
Book SynopsisChallenging clichés of Japanism as a feminine taste, Bachelor Japanists argues that Japanese aesthetics were central to contests over the meanings of masculinity in the West. Christopher Reed draws attention to the queerness of Japanist communities of writers, collectors, curators, and artists between the 1860s and the 1960s.Trade ReviewIn this ground-breaking work, Reed brings eloquence, intellectual rigor, and trenchant insights to a revisionist interpretation of Japanism from its early manifestations in the circles of Edmond de Goncourt and William Bigelow in nineteenth-century Paris and Boston to its post-war reinterpretations in the work of Seattle artist Mark Tobey. Bachelor Japanists brilliantly illuminates the criticality of homosocial networks and subversion of heteronormative sexuality to the diffusion of Japanism. -- Christine Guth, author of Longfellow's Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan Chris Reed's Bachelor Japanists extols the often eccentric routes that non-conformists took to escape bourgeois strictures around home and family. Mapping the homoerotic pleasures attendant upon the discovery of the Far East by the West, Reed finds that sexual difference was enabled by geographic distance and cultural (mis)translation. Never before has queer theory been brought to bear this powerfully on the Western fantasy of Japan, and vice versa, than in the three case studies-1870/80s Paris, Boston around 1900, and Seattle at mid-century-of Reed's immanently readable and now indispensible book. -- Andre Dombrowski, University of Pennsylvania Christopher Reed's luminous study offers a crucial and timely reappraisal of the Orientalism thesis. Reed shows that the early twentieth-century fascination with Japan was as a social as well as an aesthetic phenomenon. The intellectuals, curators, and makers whom Reed calls 'bachelor Japanists' challenged ideas of the West and the West's relationship to and distinctness from the East. Imagining Japan created new opportunities for fantasy, visuality, social domesticity, and collaboration. Not only an occasion for a new kind of art, Japan became an occasion for a new kind of living. -- Rebecca Walkowitz, Rutgers University Bachelor Japanists is about the queer power of the foreign, the hypo-primitive, and the hyper-civilized to unmake and remake what we think of as the self, and as the state. Beautifully written and generously, incisively critical, this is a book that not only teaches you what to think; it teaches you how to think. -- Eric Hayot, Penn State Meticulously researched and eloquently written, Bachelor Japanists brings the values of queer theory to bear on both its objects of study and the writing of art history. Focusing on how diverse japonismes provided opportunities to unlearn the West, Reed's immediately important book reconstructs and illuminates the sometimes outrageous, sometimes slyly implicit "structures of dissent" they inspired and facilitated: alternative forms of beauty, collecting, domesticity, and belonging. -- Christopher Bush, Northwestern UniversityTable of ContentsA Note on Names and Terms Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Originating Japanism: Fin-de-Siecle Paris 2. Bachelor Brahmins: Turn-of-the-Century Boston 3. Sublimation and Eccentricity in the Art of Mark Tobey: Seattle at Midcentury Conclusion: On the End of Japanism Notes Bibliography Index
£28.50
Columbia University Press Sprezzatura Concealing the Effort of Art from
Book SynopsisPaolo D’Angelo traces the history of concealing art—which Italian calls sprezzatura—from ancient rhetoric to our own times. Finding the precept that art must be hidden from cosmetics to interior design, politics to poetry, the English garden to shabby chic, Sprezzatura is an erudite and surprising tour of aesthetics, philosophy, and art history.Trade ReviewA brilliant and lively essay on a fundamental aesthetic concept. Broad-ranging both philosophically and historically, the author treats the wit and paradox of explaining a rhetorical and performative action of speech or art-making that must conceal its artfulness for the sake of beauty, eloquence, and grace. -- Lydia Goehr, Columbia UniversityIn Sprezzatura, Paolo D’Angelo offers a ‘history of ideas’ that is typical of the best Italian scholarship in terms of its wide‐ranging erudition and historical breadth, which are all too rare in English‐language scholarship. It is very readable—hiding, as it were, the effort with which it was written. It shows how a ‘history of an idea’ can be written with both historical and philosophical panache. -- Paul Kottman, New School for Social ResearchThis is an important and unique book on art and aesthetics that brings together classical and modern aesthetic theories, from Schelling and Kant to Danto and Dickie. D’Angelo’s study is a tour de force through some of the most seminal texts of Western poetics, rhetoric, and philosophy, and it constitutes a mine of erudition and scholarly reflection. -- Massimo Verdicchio, University of AlbertaIn this brilliant volume D'Angelo explicates a simple term. . . and follows this concept through time and place. . . . Essential. * Choice *Table of ContentsPreface to the First EditionNote to the Second Italian Edition1. Concealment2. Part of Eloquence Is to Hide Eloquence3. The Concealed Ornament4. Art or Nature?5. In the Garden6. Iki7. Those Who Cannot Dissimulate Cannot Rule Either8. True Eloquence Mocks Eloquence9. Ready-MadesNotesIndex
£25.20
Columbia University Press After Uniqueness A History of Film and Video Art
Book SynopsisA historical-conceptual perspective on the concept of the politicalTrade ReviewIf moving images are now consumed on more platforms than ever, what networks do they traverse to reach their audiences? What factors intervene to enable or restrict these passages? In After Uniqueness, Erika Balsom explores strategies that have changed our conceptual framework of how circulation functions today-what we mean by 'copy,' 'reproduction,' 'authenticity,' and 'authorship.' To explore this is to understand what moving images represent in our current world. An original, elegant, and impressively researched work. -- Francesco Casetti, Yale University Once only mechanically reproducible, all kinds of moving image art are now digitally copied and disseminated in innumerable apparatuses that were unimaginable forty years ago. Ranging in its references from eighteenth-century printmaking to UbuWeb, Balsom's brilliant and beautifully written book is a tour de force of scholarship and critical analysis that investigates the new forms of liberation and of control that ubiquitous copying offers. Its spirited intellection is exhilarating. -- David James, University of Southern California Balsom is at the forefront of a generation of scholars who focus on the history of film's relationship to the other arts-an enterprise that she terms, in the spirit of Andre Bazin, 'Where Is Cinema?' Her new volume is a timely addition that addresses the ubiquity of screens in contemporary art and examines, with her signature precision, the inner workings of the networks through which cinema now circulates. Indispensable reading! -- Bruce Jenkins, School of the Art Institute of ChicagoTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Copy Rites 1. The Promise and Threat of Reproducibility 2. 8 mm and the "Blessings of Books and Records" 3. Bootlegging Experimental Film 4. Copyright and the Commons 5. The Limited Edition 6. The Event of Projection 7. A Cinematic Bayreuth 8. Transmission, from the Movie-Drome to Vdrome Notes Bibliography Index
£90.00
Columbia University Press After Uniqueness
Book SynopsisA historical-conceptual perspective on the concept of "the political"Trade ReviewIf moving images are now consumed on more platforms than ever, what networks do they traverse to reach their audiences? What factors intervene to enable or restrict these passages? In After Uniqueness, Erika Balsom explores strategies that have changed our conceptual framework of how circulation functions today-what we mean by 'copy,' 'reproduction,' 'authenticity,' and 'authorship.' To explore this is to understand what moving images represent in our current world. An original, elegant, and impressively researched work. -- Francesco Casetti, Yale University Once only mechanically reproducible, all kinds of moving image art are now digitally copied and disseminated in innumerable apparatuses that were unimaginable forty years ago. Ranging in its references from eighteenth-century printmaking to UbuWeb, Balsom's brilliant and beautifully written book is a tour de force of scholarship and critical analysis that investigates the new forms of liberation and of control that ubiquitous copying offers. Its spirited intellection is exhilarating. -- David James, University of Southern California Balsom is at the forefront of a generation of scholars who focus on the history of film's relationship to the other arts-an enterprise that she terms, in the spirit of Andre Bazin, 'Where Is Cinema?' Her new volume is a timely addition that addresses the ubiquity of screens in contemporary art and examines, with her signature precision, the inner workings of the networks through which cinema now circulates. Indispensable reading! -- Bruce Jenkins, School of the Art Institute of ChicagoTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Copy Rites 1. The Promise and Threat of Reproducibility 2. 8 mm and the "Blessings of Books and Records" 3. Bootlegging Experimental Film 4. Copyright and the Commons 5. The Limited Edition 6. The Event of Projection 7. A Cinematic Bayreuth 8. Transmission, from the Movie-Drome to Vdrome Notes Bibliography Index
£27.00
Columbia University Press Speculative Taxidermy
Book SynopsisGiovanni Aloi maps the discourses and practices that have enabled the emergence of taxidermy in contemporary art. Speculative Taxidermy contextualizes the resilient presence of animal skin, bones, and feathers in gallery spaces, films, and fashion as a productive opportunity to rethink ethical and political stances in human-animal relationships.Trade ReviewThe first volume to focus on animals in a media-based subset of contemporary art, Speculative Taxidermy offers a lucid and compelling account of why animals have become serious subjects in art, and with what consequences for the history of art and biological science. There is no greater authority on the subject than Aloi. -- Susan McHugh, University of New England Speculative Taxidermy makes a fascinating contribution to the nonhuman turn and invites us to find new ways to envisage the relationships between human and nonhuman animals. It will be a significant text for ethical and political debates in animal studies and the environmental humanities. -- Hannah Stark, University of TasmaniaTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsPrologue: The Carnal Immanence of Political Realism—Realism, Materiality, and AgencyIntroduction: New Taxidermy Surfaces in Contemporary Art1. Reconfiguring Animal Skins: Fragmented Histories and Manipulated Surfaces2. A Natural History Panopticon: Power, Representation, and Animal Objectification3. Dioramas: Power, Realism, and Decorum4. The End of the Daydream: Taxidermy and Photography5. Following Materiality: From Medium to Surface—Medium Specificity and Animal Visibility in the Modern Age6. The Allure of the Veneer: Aesthetics of Speculative Taxidermy7. This Is Not a Horse: Biopower and Animal Skins in the AnthropoceneCoda: Toward New Mythologies—the Ritual, the Sacrifice, the InterconnectednessAppendix: Some Notes Toward a Manifesto for Artists Working with and About Taxidermy Animals, by Mark Dion and Robert MarburyNotesBibliographyIndex
£83.60
Columbia University Press Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy An
Book SynopsisFred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society.Trade ReviewProfessor Fred Evans’s closely argued book on the public object exposes the fragility of democratic discourse in its relation to image and monument. Democracy does not find a voice in public art but instead it is the public object that gives form and space to the symbolic imagination. Public art is not about the placing of a more or less beautiful object in a public space. It is instead, the struggle for space and object to find resonance with communal conversations of place and therefore the shared languages of togetherness and difference. -- Anish Kapoor, winner of the Turner PrizeThis book is a critically needed study in political aesthetics addressing complex connections between democracy, citizenship, and public art. Its systematic analysis and criticism of selected artistic projects, and ideas from such thinkers on democracy as Badiou, Derrida, Deutsche, Fraser, Lefort, Rancière, and Rawls, make this book an excellent companion to our intelligent thinking regarding the meaning and value of public art as 'acts of citizenship.' -- Krzysztof Wodiczko, recipient of the Hiroshima Art PrizeCombining stimulating commentaries on art with insightful analyses of contemporary philosophers, Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy is a major contribution to the ongoing debates about the nature of democracy. In a way that is immensely compelling, Evans shows how works of public art might (or might not) qualify as acts of citizenship in democracy. Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy is a book I wish I had written. -- Leonard Lawlor, author of From Violence to Speaking Out: Apocalypse and Expression in Foucault, Derrida, and DeleuzeIn this thought-provoking book, Fred Evans asks which public artworks constitute acts of democratic citizenship and which serve autocratic tendencies, and proposes a philosophical criterion for assessing public artworks as acts of citizenship. The field and subject of public art is in particular need of critically engaged analysis, and this book is particularly strong when Evans merges close visual and material observation of public art with close critical analysis. -- Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in AmericaA genuine tour de force: a text at once immersed in the actual experience of public art, highly original in thought, while actively engaging the writings of others on such art. The reader comes away not only with new ways to appreciate public artworks—which are too often taken for granted by the viewing public—but with new inroads into the meaning of citizenship and democracy which these works set forth. * Philosophy Today *[An] important book [that] will interest political philosophers, art theorists, critics, and historians, but will also appeal to a broader audience of cultural theorists, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists of different theoretical persuasions. -- Andreea Deciu Ritivoi * Radical Philosophy Review *Impressively argued and researched. * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments1. Democracy’s Fragility and the Political Aesthetics of Public Art2. Voices and Places: The Space of Public Art and Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection3. Democracy’s “Empty Place”: Rawls’s Political Liberalism and Derrida’s Democracy to Come4. Public Art’s “Plain Tablet”: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary Art5. Democracy and Public Art: Badiou and Rancière6. The Political Aesthetics of Chicago’s Millennium Park7. The Political Aesthetics of New York’s National 9/11 Memorial8. Public Art as an Act of CitizenshipAppendix: Badiou On “Being and the Void”NotesBibliographyIndex
£80.39
Columbia University Press Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy
Book SynopsisFred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society.Trade ReviewProfessor Fred Evans’s closely argued book on the public object exposes the fragility of democratic discourse in its relation to image and monument. Democracy does not find a voice in public art but instead it is the public object that gives form and space to the symbolic imagination. Public art is not about the placing of a more or less beautiful object in a public space. It is instead, the struggle for space and object to find resonance with communal conversations of place and therefore the shared languages of togetherness and difference. -- Anish Kapoor, winner of the Turner PrizeThis book is a critically needed study in political aesthetics addressing complex connections between democracy, citizenship, and public art. Its systematic analysis and criticism of selected artistic projects, and ideas from such thinkers on democracy as Badiou, Derrida, Deutsche, Fraser, Lefort, Rancière, and Rawls, make this book an excellent companion to our intelligent thinking regarding the meaning and value of public art as 'acts of citizenship.' -- Krzysztof Wodiczko, recipient of the Hiroshima Art PrizeCombining stimulating commentaries on art with insightful analyses of contemporary philosophers, Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy is a major contribution to the ongoing debates about the nature of democracy. In a way that is immensely compelling, Evans shows how works of public art might (or might not) qualify as acts of citizenship in democracy. Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy is a book I wish I had written. -- Leonard Lawlor, author of From Violence to Speaking Out: Apocalypse and Expression in Foucault, Derrida, and DeleuzeIn this thought-provoking book, Fred Evans asks which public artworks constitute acts of democratic citizenship and which serve autocratic tendencies, and proposes a philosophical criterion for assessing public artworks as acts of citizenship. The field and subject of public art is in particular need of critically engaged analysis, and this book is particularly strong when Evans merges close visual and material observation of public art with close critical analysis. -- Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in AmericaA genuine tour de force: a text at once immersed in the actual experience of public art, highly original in thought, while actively engaging the writings of others on such art. The reader comes away not only with new ways to appreciate public artworks—which are too often taken for granted by the viewing public—but with new inroads into the meaning of citizenship and democracy which these works set forth. * Philosophy Today *[An] important book [that] will interest political philosophers, art theorists, critics, and historians, but will also appeal to a broader audience of cultural theorists, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists of different theoretical persuasions. -- Andreea Deciu Ritivoi * Radical Philosophy Review *Impressively argued and researched. * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments1. Democracy’s Fragility and the Political Aesthetics of Public Art2. Voices and Places: The Space of Public Art and Wodiczko’s The Homeless Projection3. Democracy’s “Empty Place”: Rawls’s Political Liberalism and Derrida’s Democracy to Come4. Public Art’s “Plain Tablet”: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary Art5. Democracy and Public Art: Badiou and Rancière6. The Political Aesthetics of Chicago’s Millennium Park7. The Political Aesthetics of New York’s National 9/11 Memorial8. Public Art as an Act of CitizenshipAppendix: Badiou On “Being and the Void”NotesBibliographyIndex
£23.75
Columbia University Press Fixing Landscape
Book SynopsisFixing Landscape reconsiders China’s Three Gorges Dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Gorges region over more than two millennia, thereby offering radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China.Trade ReviewAn intriguing study for scholars of cultural theory, particularly as it pertains to China. . . . Highly recommended. * Choice *This genre-bending book lives up to its promise. -- Christian Sorace * Critical Inquiry *Poems and paintings build dams. This simple but powerful insight informs Corey Byrnes’ impressive book Fixing Landscape, a wonderfully detailed study weaving together 1,200 years of Chinese environmental, cultural, and artistic history. Byrnes traces representations of the Yangzi River, its surrounding landscape, and visions for its future through poems, paintings, political discourse, maps, films, and photographs, from the eighth-century poetry of Li Bai up to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in 2012. Lucid and lyrical at the same time, Fixing Landscape shows how visions of the river’s transformation have been a millennium in the making, and plans for its damming over a century. Poets, travel writers, and politicians have made and remade the Yangzi into an oscillating symbol of tradition, modernization, nation-building, and Chinese character, and their portrayals themselves have become technologies through which the landscape is perceived, understood, and physically transformed. Byrnes’ work will stand beside Richard White’s path-breaking The Organic Machine, a study of the Columbia River, in its brilliance. It rivals Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City in its theoretical and temporal sweep and Haruo Shirane’s Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons in its historical ambition. Fixing Landscape is a must-read not only for those interested in Chinese environmental and cultural history, but for all scholars in the environmental humanities. -- Ursula K. Heise, University of California, Los AngelesIn this groundbreaking book, Corey Byrnes looks at the Three Gorges of the Yangzi River as a landscape in contestation: poetic topos versus political imaginary; geographical site versus spatial construct; ecological marvel versus developmental crisis. Navigating sources from Tang poetry to postsocialist cinema, from colonial reportage to local ethnography, Byrnes has created a compelling study of a river, a history, and an ecological system in crisis. This is a truly stimulating work. -- David Der-wei Wang, Harvard UniversitySpanning two millennia and multiple disciplines, Corey Byrnes' Fixing Landscape offers a beautifully written, diligently researched, and provocative account of how aesthetics move the material world. This book will be of interest to scholars of the environmental humanities, cultural geography, architecture, and art history, among others. -- Stephanie LeMenager, University of OregonThe Three Gorges have long inspired the cultural imagination of the Chinese people, from Du Fu and Li Bai's Tang Dynasty poetic odes to its beauty to Jia Zhangke’s twenty-first-century cinematic meditation on its ephemerality. Along the way, the region has become a symbol of natural perfection, progress and modernity, controversy and destruction, and the nation itself. In Fixing Landscape, Corey Byrnes deftly traces the intersecting political and artistic networks surrounding the Three Gorges and, through that process, brilliantly unveils a new tapestry of meaning. -- Michael Berry, University of California, Los AngelesFixing Landscape gives valuable new perspectives on the Three Gorges and far beyond, helping specialists and nonspecialists alike better understand how and why the Chinese have manipulated their environments so dramatically, as well as how and why societies around the world have been so doing for much of recorded human history. -- Karen Thornber, Harvard UniversityByrnes performs an erudite exposition of an understudied thesis - how landscape becomes “fixed” in the cultural imagination and built environment - by examining a very wide range of historical and contemporary media focused on one geographic site: the Three Gorges. -- Robin Visser, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsOrientationPassage I. DeparturePart I. A Landscape of Traces1. Tracing the Gorges2. From Trace to SitePassage II. One Thousand LiPart II. Reinscribing the Three Gorges3. Chinese Landscape4. Chinese LaborPassage III. One Thousand YearsPart III. For the Record5. A Record of the Trace6. Ink in the WoundPassage IV. Part of the MovementNotesBibliographyIndexColor Plates
£52.70
Columbia University Press Becoming Guanyin
Book SynopsisYuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. She combines empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies.Trade Review[A] lavishly-illustrated, impeccably-researched, ground-breaking book. * Asian Review of Books *A refreshing and much needed foray into the lives and experiences of everyday women within the social context Li investigates. -- Elizabeth Miller * Religious Studies Review *Virtually every page of Becoming Guanyin demonstrates Li’s impressively wide-ranging erudition and her keen powers of observation and analysis....a major contribution to scholarship. * Nan nü *Li has expertly demonstrated a wholly new way of studying the religious expression of women in imperial China. Those with an interest in Chinese religion, particularly Buddhism, as well as those interested in gender studies and religion, and the anthropology of religion, would find this volume invaluable. -- Joseph Chadwin, University of Vienna * Religious Studies Review *Richly illustrated and described in great detail, Li’s book provides a vivid picture of lay Buddhist women’s devotion to Guanyin. * Journal of Chinese Religions *Scholars of Buddhism or Chinese history of the late imperial era will certainly find inspiration and useful information for their own research in the broad scope of this book’s textual and visual primary sources, while all readers can enjoy its accessible style, photos and depictions of stunning artifacts and ancient tombs, quirky anecdotes and creative imaginations from vernacular stories, as well as the other ‘skilful means’ Li employs to discover the repressed and hidden agency of female Buddhists in late imperial China. * Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies *Yuhang Li is, by training, an art historian. However, her take on Guanyin goes beyond the realms of art history. Li analyzes the female portrayal of Guanyin through paintings, material culture of embroidery, theatrical display of dance, archaeological objects, scripture, and literature. This is truly an interdisciplinary work. -- Chün-fang Yü, author of Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of AvalokitesvaraWhat distinguishes Becoming Guanyin from other excellent work on women and religion in late imperial China is its careful attention to the material culture of religious practice, from objects women made to objects of worship. The book should appeal to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines—history, art history, religion, literature, and gender studies. -- Ann Waltner, coauthor of Family: A World HistoryBecoming Guanyin is a truly innovative and interdisciplinary book that explores how lay women expressed religious devotion in late imperial China. Through a critical examination of women’s hairpins, embroidery made from women’s hair, and courtesan dance performances, Yuhang Li responds with intelligence to current scholarship on visual and material culture, women’s history, and religious studies. Highly recommended! -- Shih-shan Susan Huang, author of Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional ChinaIn a word, the book is rich—in illustrations, narratives, descriptions, and details, some public and some private and even intimate. * Reading Religion *Provides a new perspective to look at Chinese women’s religious experience through her study of material objects produced by women. This book is definitely a very positive contribution to the study of gender and religion in practice. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *One of the book's most significant contributions is to break down the boundaries between the study of art history, religious history, and gender history. -- Yan Liang * Religious Studies Review *Table of ContentsList of FiguresIntroduction: Gendered Materialization of Guanyin1. Dancing Guanyin: The Transformative Body and Buddhist Courtesans2. Painting Guanyin with Brush and Ink: Negotiating Confucianism and Buddhism3. Embroidering Guanyin with Hair: Efficacious Pain and Skill4. Mimicking Guanyin with Hairpins: Jewelry as a Means of TranscendenceConclusion: From Home to Temple and Court: Restaging Women’s Devotional ObjectsNotesBibliographyIndex
£91.52
Columbia University Press Becoming Guanyin
Book SynopsisYuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. She combines empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies.Trade Review[A] lavishly-illustrated, impeccably-researched, ground-breaking book. * Asian Review of Books *A refreshing and much needed foray into the lives and experiences of everyday women within the social context Li investigates. -- Elizabeth Miller * Religious Studies Review *Virtually every page of Becoming Guanyin demonstrates Li’s impressively wide-ranging erudition and her keen powers of observation and analysis....a major contribution to scholarship. * Nan nü *Li has expertly demonstrated a wholly new way of studying the religious expression of women in imperial China. Those with an interest in Chinese religion, particularly Buddhism, as well as those interested in gender studies and religion, and the anthropology of religion, would find this volume invaluable. -- Joseph Chadwin, University of Vienna * Religious Studies Review *Richly illustrated and described in great detail, Li’s book provides a vivid picture of lay Buddhist women’s devotion to Guanyin. * Journal of Chinese Religions *Scholars of Buddhism or Chinese history of the late imperial era will certainly find inspiration and useful information for their own research in the broad scope of this book’s textual and visual primary sources, while all readers can enjoy its accessible style, photos and depictions of stunning artifacts and ancient tombs, quirky anecdotes and creative imaginations from vernacular stories, as well as the other ‘skilful means’ Li employs to discover the repressed and hidden agency of female Buddhists in late imperial China. * Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies *Yuhang Li is, by training, an art historian. However, her take on Guanyin goes beyond the realms of art history. Li analyzes the female portrayal of Guanyin through paintings, material culture of embroidery, theatrical display of dance, archaeological objects, scripture, and literature. This is truly an interdisciplinary work. -- Chün-fang Yü, author of Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of AvalokitesvaraWhat distinguishes Becoming Guanyin from other excellent work on women and religion in late imperial China is its careful attention to the material culture of religious practice, from objects women made to objects of worship. The book should appeal to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines—history, art history, religion, literature, and gender studies. -- Ann Waltner, coauthor of Family: A World HistoryBecoming Guanyin is a truly innovative and interdisciplinary book that explores how lay women expressed religious devotion in late imperial China. Through a critical examination of women’s hairpins, embroidery made from women’s hair, and courtesan dance performances, Yuhang Li responds with intelligence to current scholarship on visual and material culture, women’s history, and religious studies. Highly recommended! -- Shih-shan Susan Huang, author of Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional ChinaIn a word, the book is rich—in illustrations, narratives, descriptions, and details, some public and some private and even intimate. * Reading Religion *Provides a new perspective to look at Chinese women’s religious experience through her study of material objects produced by women. This book is definitely a very positive contribution to the study of gender and religion in practice. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *One of the book's most significant contributions is to break down the boundaries between the study of art history, religious history, and gender history. -- Yan Liang * Religious Studies Review *Table of ContentsList of FiguresIntroduction: Gendered Materialization of Guanyin1. Dancing Guanyin: The Transformative Body and Buddhist Courtesans2. Painting Guanyin with Brush and Ink: Negotiating Confucianism and Buddhism3. Embroidering Guanyin with Hair: Efficacious Pain and Skill4. Mimicking Guanyin with Hairpins: Jewelry as a Means of TranscendenceConclusion: From Home to Temple and Court: Restaging Women’s Devotional ObjectsNotesBibliographyIndex
£29.75
Columbia University Press Beauty in the Age of Empire
Book SynopsisBeauty in the Age of Empire is a global history of aesthetic education focused on how Western practices were adopted, transformed, and repurposed in Egypt and Japan. Raja Adal uncovers the emergence of aesthetic education in modern schools and its role in making a broad spectrum of ideologies from fascism to humanism attractive.Trade ReviewA hugely important book. Its groundbreaking methodologies—the global optics, the comparative frameworks based not on regionality but on shared conditions and synchronicities, the focus on embodied histories—have the potential to transform the field. -- Irena Hayter, University of Leeds * Journal of Asian Studies *The book indeed presents a substantial account of the history of the proposed uses of aesthetics by the state and prominent educators in Egypt and Japan, and without a doubt one learns a great deal from Adal's comparative discussion. * International Journal of Asian Studies *Raja Adal’s enchantingly original study analyzes the aesthetic education prescribed for children (in music, art, and calligraphy) in late nineteenth- and twentieth century Egypt and Japan as their educational policy makers sought to balance the sources of national tradition and the attractions of European modernity. Drawing on mastery of both Japanese and Arabic, this philosophically informed study lets us transcend any simplified categories of Western and non-Western civilizational projects. -- Charles Maier, author of Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging Since 1500Raja Adal’s exemplary Beauty in the Age of Empire charts how aesthetics was used in modernizing societies like Japan and Egypt to ‘enchant’ citizens while reinforcing a changing political environment. Through national schools, a new curriculum inculcated in children a desire to support the value of national identity rather than affectively perform personal responses to artistic expression. Adal shows how this aesthetic education moved along the scale of singularity, from the one place of the nation, to the worldliness of ‘many places.’ -- Harry Harootunian, author of Uneven Moments: Reflections on Japan's Modern HistoryBeauty in the Age of Empire is a unique and fascinating analysis that tracks complex genealogies of aesthetic education through colonialism, empire, and nation-building. It both provincializes Eurocentric histories of the aesthetic and provides a deeper understanding of the cultivation of modern childhood. -- Jessica Winegar, author of Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary EgyptExamining three forms of aesthetic education in modern Egypt and Japan, Beauty in the Age of Empire reveals how similar ideals and anxieties accompanied the project of forming national subjects in countries compelled into nation-making by Western imperialism in the nineteenth century. In lucid and straightforward prose, Adal guides readers into the “global archive” of modern schooling. Striking parallels and new insights abound. This is a vivid and fresh approach to global modernity. -- Jordan Sand, author of House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsNote on NamesAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Modern School as a Global ArchivePart I: Music, Calligraphy, and the Education of the Inner SelfInterlude: How Culture Travels: A Global History of the Piano2. Music Education and the Uses of Aesthetics3. Writing Education and the Location of AestheticsPart II: From Mimesis to Art: Drawing Education and the Rise of the Independent SubjectInterlude: Mimesis and Seduction in National Anthems4. The Mimetic Moment: The Age of Global Mimesis and Representational Mimesis5. The End of Global Mimesis: The Rise of the National Subject6. The End of Representational Mimesis: The Rise of the Individual SubjectConclusionNotesWorks CitedIndex
£46.75
Columbia University Press Staging Personhood Costuming in Early Qing Drama
Book SynopsisStaging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming-Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic texts and performances against Qing sartorial regulations, Guojun Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule.Trade ReviewA cogently written and deeply researched book, full of interpretative insights and rarely discussed materials. An important contribution to the study of Qing literature and history, this book will be a rich trove for all scholars interested in performances of gender and ethnicity in the early modern world. * Journal of Asian Studies *The arguments that Wang makes are richly detailed and compelling. I strongly recommend it to people interested in gender and ethnicity in the Qing, as well as scholars of fiction and drama. * International Journal of Comparative Literature *Benefit[s] scholars and students whose interest are not just limited to traditional Chinese theater or late imperial China, but more broadly in historical understandings of the Manchu empire and boundaries between self and others in terms of ethnic and gender relations. * Nan Nu *An exciting read even for those who know very little about Chinese or theater history. It is delicately edited and presented in a manner that is easy to grasp while also offering a wealth of complex information and philosophical interpretations of this historic contextualization. * Pennsylvania Literary Journal *By excavating how the individual body was transformed and how personhood, identity, and cultural mentality were shaped through costuming in literary writing, Wang refreshingly recenters the body in the study of classical Chinese dramatic literature. * Theatre Journal *The result of Wang’s skilful deconstruction of early Qing costuming is a rich piece of scholarship[.] * East Asian Journal of Popular Culture *A marvelous piece of scholarship, Staging Personhood presents an exhaustive study of the function of clothing on stage and off. While speaking to issues of sexuality, gender, masculinity, and status in real society, the book goes beyond the existing literature to introduce the body as a symbolic marker and site of detailed and sustained discourse. -- Stephen H. West, coeditor of The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays: The Earliest Known VersionsIn this thoughtful and richly informative study of theatrical costume in the early Qing, Guojun Wang explores the dramatic transformation in the clothing and hairstyles of Han Chinese men through actual drama. Plunged into the imagined worlds created for audiences of long ago, the reader emerges from Staging Personhood with a sense of the play between costume and clothing, the theatrical and the everyday, that produced the sartorial landscape of early Qing China. -- Antonia Finnane, author of Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, NationA refreshing book that will encourage readers and researchers to pay closer attention to the modes and codes of theatrical costuming in association with issues of ethnicity, gender, and individual identities, embedded in the specific context of early Qing China. -- Tian Yuan Tan, author of Passion, Romance, and Qing: The World of Emotions and States of Mind in “Peony Pavilion”Solidly felted, seamlessly knitted, and shrewdly illuminative, Guojun Wang’s scholarship is a brocade of erudition—or should I say, a magician’s cloak, waving for overdue attention to the disappearing act of Qing stage costumes and their ghostly presence. Sharply revealed in Wang’s needle eye, class, gender, ethnicity, and, above all, time-space are no longer set fault lines of history, but are themselves warped and woven to the effect of costumed personhood. -- Ling Hon Lam, author of The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to TheatricalityWang has uncovered a fascinating context for studying Chinese theater that has been hiding in plain sight...This is a book that repays more than one reading. * T'oung Pao *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Costuming as Method1. Ways to Dress and Ways to See2. Across Genders and Ethnicities3. Between Family and State4. The Chaste Lady Immortal of Seamless Stitching5. From State Attire to Stage PropEpilogue: Dressing Other and SelfAppendix 1: Extant Editions of A Ten-Thousand-Li ReunionAppendix 2: Scene Synopsis of A Ten-Thousand-Li ReunionNotesWorks CitedIndex
£46.75
Columbia University Press Robert Rauschenberg An Oral History The Columbia
Book SynopsisRobert Rauschenberg is a work of collaborative oral biography that tells the story of one of the twentieth century's great artists through a series of interviews with key figures in his lifefamily, friends, former lovers, professional associates, studio assistants, and collaborators.Trade ReviewFall in love with Robert Rauschenberg, galactic master of art and life, through his worldwide collaborations. -- Dorothy Lichtenstein, president of the Roy Lichtenstein FoundationThe informative and entertaining voices of this solid work are as idiosyncratic as the artist himself. This is an excellent history for fans of Rauschenberg and mid-20th-century art. * Publishers Weekly *This makes oral history a peculiarly apposite way of approaching him. The voices in Sara Sinclair’s new book appear as randomly put together as do the car tyre and stuffed goat of Rauschenberg’s combine 'Monogram'. . . . And it is this fabrication that makes Sinclair’s book so fine. Rauschenberg emerges from it less as a painting than as a combine; which is to say, a Rauschenberg. -- Charles Darwent * Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsPrefaceReader’s GuideAcknowledgmentsPrologue1. Small World2. Collaborations3. 381 Lafayette Street4. Captiva5. Travelogue6. Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI)7. Curating and Installations8. An Expanding American Art Market9. No One Wanted It to EndNetwork DiagramsNarratorsNotesIndex
£80.39
Columbia University Press Robert Rauschenberg
Book SynopsisRobert Rauschenberg is a work of collaborative oral biography that tells the story of one of the twentieth century's great artists through a series of interviews with key figures in his lifefamily, friends, former lovers, professional associates, studio assistants, and collaborators.Trade ReviewFall in love with Robert Rauschenberg, galactic master of art and life, through his worldwide collaborations. -- Dorothy Lichtenstein, president of the Roy Lichtenstein FoundationThe informative and entertaining voices of this solid work are as idiosyncratic as the artist himself. This is an excellent history for fans of Rauschenberg and mid-20th-century art. * Publishers Weekly *This makes oral history a peculiarly apposite way of approaching him. The voices in Sara Sinclair’s new book appear as randomly put together as do the car tyre and stuffed goat of Rauschenberg’s combine 'Monogram'. . . . And it is this fabrication that makes Sinclair’s book so fine. Rauschenberg emerges from it less as a painting than as a combine; which is to say, a Rauschenberg. -- Charles Darwent * Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsPrefaceReader’s GuideAcknowledgmentsPrologue1. Small World2. Collaborations3. 381 Lafayette Street4. Captiva5. Travelogue6. Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI)7. Curating and Installations8. An Expanding American Art Market9. No One Wanted It to EndNetwork DiagramsNarratorsNotesIndex
£22.00
Columbia University Press Art and Posthistory Conversations on the End of
Book SynopsisFrom the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to the ongoing importance of Danto's ideas.Trade ReviewThis book's dialogue between the greatest American philosopher of art and his distinguished Italian colleague presents a great deal of previously unpublished information, much of the highest value. You will find here vital details about the aesthetic theory and art criticism of Arthur Danto. -- David Carrier, author of Proust/Warhol: Analytical Philosophy of ArtThe book is best for those who are Danto ‘completionists’ and those interested in Danto on philosophy of art qua art criticism. The preliminary essays are the most philosophically bountiful. * British Journal of Aesthetics *Serve[s] as an effective introduction to Danto’s work for those unfamiliar with it and a fine coda to his career for the more well-versed reader. * European Legacy *Table of ContentsForeword, by Barry SchwabskyPrefaceIn Judy’s Bedroom1. History and Posthistory (1995)2. Style, Narration, and Posthistory (1998)3. The Angelic vs. the Monstrous (1998)4. Art Criticism as Analytic Philosophy (2012)NotesIndex
£54.40
