You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Marco Paolini: A Deep Map breaks new ground in the field of Italian political theatre by outlining the unique approach of one of Italy’s most celebrated playwrights, Marco Paolini, whose work has hitherto remained mostly inaccessible to English-speaking audiences. This book is the first substantial study of Paolini’s corpus in English. Additionally, it offers an in-depth analysis of Paolini’s unique methods by focusing on the recovery of collective cultural memory through theatre and in-depth historical and political context. Author Cristina Perissinotto engages critically with art and politics in Italy specifically but also considers implications and relevance on a global scale. Perissinotto’s multidisciplinary approach simultaneously draws upon memory studies, history, and poetry. She demonstrates how Paolini’s plays use techniques already in use to ancient Greek theatre, which called for the engagement of actors in political commentary from the stage, connecting them directly with the public on social and ethical issues.
In the Beginning: Recollections of Software Pioneers records the stories of computing's past, enabling today's professionals to improve on the realities of yesterday. The stories in this book clearly show that modern concepts, such as data abstraction, modularity, and structured approaches, date much earlier in the field than their appearance in academic literature. These stories help capture the true evolution. The book illustrates human experiences and industry turning points through personal recollections by the pioneers ... people like Barry Boehm, Peter Denning, Watts Humphrey, Frank Land, and a dozen others.
Italy possesses two literary canons, one in the Tuscan language and the other made up of the various dialects of its many regions. The Other Italy presents for the first time an overview of the principal authors and texts of Italy's literary canon in dialect. It highlights the cultivated dialect poetry, drama, and narrative prose since the codification of the Tuscan literary language in the early sixteenth century, when writing in dialect became a deliberate and conscious alternative to the official literary standard. The book offers a panorama of the literary dialects of Italy over five centuries and across the country's regions, shedding light on a profoundly plurilingual and polycentric civilization. As a guide to reading and research, it provides a compendium of literary sources in dialect, arranged by region and accompanied by syntheses of regional traditions with selected textual illustrations. A work of extraordinary importance, The Other Italy was awarded the Modern Language Association of America's Aldo and Jean Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies. It will serve scholars as an indispensable resource book for years to come.
Shanghai in the early twentieth century was alive with art and culture. With the proliferation of popular genres such as the martial arts film, the contest among various modernist filmmakers, and the advent of sound, Chinese cinema was transforming urban life. But with the Japanese invasion in 1937, all of this came to a screeching halt. Until recently, the political establishment has discouraged comprehensive studies of the cultural phenomenon of early Chinese film, and this momentous chapter in China's history has remained largely unexamined. The first sustained historical study of the emergence of cinema in China, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen is a fascinating narrative that ill...
Winner of an Honorable Mention in the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Awards given by the Association of American Publishers Between 1618 and 1750, sixteen people—nine women and seven men—were brought to the attention of the ecclesiastical authorities in Venice because they were reporting visions, revelations, and special privileges from heaven. All were investigated, and most were put on trial by the Holy Office of the Inquisition on a charge of heresy under various rubrics that might be translated as "pretense of holiness." Anne Jacobson Schutte looks closely at the institutional, cultural, and religious contexts that gave rise to the phenomenon of visionaries in Venice. To explain t...
Although cinema was invented in the mid-1890s, it was a decade more before the concept of a “film spectator” emerged. As the cinema began to separate itself from the commercial entertainments in whose context films initially had been shown—vaudeville, dime museums, fairgrounds—a particular concept of its spectator was developed on the level of film style, as a means of predicting the reception of films on a mass scale. In Babel and Babylon, Miriam Hansen offers an original perspective on American film by tying the emergence of spectatorship to the historical transformation of the public sphere. Hansen builds a critical framework for understanding the cultural formation of spectatorsh...
Mixing film history with social history, Reel Patriotism examines the role played by the American film industry during World War I and the effects of the industry’s pragmatic patriotism in the decade following the war. Looking at such films as Joan the Woman and Wings and at the war-time activities of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, film distributors, including George Kleine, and the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, this book shows how heavily publicized gestures of patriotism benefited the reputation and profits of the movie business. Leslie Midkiff DeBauche shows how the United States government’s need to garner public support for the war, conserve food, raise mo...
An important reexamination of early film history, translated from the French for the first time.
The Classical Hollywood Reader brings together essential readings to provide a history of Hollywood from the 1910s to the mid 1960s. Following on from a Prologue that discusses the aesthetic characteristics of Classical Hollywood films, Part 1 covers the period between the 1910s and the mid-to-late 1920s. It deals with the advent of feature-length films in the US and the growing national and international dominance of the companies responsible for their production, distribution and exhibition. In doing so, it also deals with film making practices, aspects of style, the changing roles played by women in an increasingly business-oriented environment, and the different audiences in the US for w...
On Cecil B. de Mille - his life and works.