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New edition of the Lowry in the popular Masterpieces of Art series. Renowned for his paintings of the industrial towns of North West England, Lancashire born Lowry had a distinctive and enchanting style, depicting the everyday life of the world around him. In association with The Lowry, which houses over 400 of Lowry’s works, this exceptional book portrays a selection of his paintings, sketches and other works, with subjects gleaned from urban landscapes teeming with his iconic ‘matchstick men’ to haunting unpopulated scenes. Often neglected by the elite of the art world his work has received much greater recognition in recent years.
Through a detailed analysis of epistolary writing, A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship: Spiritual Ambitions, Intellectual Debates, and Epistolary Connections brings to life the Buddhist discourse of a network of lay disciples who debated the value of Chan versus Pure Land, sudden versus gradual enlightenment, adherence to Buddhist precepts, and animal welfare. By highlighting the differences between their mentor, the monk Zhuhong 袾宏 (1535-1615), and his nemesis, the Yangming Confucian Zhou Rudeng 周汝登 (1547-1629), this work confronts long-held scholarly views of Confucian dominance to conclude that many classically educated, elite men found Buddhist practices a far more attractive option. Their intellectual debates, self-cultivation practices, and interpersonal relations helped shape the contours of late sixteenth-century Buddhist culture.
From the Badlands to the Bluegrass, this perilous, potentially deadly adventure changes the lives of everyone involved and puts at risk the survival of the Clan and all the Celtic brooches. While dressing for a dinner date with her cousin and James Cullen Fraser, Ensley Williams picks through her jewelry box for some bling to add to her outfit and chooses her late mother's sunstone brooch. Engraved on the inside of the stone is an inscription. When she recites the Celtic words, she's engulfed in a peat-scented fog and transported back to the Dakota Badlands in 1885 where she meets Teddy Roosevelt at his Elkhorn Ranch. When James Cullen discovers Ensley has disappeared, he decides not to tell...
Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. Of a different world than common prostitutes, courtesans deal in artistic and intellectual pleasures in ways that are wholly interdependent with their commerce in sex. In pre-colonial India, courtesans cultivated a wide variety of artistic skills, including magic, music, and chemistry. In Ming dynasty China, courtesans communicated with their patrons through poetry and music. Yet because these cultural practices have existed primarily outside our present-day canons of art and have often occurred through oral tran...
This volume of nine essays draws together leading scholars in anthropology, social history, musicology, and ethnomusicology to address the roles and functions of music in the Chinese ritual context. How does music, one of a constellation of essential performative elements in almost all rituals, empower an officiant, legitimate an officeholder, create a heightened state of awareness, convey a message, or produce a magical outcome, a transition, a transformation? After an introduction by the volume editors, Bell Yung proposes a theoretical framework for dealing with Chinese ritual sound. A group of three essays focuses on the music for rituals that create political and social legitimacy followed by a second group of essays considering the music associated with rites of passage. Two essays then deal with the music accompanying rituals of propitiation. In all these cases, music is seen to play a critical role, if not the core of the ritual.
Glenn Bowers ancestors came from England, Germany, and Scotland. They included farmers, sailors, teachers, merchants, ministers, poets and politicians. Many of them fought and died in wars. The varied themes of each chapter are common to previous generations of many American families. The storylines include the following persons: Wilhelm Bar (William Bower) came to America in 1833 with his five brothers because his parents were concerned about militarism in their native Wrrtemberg. He joined the 29th Ohio in the Civil War, as did 3 brothers, and he died in prison after being captured in their second battle. Margaret Polk Colburn was the first woman physician in Henry County, Indiana. Her hus...
Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China’s literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another. Thinking about writing as the material product of a culture shifts the emphasis from the author as the creator and ultimate arbiter of a text’s meaning to the editors, publishers, collectors, and readers through whose hands a text is reshaped, disseminated, and given new meanings. By yoking writing and materiality, the contributors to this volume aim to bypass the tendency to oppose form and content, words and things, documents and artifacts, to rethink key issues in the interpretation of Chinese literary and visual culture.
A paramedic goes back in time to Independence, Missouri, in the year 1852, to solve a family mystery. Her quest is jeopardized when she meets a lawyer, Cullen Montgomery, who resembles the ghost who has haunted her since childhood.
In The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, two of the world's leading sinologists, Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender, capture the breadth of China's oral-based literary heritage. This collection presents works drawn from the large body of oral literature of many of China's recognized ethnic groups--including the Han, Yi, Miao, Tu, Daur, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Kazak--and the selections include a variety of genres. Chapters cover folk stories, songs, rituals, and drama, as well as epic traditions and professional storytelling, and feature both familiar and little-known texts, from the story of the woman warrior Hua Mulan to the love stories of urban storytellers in the Yangtz...