Associated University Presses
Alfred Jarry, an imagination in revolt.
Alfred Jarry's marionette play, Ubu Roi, caused a sensation when it debuted on the Paris stage in 1896. In this study Fell considers the work of this subversive French dramatist, paying particular attention to his creative output in the years just prior to this event. Reproductions of Jarry's woodcuts illustrate the volume. The text is based upon the author's 1997 doctoral dissertation at the U. of Kent at Canterbury. Distributed in the U.S. by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Art and time.
Not a purely academic study, this book is intended for artists and non-artists alike who want to understand art in an active way. The late Philip Rawlings (School of Art & Design, U. of London) presents ideas about art in relation to time, examining empirical time and imagination; artistic imagery of time; performance or reading time; time as region or era; and photography and time. Includes 54 black & white illustrations. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
H.C. Westermann at war; art and manhood in cold war America.
McCarthy (art history and American studies, Rhodes College, Tennessee) looks at the fear, paranoia, and gallows humor in American artist Westermann's (1922-81) antiwar art. He finds in it a world that is subject to violence that is apparently random but carefully conceived and carried out by other humans. Though the art can appear pessimistic and bleak while picturing death in often startlingly comic fashion, he says, it is offers a cautionary tale about fanaticism of any sort. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Iconotropism; turning toward pictures.
Literary theorist Spolsky (English, Bar-Ilan U., Israel) supplies the introductory essay and a bibliography focused on Murray Roston, whose 1987 work Renaissance Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts has inspired her thinking; she also contributes the first essay on Raphael and Titian in connection with iconotropism, or representational hunger. Following are nine more essays on various aspects of word and image relations, this being the unifying theme in discussions on images of the Holocaust, representations of the divine in Kabbalah, how ekphrasis dramatizes visual perception, Monet, Jackson Pollack, and Poe and Hawthorne, among other subjects. Contributors are a mix of art historians and literary studies scholars affiliated with universities in the US (primarily), Canada, and Israel. Some illustrations (b&w) are included to support the text. The book is Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
In sickness and in health; disease as metaphor in art and popular wisdom.
Nine essays and many b&w illustrations show how visual imagery has long played a role in reinforcing and establishing definitions of sickness and standards for physical well-being. The contributors examine how works of art and imagery from popular culture both reflect and reinforce the power of medical beliefs to define and limit human behavior, and how art and medicine work together to communicate social directives in support of a perceived common good. The images in question range from visual conventions associated with plague in the 14th century to images of the "body culture" of early 20th century France and Germany, where athleticism and good health came to symbolize restoration of the patriarchal social order. Oversize: 8.75x11.25 inches. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
John Sloan's women; a psychoanalysis of vision.
Coco (art history, Lewis and Clark College, Oregon) examines the personal and social dimensions of the early pictures by American realist painter and printmaker Sloan (1871-1951), and their relationship to his later studies of the female nude. The study is revised from her Ph.D. dissertation for Cornell University. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Marvelous encounters; surrealist responses to film, art, poetry, and architecture.
Bohn (French and comparative literature, Illinois State U.) looks at critical poetry, which is written in response to another work of art but maintains its mission as poetry, by surrealist poets writing in French, Spanish, and Catalan. Among his examples are synthetic criticism by Louis Aragon, surrealism and painting in André Breton, Catalan experiments by Salvador Dalí, the Canary Islands, Argentina and Peru, and Chile and Mexico. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Physiognomy in profile; Lavater's impact on European culture.
With the late 18th century publication of his Physiognomische Fragmente, Johann Caspar Lavater helped popularize the "science" of readings people's facial bone structure and profiles for insight into their characters and inner dispositions. Although largely forgotten today, Lavater's ideas had a profound impact on European art, literature, medicine, and social sciences that is still felt to this day, suggest the editors. They present 13 thematically and methodologically diverse papers exploring that influence in the context of issues of appropriation and influence, problems of social classification, the body as an expressive medium, physiognomy as a social phenomenon, and recent novels. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Practising theory; Pierre Bourdieu and the field of cultural production.
Australian scholars of the humanities and social sciences honor sociologist Bourdieu by discussing his work and its implications. Their topics include truth and method in Gadamer and Bourdieu, a critique of his habitus in the context of C. S. Pierce's belief as habit, Bourdieu and the actor, Bourdieu on participant objectivation, and his virtual radicalist views of capitalism. The 11 papers are from an October 2002 symposium at Monash University. They are not indexed. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Representing Diana, Princess of Wales; cultural memory and fairy tales revisited.
Denney (art history and women's studies, U. of Wyoming) shows how Diana, Princess of Wales kept to a tradition set by Alexandra, Princess of Wales in the nineteenth century. Alexandra took great pains to establish herself as someone who should be a princess in the way she allowed herself to be represented in portraiture. In many of the photographs it is clear Diana followed the example of Alexandra, down to the choice of costume, coiffure, and background. Diana, however, had to cope with a much different kind of mass media than that of Alexandra's day. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The scandal of images; iconoclasm, eroticism, and painting in early Modern English drama.
Tassi (English, U. of Nebraska, Kearney) examines the themes and subtexts of works of theater such as Campaspe, Antonio and Mellida, Arden and Faversham and Timon of Athens to explore the iconophobia of Elizabethan Protestantism. She finds that theater was considered primarily visual so it, along with painting and other arts, caused some discomfort amongst spectators. This discomfort, rather than confining the visual arts, freed them to comment on aesthetics, morals, and perceptions in unconventional ways. Distributed by the Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The simplest of signs; Victor Hugo and the language of images in France, 1850-1950.
In three extended essays, Raser (French, U. of Georgia) examines, amongst other interesting elements, the language of the visual, of time and place, and of aesthetics and politics within Hugo and later luminaries in the hundred years after 1850. He shows how Hugo manipulated facts as a code, and how his textual systems (antithesis, inscription, ekphrasis) denoted his awareness that something is lost as new text comes into being. Raser also examines the language and methods of art criticism of the period, including the inclination to narrative and the end of citation in Baudelaire's work. He closes with the innovation in the art/literature connection in Fromentin, Claudel, Sartre and Tintoretto. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Struggle over the modern; purity and experience in American art criticism, 1900-1960.
It was not so much the art that changed during the period, says Raverty (modern and contemporary art history, theory, and criticism; New Jersey City U.) as the critical consensus, which shifted from politically engaged realism to apolitical abstraction. He dismisses as simplistic the notion that the change was due to Americans being exposed to European Modernists. A convincing account will require different political, economic, and broader cultural treatments, rather than any single study, he predicts, but begins the task here. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
A studio of one's own; fictional women painters and the art of fiction.
White (English emerita, Centre College) shows how women authors' depiction of female characters who are visual artists expands in terms of expectation, action and space from the fragile heroines who could barely tote their own small portfolios to powerful women who controlled their own destiny and that of their art from their ateliers. Focusing on novels in English from the early nineteenth century onward, White examines the artists of Austen, the Brontës, and Phelps, leading to Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Woolfe's To the Lighthouse, Murdoch and Banti's portraitists, Jennifer Johnston's and Deirdre Madden's landscape painters, and works by Atwood, Walsh, Mary Gordon, Byatt, Chevalier, Shields and Mori. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
