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This collection of essays explores the representations, incarnations and manifestations of evil when it is embodied in a particular villain or in an evil presence. All the essays contribute to showing how omnipresent yet vastly under-studied the phenomena of the villain and evil are. Together they confirm the importance of the continued study of villains and villainy in order to understand the premises behind the representation of evil, its internal localized logic, its historical contingency, and its specific conditions.
This monograph examines the most prestigious political paintings created in Britain during the High Baroque age. It investigates a period characterized by numerous social, political, and religious crises, in the years between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy (1660) and the death of the first British monarch from the House of Hanover (1727). On the basis of hitherto unpublished documents, the book elucidates the creation and reception of nine major commissions that involved the court, private aristocratic patrons, and/or civic institutions. The ground-breaking new interpretations of these works focus on strategies of conflict resolution, the creation of shared cultural memories, processes of cultural translation, the performative context of the murals and the interaction of painted images and architectural spaces.
What constitutes a villain? How does villainy differ from evil? Do villains created for children's fiction differ from those created for adults? The villains considered in this volume come from an eclectic range of sources - from comic books to film and from novels to television serials - and a broad selection of times and places. Villains continue to raise troubling questions about the role of narrative in both fiction and real life.
Putting the latest theoretical thinking into empirical use, the author assesses how the function of the state and its citizens changed during the Paris Commune and Franco-Prussian War.
Leading historians and anthropologists with an interest in law gather to analyse the nature and meaning of law in diverse societies.
Neurasthenia, meaning nerve weakness, was ‘invented’ in the United States as a disorder of modernity, caused by the fast pace of urban life. Soon after, from the early 1880s onwards, this modern disease crossed the Atlantic. Neurasthenia became much less ‘popular’ in Britain or the Netherlands than in Germany. Neurasthenia’s heyday continued into the first decade of the twentieth century. The label referred to conditions similar to those currently labelled as chronic fatigue syndrome. Why this rise and fall of neurasthenia, and why these differences in popularity This book, which emerged out of an Anglo-Dutch-German conference held in June 2000, explores neurasthenia’s many-sided history from a comparative perspective.
Léon Harmel is a penetrating study of the French industrialist who from 1870 to 1914 advanced social Catholic and Christian democratic movements by improving factory conditions and empowering workers. Joan Coffey’s fascinating new book represents the first major study of Léon Harmel in English. Harmel’s model factory at Val-des-Bois demonstrated that mutual accord and respect were possible between labor and management. Harmel turned his profitable spinning mill into a Christian corporation. His ethical business practices captured the attention of Pope Leo XIII and inspired his encyclical Rerum Novarum. Harmel also encouraged his workers to make pilgrimages to Rome. The collaboration of Pope Leo XIII and Léon Harmel laid the foundation of enterprises that collectively became known as Christian democracy. Drawing on extensive archival sources, including the Vatican Archives, Joan Coffey’s work skillfully analyzes the personal relationship between Pope Leo XIII and Léon Harmel. Léon Harmel also offers a timely reminder of the power of personal ethics and provides a refreshing antidote to today’s business climate.
Renaissance images could be real as well as linguistic. Human beings were often believed to be an image of the cosmos, and the sun an image of God. Kathryn Banks explores the implications of this for poetic language and argues that linguistic images were a powerful tool for rethinking cosmic conceptions. She reassesses the role of natural-philosophical poetry in France, focusing upon its most well-known and widely-read exponent, Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas.Through a sustained analysis of Maurice Sceve's Delie , Banks also rethinks love lyric's oft-noted use of the beloved as image of the poet. Cosmos and Image makes an original contribution to our understanding of Renaissance thinking about the cosmic, the human, and the divine. It also proposes a mode of reading other Renaissance texts, and reflects at length upon the relation of 'literature' to history, to the history of science, and to political turmoil.
By applying a comparative approach the volume focuses on a select group of „empires“ which are generally not in the focus of empires studies. They are studied in detail and analyzed due to a strict concept that takes into account real history and reception history as well. Reception history becomes more and more an important element in empire studies although this topic is still often more or less underdeveloped. The volume singles out a series of such “forgotten empires”. It aims to provide a methodologically clearly structured as well as a uniform and consistent approach. It develops a general set of questions that help to compare and distinguish these entities. This way the volume intends to examine and to illuminate empires that are generally ignored by modern scholarship.
It is hard to imagine nowadays that, for many years, France and Germany considered each other as "arch enemies." And yet, for well over a century, these two countries waged verbal and ultimately violent wars against each other. This study explores a particularly virulent phase during which each of these two nations projected certain assumptions about national character onto the other - distorted images, motivated by antipathy, fear, and envy, which contributed to the growing hostility between the two countries in the years before the First World War. Most remarkably, as the author discovered, the qualities each country ascribed to its chief adversary appeared to be exaggerated or negative versions of precisely those qualities that it perceived to be lacking or inadequate in itself. Moreover, banishing undesirable traits and projecting them onto another people was also an essential step in the consolidation of national identity. As such, it established a pattern that has become all too familiar to students of nationalism and xenophobia in recent decades. This study shows that antagonism between states is not a fact of nature but socially constructed.