Ashgate Publishing Co.

Sculpture and psychoanalysis.

After reading this collection of articles one may be inclined to look at sculpture within its Freudian, Lacanian and Kleinian contexts more carefully, as these contributors find splitting, projection, sublimation, identification and the schizoid within the artifacts as well as within their audience. The eleven essays describe modern objects, the meanings of abstraction, installation and performance, and matter and process. They provide a number of fascinating illustrations of works and of their contexts, including period photographs. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Sir John Soane and London.

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) carried out over 400 recorded architectural commissions in London, which are archived here for the first time to illustrate Sloan's extensive involvement in the city. The work is presented with a sequence of eight case studies on important surviving Soane buildings, followed by a gazetteer of Soane's known London projects. The buildings are illustrated by newly commissioned black-and-white photographs by Martin Charles and lovely watercolors by Dean, an architect and member of the English Heritage London and Salisbury Cathedral Fabric Advisory Committees. Distributed in the US by Ashgate. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Society, culture, and politics in Byzantium.

A prodigious historian of Byzantium, Oikonomides is spoken of in the past tense, which might explain why this fourth Variorum collection is described as his last. The 28 articles from the tail end of his career, 1988-2000, look at language and literacy, art and politics, Byzantium after 1204, and Mount Athos and the church. Half of them are in English, the others in French or Greek. Among their topics are an example from western Asia Minor of literacy in 13th-century Byzantium, an imperial Byzantine casket and its fate at a humanist's hands, the Byzantine overlord of Genoese possessions in Romania, and patronage in Palaiologan Mount Athos. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Spatial planning and urban development in the new EU member states; from adjustment to reinvention.

This anthology of 16 articles was developed from a special Eastern Enlargement edition of the Planungsrundschau, a German-language journal and publication series on planning theory, politics, and practice. Urban planners, sociologists, and related professionals review developments and planned interventions in the ten new members states of the European Union since the beginning of the transition. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Towns and local communities in medieval and early modern England.

Three papers published here for the time join 10 others reproduced from journals and anthologies published between 1978 and 2000. They cover local communities, archaeology and topography, towns and power, late medieval society, and urban decline. Among the topics are town and village formation in medieval England, town defenses in medieval England and Wales, the role of minorities and immigrants in English medieval towns, and York as a case study for whether there was a crisis in English towns between 1460 and 1640. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Traversing the fantasy; critical responses to Slavoj Zizek.

Zizek's work is far-ranging, a fact well-represented in this collection of 12 essays including an extended response by Zizek himself. A distinguished set of contributors challenge Zizek on psychoanalysis (the politics of style in the works of Zizek and the graph of desire), culture (Deleuze, aesthetics, the fantasmatic and film noir), ideology (God's ontology and the ideology of Zizek's cultural theory), politics (woman as symptom of man and the antinomies of Zizek's sociopolitical reason), ethics (aporias as an ethics of the political and absolute freedom in major structural change), and philosophy, which discusses Lucan, Merleau-Ponty, and Zizek's "misreading" of Schelling. Zizek's response is equally far-reaching and satisfying. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Turner as draughtsman.

Best known for his paintings in watercolor and oil, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) was also a highly competent draughtsman. Illustrated throughout with b&w artistic reproductions, this volume examines this long-neglected aspect of his oeuvre. Wilton places Turner's drawing practice of different periods within the context of what he was intending to convey. He also offers some justification of Turner's figure drawing, which has long been ridiculed by critics. Wilton is Visiting Research Fellow at the Tate Britain museum. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Victorian and Edwardian reponses to the Italian Renaissance.

The 13 essays emerged from a gathering in Florence in the spring of 2000 where historians from Britain, Italy, and elsewhere explored the construction of the Italian Renaissance in the 19th-century and early 20th-century anglophone world. Among their perspectives are British public museums and the Italian art market in the mid-19th century; models of patronage and patterns of taste in American press and fiction from 1880 to 1914; Victorian women and the past; and civil life, religion, and the countryside in Medieval and Renaissance Siena and Tuscany about 1900. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Women, art, and architecture in northern Italy, 1520-1580; negotiating power.

McIver (art history, U. of Alabama) takes a new path in this interdisciplinary approach to material culture by exploring the decoration of the domestic interior. She investigates the household records of women for clues as to how they got and spent their money on household items and linens, jewelry, fabrics and devotional objects. The result is a picture of how much economic and social power was wielded by women in secular life. The patronage of these women for items in domestic use mattered a great deal to the economy and social consideration, and although they may not have bought palaces and monumental structures, these women influenced or controlled more money, and therefore more power, than has been assumed. The illustrations, including the color plates, give readers a good idea of who controlled what in the household, and therefore who was really in power. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)