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Explores the resilience of the Dutch Republic in the face of preindustrial climate change during the Little Ice Age.
Tales of shipwreck have always fascinated audiences, and as a result there is a rich literature of suffering at sea, and an equally rich tradition of visual art depicting this theme. Exploring the shifting semiotics and symbolism of shipwreck, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume provide a history of a major literary and artistic motif as they consider how depictions have varied over time, and across genres and cultures. Simultaneously, they explore the imaginative potential of shipwreck as they consider the many meanings that have historically attached to maritime disaster and suffering at sea. Spanning both popular and high culture, and addressing a range of political, spiritual, aesthetic and environmental concerns, this cross-cultural, comparative study sheds new light on changing attitudes to the sea, especially in the West. In particular, it foregrounds the role played by the maritime in the emergence of Western modernity, and so will appeal not only to those interested in literature and art, but also to scholars in history, geography, international relations, and postcolonial studies.
We need a poetic history of the ocean, and Shakespeare can help us find one. There's more real salt in the plays than we might expect. Shakespeare's dramatic ocean spans the God-sea of the ancient world and the immense blue vistas that early modern mariners navigated. Throughout his career, from the opening shipwrecks of The Comedy of Errors through The Tempest, Shakespeare's plays figure the ocean as shocking physical reality and mind-twisting symbol of change and instability. To fathom Shakespeare's ocean - to go down to its bottom - this book's chapters focus on different things that humans do with and in and near the sea: fathoming, keeping watch, swimming, beachcombing, fishing, and drowning. Mentz also sets Shakespeare's sea-poetry against modern literary sea-scapes, including the vast Pacific of Moby-Dick, the rocky coast of Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, and the lyrical waters of the postcolonial Caribbean. Uncovering the depths of Shakespeare's maritime world, this book draws out the centrality of the sea in our literary culture.
Contrary to what Kant believed about the Dutch (and their visual culture) as “being of an orderly and diligent position” and thus having no feeling for the sublime, this book argues that the sublime played an important role in seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture. By looking at different visualizations of exceptional heights, divine presence, political grandeur, extreme violence, and extraordinary artifacts, the authors demonstrate how viewers were confronted with the sublime, which evoked in them a combination of contrasting feelings of awe and fear, attraction and repulsion. In studying seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture through the lens of notions of the sublime, we can move beyond the traditional and still widespread views on Dutch art as the ultimate representation of everyday life and the expression of a prosperous society in terms of calmness, neatness, and order. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, architectural history, and cultural history.
The sets of landscape etchings produced in the second decade of the seventeenth century by Claes Jansz. Visscher, Esaias van den Velde, Willem Buytewech, and Jan van de Velde drew on and contributed to a print culture that played a key role in defining "Dutch" landscape. Examination of these printed landscape series as part of a wide-ranging print culture underscores the consistent interrelationship of landscape, history, and politics. To varying degrees, the contemporaneous descriptive geographies, histories, allegorical tableaux, didactic prints, and poetic anthologies considered in this study provide parallels for the prints' serial structure, journey theme, and commemorative motifs. More...
Seafaring activity for trade and travel was dominant throughout the Spanish Empire, and in the worldview and imagination of its inhabitants, the specter of shipwreck loomed large. Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World probes this preoccupation by examining portrayals of nautical disasters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. The essays collected here showcase shipwreck’s symbolic deployment to question colonial expansion and transoceanic trade; to critique the Christian enterprise overseas; to signal the collapse of dominant social order; and to relay moral messages and represent socio-political debates. The contributors find examples in poetry, theater, narrative fiction, and other print artifacts, and approach the topic variously through the lens of historical, literary, and cultural studies. Ultimately demonstrating how shipwrecks both shaped and destabilized perceptions of the Spanish Empire worldwide, this analytically rich volume is the first in Hispanic studies to investigate the darker side of mercantile and imperial expansion through maritime disaster.
In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial networks and artistic production. Moving across film, painting, performance, and installation art, Metzger traces flows of money, culture, and aesthetics to reveal the ways in which routes of commerce stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age have molded and continue to influence the social reproduction of Chineseness. With a particular focus on the Caribbean, Metzger investigates the expressive culture of Chinese migrants and the communities that received these waves of people. He interrogates central i...
The Tempest is one of the most suggestive, yet most elusive of all Shakespeare's plays, and has provoked a wide range of critical interpretation. It is a magical romance, yet deeply and problematically embedded in seventeenth-century debates about authority and power. David Lindley's Introduction and commentary focus upon contemporary texts, attending to the implications of Prospero's magic, his political and paternal ambitions, and the controversial issue of his 'colonialist' control of Caliban. The Tempest was also Shakespeare's response to the new opportunities offered by the Blackfriars theatre, and careful attention is given to the play's dramatic form, stage-craft, and use of music and spectacle, to demonstrate its uniquely experimental nature.
This book explores the unprecedented surge or oceanic feeling in the aesthetic expression of the romantic century. As secular thought began to displace the certainties of a sacral universe, the oceans that give life to our planet offered a symbol of eternity, rooted in the experience of nature rather than Biblical tradition. Images of the sea permeated the minds of the early Romantics, became a significant ingredient of romantic expression, and continued to emerge in the language, literature, art, and music of the nineteenth century. These pages document the evidence for this oceanic consciousness in some of the most creative minds of that century.
Offering a corrective to the common scholarly characterization of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting as modern, realistic and secularized, Boudewijn Bakker here explores the long history and purpose of landscape in Netherlandish painting. In Bakker's view, early Netherlandish as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painting can be understood only in the context of the intellectual climate of the day. Concentrating on landscape painting as the careful depiction of the visible world, Bakker's analysis takes in the thought of figures seldom consulted by traditional art historians, such as the fifteenth-century philosopher Dionysius the Carthusian, the sixteenth-century religious reformer...