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This volume brings together for the first time the most significant papers on the interpretation of objects and collections and examines how people relate to material culture and why they collect things. The first section of the book discusses the interpretation of objects, setting the philosophical and historical context of object interpretation. Papers are included which discuss objects variously as historical documents, functioning material, and as semiotic texts, as well as those which examine the politics of objects and the methodology of object study. The second section, on the interpretation of collections, looks at the study of collections in their historical and conceptual context. Many topics are covered such as the study of collecting to structure individual identity, its affect on time and space and the construction of gender. There are also papers discussing collection and ideology, collection and social action and the methodology of collection study. This unique anthology of articles and extracts will be of inestimable value to all students and professionals involved in the interpretation of objects and collections.
Seeking for philosophy the same spirit and assurance conveyed by artists like Fred Astaire, Cavell presents essays exploring the meaning of grace and gesture in film and on stage, in language and in life. Critical to the renaissance in American thought Cavell hopes to provoke is the recognition of the centrality of the “ordinary” to American life.
This book traces the development of the Polish theory of history, analysing how Jerzy Topolski, Krzysztof Pomian, and Olga Tokarczuk have both built upon and transgressed the metahistorical theories of American historian Hayden White. Poland’s reception of White’s work has gone through different phases, from distancing to a period of fascination and eventual critical analysis, beginning with Topolski's methodological school in the 1980s. Topolski played a major role in international debates on historical theory in the second half of the 20th century. The book’s second study is a rare opportunity for English-speaking audiences to engage with the thoughts of Pomian, a philosopher and his...
How modernist writers experienced the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Museum of Natural History-and how these museums influenced their writing
This provocative book challenges long-held assumptions about the nature of historical consciousness in Germany. Susan A. Crane argues that the ever-more-elaborate preservation of the historical may actually reduce the likelihood that history can be experienced with the freshness and individuality characteristic of the early collectors and preservationists. Her book is both a study of the emergence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany of a distinctively modern conception of historical consciousness, and a meditation on what was lost as historical thought became institutionalized and professionalized. Public forms of remembering the past which are familiar today, such as hi...
This is the first comparative study of literature written by writers who fled from East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It includes not only interpretations of individual lives and literary works, but also studies of the most important literary journals, publishers, radio programs, and other aspects of exile literary cultures. The theoretical part of introduction distinguishes between exiles, émigrés, and expatriates, while the historical part surveys the pre-twentieth-century exile traditions and provides an overview of the exilic events between 1919 and 1995; one section is devoted to exile cultures in Paris, London, and New York, as well as in Moscow, Madrid, Toronto, Bueno...
"As a study of late Renaissance naturalists, the science they practised, and the fit between that science and late Renaissance court life, the book has no rival."--Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
This concise book presents the fascinating history of the creation of the Musee d'Orsay and the battles among the prominent politicians, curators, and historians over the architecture, collections, and concept of the museum.
For at least a century, scholarship on realist narrative, and occasional polemics against realist narrative, have assumed that realism promotes the values of sameness against those of otherness, and that it does so by use of a narrative mode that excludes certain epistemologies, ideologies, and ways of thinking. However, the truth is more complex than that, as the essays in this volume all demonstrate. Realism’s Others examines the various strategies by which realist narratives create the idea of difference, whether that difference is registered in terms of class, ethnicity, epistemology, nationality, or gender. The authors in this collection examine in detail not just the fact of othernes...
Tracing and theorizing the concept of boundaries through literary works, visual objects and cultural phenomena, this book argues against the reification of boundaries as fixed and empty non-spaces that divide the world. The contributors elaborate on Boer's theme of boundaries as spaces where opposition yields to negotiation. Their analyses span diverse artefacts and media, ranging from literature to photography, to art installation and presentation, film and song. Fanning out from Boer's central focus - Orientalism - to other places of contestation, boundaries are described to mediate the relationship between self and other.