You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
From the award-winning author of Dressing Up, a riveting and diverse history of women’s hair that reestablishes the cultural power of hairdressing in nineteenth-century America. In the nineteenth century, the complex cultural meaning of hair was not only significant, but it could also impact one’s place in society. After the Civil War, hairdressing was also a growing profession and the hair industry a mainstay of local, national, and international commerce. In Beyond Vanity, Elizabeth Block expands the nascent field of hair studies by restoring women’s hair as a cultural site of meaning in the early United States. With a special focus on the places and spaces in which the hair industry...
Over the last few decades, television programs have attempted to depict some of the more troubling elements of society with a more conscientious approach. Issues that networks were once reluctant to broadcast—such as sexual abuse, sexual assault, and rape—have become frequent plot points for many popular shows. Narratives that portray important social issues could potentially affect the ways individual viewers understand such incidents in the real world, so it is important to pay close and critical attention to the stories about rape that are broadcast to mass audiences. In Assault on the Small Screen: Representations of Sexual Violence on Prime Time Television Dramas, Molly Ann Magestro...
This book examines the works of major artists between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as important barometers of individual and collective values toward non-human life. Once viewed as merely representational, these works can also be read as tangential or morally instrumental by way of formal analysis and critical theories. Chapter Two demonstrates the discrimination toward large and small felines in Genesis and The Book of Revelation. Chapter Three explores the cruel capture of free roaming animals and how artists depicted their furs, feathers and shells in costume as symbols of virtue and vice. Chapter Four identifies speciest beliefs between donkeys and horses. Chapter Five explores the altered Dutch kitchen spaces and disguised food animals in various culinary constructs in still life painting. Chapter Six explores the animal substances embedded in pigments. Chapter Seven examines animals in absentia-in the crafting of brushes. The book concludes with the fish paintings of William Merritt Chase whose glazing techniques demonstrate an artistic approach that honors fishes as sentient beings.
“This eloquent, elegant book thoughtfully plumbs the . . . consequences of our dependence on plastics” (The Boston Globe, A Best Nonfiction Book of 2011). From pacemakers to disposable bags, plastic built the modern world. But a century into our love affair, we’re starting to realize it’s not such a healthy relationship. As journalist Susan Freinkel points out in this eye-opening book, we’re at a crisis point. Plastics draw on dwindling fossil fuels, leach harmful chemicals, litter landscapes, and destroy marine life. We’re drowning in the stuff, and we need to start making some hard choices. Freinkel tells her story through eight familiar plastic objects: a comb, a chair, a Fris...
None
Interdisciplinary approaches to the material culture of the middle ages, from illuminated manuscripts to church architecture.
An interdisciplinary study of hair through the art, philosophy, and science of fifteenth-century Florence. In this innovative cultural history, hair is the portal through which Emanuele Lugli accesses the cultural production of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s Florence. Lugli reflects on the ways writers, doctors, and artists expressed religious prejudices, health beliefs, and gender and class subjugation through alluring works of art, in medical and political writings, and in poetry. He considers what may have compelled Sandro Botticelli, the young Leonardo da Vinci, and dozens of their contemporaries to obsess over braids, knots, and hairdos by examining their engagement with scientific, philosoph...
In the age of Antiques Roadshow fever, there has been an explosion of interest in all things collectible. In The Essential Guide, collectors of every specialty can find their particular passions organized by category -- in both European and North American collections. This unique and practical guide identifies and locates more than two hundred of the most popular types of collectibles in museums, galleries, house museums, and other collections -- from the famous to the obscure to the eccentric. Over 700 entries on more than 170 subjects, extensively photographed, are drawn from more than 1,200 museums in Europe and America. The Essential Guide enables readers to plan travel around their interests and enhance their journey with Lord McAlpine's expert and entertaining voice.
None
Addressing a strangely neglected key issue in the history of art, this volume engages the variety and complexity of medieval representations of the unclothed human body. The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art breaks ground by offering a variety of approaches to explore the meanings of both male and female nudity in European painting, manuscripts and sculpture ranging from the late antique era to the fifteenth century.