You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This entertaining and useful book provides a comprehensive survey of films about the ancient world, from The Last Days of Pompeii to Gladiator. Jon Solomon catalogues, describes, and evaluates films set in ancient Greece and Rome, films about Greek and Roman history and mythology, films of the Old and New Testaments, films set in ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Persia, films of ancient tragedies, comic films set in the ancient world, and more. The book has been updated to include feature films and made-for-television movies produced in the past two decades. More than two hundred photographs illustrate both the films themselves and the ancient sources from which their imagery derives.
With the success of Gladiator, both critics and scholars enthusiastically announced the return of a genre which had lain dormant for thirty years. However, this return raises important new questions which remain unanswered. Why did the epic come back, and why did it fall out of fashion? Are these the same kinds of epics as the 1950s and 60s, or are there aesthetic differences? Can we treat Kingdom of Heaven, 300 and Thor indiscriminately as one genre? Are non-Western histories like Hero and Mongol epics, too? Finally, what precisely do we mean when we talk about the return of the epic film, and why are they back? The Return of the Epic Film offers a fresh way of thinking about a body of films which has dominated our screens for a decade. With contributions from top scholars in the field, the collection adopts a range of interdisciplinary perspectives to explore the epic film in the twenty-first century.
A commentary on the communicative universality of music citing real-world examples from rituals, education, work, and healing.
In the tradition of Ruskin and Arnold, here's a witty, elegant essay on the contemporary academy by a renowned teacher, scholar, and former administrator.
Joshua, Maria, and Linus Flavian determine their destinies. From the Nazirite and Essenic sects to the burgeoning fishing industry on the Sea of Galilee, Joshua and his band of followers are led from obscurity to the portals of the Roman prefect in a movement poised to change the world. Th ey are members of a healing ministry that concerns the Jewish authorities that are striving for survival and security under the umbrella of Rome. Accidentally, Maria of Magdala becomes a part of this movement, and is left with an awesome responsibility. Linus Flavian pits Roman pride and ambition against a Galilean past. The second in the dramatic new series, The Magdala Trilogy, Beyond the Olive Grove provides a fascinating commentary on the origins of Christianity that is both challenging and yet plausible, incorporating traditional beliefs, fictitious thoughts, and new controversial interpretations. With vivid prose and compelling characters, Beyond the Olive Grove offers a captivating glimpse into Biblical times.
Through the lens of modern Chinese literature, Gender Politics in Modern China explores the relationship between gender and modernity, notions of the feminine and masculine, and shifting arguments for gender equality in China. Ranging from interviews with contemporary writers, to historical accounts of gendered writing in Taiwan and semi-colonial China, to close feminist readings of individual authors, these essays confront the degree to which textual stategies construct notions of gender. Among the specific themes discussed are: how femininity is produced in texts by allocating women to domestic space; the extent to which textual production lies at the base of a changing, historically speci...
In this fresh and innovative study, Judith A. Peraino investigates how music has been used throughout history to call into question norms of gender and sexuality. Beginning with a close examination of the mythology surrounding the sirens—whose music seduced Ulysses into a state of mind in which he would gladly sacrifice everything for the illicit pleasures promised in their song—Peraino goes on to consider the musical creatures, musical gods and demigods, musical humans, and music-addled listeners who have been associated with behavior that breaches social conventions. She deftly employs a sophisticated reading of Foucault as an organizational principle as well as a philosophical focus t...
Thirteen original essays study the mobility of Classicists sensu latiore, including philologists and archaeologists, between the Anglophone and Germanophone worlds between the mid-19th C. and 2020, concentrating on the North Atlantic Triangle. American classicists "rushed across the seas" for doctoral work in Germany (the great Hellenist Gildersleeve, the American circle around Wölfflin, the historian of classical scholarship Gudeman). The archaeologist Schliemann’s dubious profiteering in America is exposed. Two contemporary scholars describe how they moved to enrich their career horizons (Ludwig, Shanzer). More, however, sadly, were forced to seek asylum from 20th century Fascism and anti-Semitism (Bieler, Brendel, Fraenkel). One (Gudeman) emigrated from America to Germany in the early Nazi period and later died in a labor camp. The lasting prominence of one novelist (Wallace) and one critic with a dark past (Pöschl), whose influential works crossed the sea, are also evaluated. The volume includes work in academic sociology, archival and epistolographical detective-work, in life writing, transmission-reception, and the history of scholarship.
The Solomon Scandals is a provocative Washington suspense novel inspired by now-forgotten history. A deadly high-rise collapse happened in Northern Virginia, and a U.S. senator and a Supreme Court justice held stakes in a CIA-occupied building. In the novel, an audacious reporter for a crooked newspaper investigates the darker side of a popular real estate tycoon. One of the tycoon's rickety buildings houses hundreds of workers for a shadowy bureaucracy. The reporter's incendiary discoveries compel him to hide his related memoir for a century to shield those on the scandals' fringes. David H. Rothman's complex tale teems with memorable characters (some caught up in a classic Washington dilem...