Download or read book The Unknowable in Literature and Material Culture written by Margot Irvine and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature strives to interpret and explain the unknown, and to propose ways in which to engage with it—even if, at least initially, these keys exist only in the realm of the imagination. This is one of the many important qualities that draw us to study literature, and to marvel at the creative understandings that it offers. However, many questions call for further exploration: how does something “unknowable”, unspeakable, become a subject that can be examined and debated? How have literary and scientific communities entered into the dialogue and exchange that are crucial to the consolidation of knowledge? By what processes can we come to know and understand that which remains hidden, undocumented, unspoken, poorly understood: the memories, secrets, “unknowable” and “unspeakable” truths of public and private human lives? Inspired by questions such as these, the contributors to this volume reflect on fin de siècle discourses around homosexuality and sexual “inversion”, on Émile Zola as seeker of concealed truths and figure of scandal, on the modes and crises of representing human experience in literary and visual forms, and on the dialogic space between self and other.
Download or read book British Children s Literature and Material Culture written by Jane Suzanne Carroll and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'golden age' of children's literature in the late 19th and early 20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of commodities. The first book-length study to situate children's literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of children's books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British children's literature. In tracing the role of objects in key texts from the turn of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of the changing attitudes towards consumer culture – a movement from celebration to suspicion – to demonstrate that children's literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young people's views of and relationships with other kinds of commodities. Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit's Five Children & It to Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children's fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into children's relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.
Download or read book What Objects Mean written by Arthur Asa Berger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Asa Berger, author of an array of texts in communication, popular culture, and social theory, is back with the second edition of his popular, user-friendly guide for students who want to understand the social meanings of objects. In this broadly interdisciplinary text, Berger takes the reader through half a dozen theoretical models that are commonly used to analyze objects. He then describes and analyzes eleven objects, many of them new to this edition—including smartphones, Facebook, hair dye, and the American flag—showing how they demonstrate concepts like globalization, identity, and nationalism. The book includes a series of exercises that allow students to analyse objects in their own environment. Brief and inexpensive, this introductory guide will be used in courses ranging from anthropology to art history, pop culture to psychology.
Download or read book American Material Culture written by Ann Smart Martin and published by Winterthur Museum. This book was released on 1997 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourteen essays in this volume provide an important cross section of new research on the current state of American material culture scholarship. From Tupperware to stuffed owls, modern dolls to colonial portraits, the subjects that the authors study demonstrate that things provoke and sustain human dramas.
Download or read book Nonhuman voices in Anglo Saxon literature and material culture written by James Paz and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-07 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture uncovers the voice and agency possessed by nonhuman things across Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture. It makes a new contribution to ‘thing theory’ and rethinks conventional divisions between animate human subjects and inanimate nonhuman objects in the early Middle Ages. Anglo-Saxon writers and craftsmen describe artefacts and animals through riddling forms or enigmatic language, balancing an attempt to speak and listen to things with an understanding that these nonhumans often elude, defy and withdraw from us. But the active role that things have in the early medieval world is also linked to the Germanic origins of the word, where a þing is a kind of assembly, with the ability to draw together other elements, creating assemblages in which human and nonhuman forces combine.
Download or read book Exquisite Materials written by Abigail Joseph and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book's four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style. These diverse episodes converge around the contention that paying attention to the multitudinous objects of the Victorian world-and to the social practices surrounding them-reveals the boundaries and influences of queer forms of identity and aesthetic sensibility that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained recognizable up to our own moment. In the cases that author Abigail Joseph examines, objects become unexpected sites of queer community and desire.
Download or read book Archaeology and Religion in Early Northwest India written by Daniel Michon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-12 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which past cultures have been used to shape colonial and postcolonial cultural identities. It provides a theoretical framework to understand these processes, and offers illustrative case studies in which the agency of ancient peoples, rather than the desires of antiquarians and archaeologists, is brought to the fore.
Download or read book Crossing Boundaries written by Eric Cambridge and published by Oxbow Books Limited. This book was released on 2017-04-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interdisciplinary studies are increasingly widely recognised as being among the most fruitful approaches to generating original perspectives on the medieval past. In this major collection of 27 papers, contributors transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries to offer new approaches to a number of themes ranging in time from late antiquity to the high Middle Ages. The main focus is on material culture, but also includes insights into the compositional techniques of Bede and the Beowulf-poet, and the strategies adopted by anonymous scribes to record information in unfamiliar languages. Contributors offer fresh insights into some of the most iconic survivals from the period, from the wooden doors of Sta Sabina in Rome to the Ruthwell Cross, and from St Cuthbert’s coffin to the design of its final resting place, the Romanesque cathedral at Durham. Important thematic surveys reveal early medieval Welsh and Pictish carvers interacting with the political and intellectual concerns of the wider Insular and continental world. Other contributors consider what it is to be Viking, revealing how radically present perceptions shape our understanding of the past, how recent archaeological work reveals the inadequacy of the traditional categorisation of the Vikings as ‘incomers’, and how recontextualising Viking material culture can lead to unexpected insights into famous historical episodes such as King Edgar’s boat trip on the Dee. Recent landmark finds, notably the runic-inscribed Saltfleetby spindle whorl and the sword pommel from Beckley, are also published here for the first time in comprehensive analyses which will remain the fundamental discussions of these spectacular objects for many years to come.This book will be indispensable reading for everyone interested in medieval culture.
Download or read book The Italian Invert written by Michael Rosenfeld and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Each of us has his tastes inscribed in his brain and heart; whether he fulfills his urges with regret or with joy, he must fulfill them. He should let others act according to their own nature. It’s fate that creates us and guides us throughout our lives: to fight against it would be little more than fruitless, foolish, and reckless!” In the late 1880s, a dashing young Italian aristocrat made an astonishing confession to the novelist Émile Zola. In a series of revealing letters, he frankly described his sexual experiences with other men—including his seduction as a teenager by one of his father’s friends and his first love affair, with a sergeant during his military service—as well as his “extraordinary” personality. Judging it too controversial, Zola gave it to a young doctor, who in 1896 published a censored version in a medical study on sexual inversion, as homosexuality was then known. When the Italian came across this book, he was shocked to discover how his life story had been distorted. In protest, he wrote a long, daring, and unapologetic letter to the doctor defending his right to love and to live as he wished. This book is the first complete, unexpurgated version in English of this remarkable queer autobiography. Its text is based on the recently discovered manuscript of the Italian’s letter to the doctor. It also features an introduction tracing the textual history of the documents, analytical essays, and additional materials that help place the work in its historical context. Offering a striking glimpse of gay life in Europe in the late nineteenth century, The Italian Invert brings to light the powerful voice of a young man who forthrightly expressed his desires and eloquently affirmed his right to pleasure.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age written by Anders Steinvall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age covers the period 1920 to the present, a time of extraordinary developments in colour science, philosophy, art, design and technologies. The expansion of products produced with synthetic dyes was accelerated by mass consumerism as artists, designers, architects, writers, theater and filmmakers made us a 'color conscious' society. This influenced what we wore, how we chose to furnish and decorate our homes, and how we responded to the vibrancy and chromatic eclecticism of contemporary visual cultures.The volume brings together research on how philosophers, scientists, linguists and artists debated color's polyvalence, its meaning to different cultures, and how it could be measured, manufactured, manipulated and enjoyed. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Anders Steinvall is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at Umeå University, Sweden. Sarah Street is Professor of Film at the University of Bristol, UK. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf
Download or read book Faith stories written by Anna Hickey-Moody and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith stories is an investigation of faith and belief systems in Australia and England. Drawing on ethnography, interviews, focus groups for adults and arts-based workshops for their children, Hickey-Moody takes a community-based approach to examining belonging, attachment, faith, belief and ‘what really matters’ in diverse areas. Each of the book’s research sites is geographically and culturally specific in ways that shape residents’ experiences of community and belonging, but they are united by enduring threads relating to colonisation, diaspora and negotiating belonging in culturally diverse contexts. Examining faith reveals that there are striking similarities between seemingly different cultures. Understanding these connections can reduce conflict and promote cohesion in communities that are often struggling to adapt to huge changes. This book provides rich resources for those who wish to explore faith and belief in complex social circumstances, either as research or as community engagement. In such increasingly divided times, work like this is needed now more than ever.
Download or read book The Camino de Santiago in the 21st Century written by Samuel Sánchez y Sánchez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spanish Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage rooted in the Medieval period and increasingly active today, has attracted a growing amount of both scholarly and popular attention. With its multiple points of departure in Spain and other European countries, its simultaneously secular and religious nature, and its international and transhistorical population of pilgrims, this particular pilgrimage naturally invites a wide range of intellectual inquiry and scholarly perspectives. This volume fills a gap in current pilgrimage studies, focusing on contemporary representations of the Camino de Santiago. Complementing existing studies of the Camino’s medieval origins, it situates the Camino as a modern experience and engages interdisciplinary perspectives to present a theoretical framework for exploring the most central issues that concern scholars of pilgrimage studies today. Contributors explore the contemporary meaning of the Camino through an interdisciplinary lens that reflects the increasing permeability between academic disciplines and fields, bringing together a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives (cultural studies, literary studies, globalization studies, memory studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, cultural geographies, photography, and material culture). Chapters touch on a variety of genres (blogs, film, graphic novels, historical novels, objects, and travel guides), and transnational perspectives (Australia, the Arab world, England, Spain, and the United States).
Download or read book Author Unknown written by Tom Geue and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the darker corners of ancient Rome to spotlight the strange sorcery of anonymous literature. From Banksy to Elena Ferrante to the unattributed parchments of ancient Rome, art without clear authorship fascinates and even offends us. Classical scholarship tends to treat this anonymity as a problem or game—a defect to be repaired or mystery to be solved. Author Unknown is the first book to consider anonymity as a site of literary interest rather than a gap that needs filling. We can tether each work to an identity, or we can stand back and ask how the absence of a name affects the meaning and experience of literature. Tom Geue turns to antiquity to show what the suppression or loss of a name can do for literature. Anonymity supported the illusion of Augustus’s sprawling puppet mastery (Res Gestae), controlled and destroyed the victims of a curse (Ovid’s Ibis), and created out of whole cloth a poetic persona and career (Phaedrus’s Fables). To assume these texts are missing something is to dismiss a source of their power and presume that ancient authors were as hungry for fame as today’s. In this original look at Latin literature, Geue asks us to work with anonymity rather than against it and to appreciate the continuing power of anonymity in our own time.
Download or read book The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Volume 5 written by Yosef Kaplan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 1392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fifth volume of the Posen Library demonstrates through a rich array of texts and images the extraordinary diversity of Jewish life during the early modern period "A rich and varied gateway into the primary source material of early modern Jewish history that is very strong on geographical diversity. A magnificent achievement."--Adam Sutcliffe, King's College London The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 5, covering the early modern period (1500-1750), presents a variety of Jewish texts to demonstrate the diversity of Jewish culture and life. These texts originate from Eastern and Western Europe, the Americas, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Kurdistan, Persia, Yemen, India--in short, a worldwide diaspora. They embrace historical writing and religious scholarship, liturgical expression and economic records, ethics and personal devotion, correspondence and communal regulations, art and music, architecture and poetry. The simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal character of Jewish communities during this era illustrates the distinctiveness of the early modern period in Jewish history and informs developments in world history at large. Including texts written by women, a robust collection of images, and extensive material not previously accessible to English-language readers, this volume is rich, deep, and enlightening.
Download or read book The Unknown City written by Iain Borden and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look beyond design process and buildings aimed at discoveringnew ways of looking at the urban experience.
Download or read book Useful Objects written by Reed Gochberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Useful Objects' examines the cultural history of nineteenth-century American museums through the eyes of writers, visitors, and collectors. Throughout this period, museums gradually transformed from encyclopedic cabinets to more specialized public institutions. These changes prompted wider debates about how museums determine what objects to select, preserve, and display-and who gets to decide. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials and accounts in fiction, guidebooks, and periodicals, this text shows how the challenges facing nineteenth-century museums continue to resonate in debates about their role in American culture today.
Download or read book Abraham s Luggage written by Elizabeth Lambourn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A single, unique document - a list of one merchant's baggage - is the starting point used to bring to life the twelfth-century Indian Ocean. Drawing connections between material culture, foodstuffs and the construction of identity, Lambourn examines notions of home and mobility at a key moment in world history.
