Ashgate Publishing Co.
Body/embodiment; symbolic interaction and the sociology of the body.
The body is not just an artifact but actually a many-chambered vessel of great significance to the individual and society; body, self and social interaction are intimately interrelated and constantly reconfigured. Using empirical evidence and armed with symbolic interactionism as explored by John Dewey, William James, Charles Pierce, Charles Copley and George Herbert Mead, contributors explore the sociology of the body in terms of its reflexivity, drama, phenomenology, place in the culture, and function as a form of narrative. Papers cover such topics as visibility and invisibility in chronic illness and disability, embodied enactment and experience, managing disabilities and the precariousness of the territories of the self, performance, the body in interpretive sociology, human-horse interaction, the addict's body, the dualism of body image, food metaphors and the black body, masculinity and pregnancy. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Cultures of glass architecture.
British architect has long been fascinated with glass, especially as a building material. Here he explores, the history, aesthetics, environmental and cultural perspectives, and the future of glass architecture. He also includes a technical review of seeing through glass. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Curiosity and wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
European and American scholars of history and literature explore how the two emotions were expressed during the early modern period. Their topics include the metaphorical collecting of curiosities in France and Germany, the jocund cabinet and the melancholy museum in 17th-century English literature, and wonder-working and the culture of automata. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Doves and dreams; the art of Frances Macdonald and James Herbert McNair.
Robertson (Mackintosh studies, U. of Glasgow, UK) is joined by other art scholars from Canada and the UK in this examination of the lives and careers of Frances Macdonald (1873-1921) and J. Herbert McNair (1868-1955), the less often studied members of the "Glasgow Four." The volume has been published in association with the exhibition of the same name, showing in 2006 and 2007 at the Hunterian Art Gallery at the U. of Glasgow and Walker Art Gallery at the National Museums Liverpool. Essays, which survey the contributions of Macdonald and McNair, present a comparative analysis of the urban context, and discuss their collaborative partnership and 3-D designs, are followed by a catalog of the works, most held at the U. of Glasgow. Color and b&w photos show furniture and interiors, graphics, metalwork, pastels, textiles, and watercolors. Distributed in the US by Ashgate. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Pictures and popery; art and religion in England, 1660-1760.
During the 18th century, says Haynes (world art and museology, U. of East Anglia) the English, who prided themselves on their defense of the Reformation, highly prized art that was Roman Catholic in matter and provenance, and the anti-image Church of England was full of images. She investigates the related paradoxes by looking at the nature of English Protestantism, and explaining the religious concerns and debates over how art was viewed and made. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Re-membering masculinity in early modern Florence; widowed bodies, mourning, and portraiture.
In her innovative and fruitful approach to Renaissance portraiture, Levy (art history, Wheaton College) argues that these paintings were generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-mortuary mourning. She contends that portraiture could defer memory loss, or, at least, pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death. To support her arguments, Levy examines an extensive selection of 15th- and 16th-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in the context of historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, as well as critical theories of race and disability. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Reflections on aesthetic judgment and other essays.
Tilghman (Kansas State U.) finds himself to be consistently anti-theoretical but nonetheless Wittgensteinian. To prove it here he keeps firmly in mind Wittgenstein's remark that ontology is best understood as grammar as he looks behind theories to get a clearer view of essential problems and their solutions. He seeks to emphasize the importance of the representation of the human in art and our human response to art, with the idea that reflection upon life and the importance of art within in is the best way to think seriously about both. Along the way he reflects upon the nature of the literary work of art, aesthetic descriptions and "secondary senses," the ontology of literature, understanding people and understanding art, aesthetic theory, the importance of nonsense, Le Brun, understanding of culture through its architecture and painting, language and painting, literature and morality, and a conceptual dimension of art history. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Representing female artistic labour, 1848-1890; refining work for the middle-class woman.
Zakreski (English, U. of Exeter) adds her study to the growing evidence that has deflated the "separate spheres" conceptualization of male and female labor in the 19th century. Drawing on fiction, prose, painting and the periodical press, Zakreski examines the professions of sewing, art, writing and acting, showing how they came to be defined as "artistic" and thus as suitable professions for middle-class women. She argues that representations of creative women by such authors as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Craik, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Yonge shaped new forms of mainstream society that did not consign working women to the margins of patriarchal culture. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The responsive museum; working with audiences in the twenty-first century.
Sending patrons through static displays when they have just come in from the world of video games may already be a lost cause. In this collection of articles designed to help administrators and curators think of museums as learning spaces responsive to their audiences, contributors work from experience to describe understanding and developing audiences at the theoretical, policy and practical levels. Topics include influences on museum practice, government policy, the public access debate, prioritizing audience groups, building capacity for sustainable audience development through networks and partnerships, developing web resources, evaluation, funding, applied research, audience advocacy, creating environments for learning, museum professions, and a hint of where museums will go from here. Topics include responses on such issues as developing the inclusive model, digital technologies, and taking collective responsibility for making museums accessible. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Richard Woods.
This monograph presents the delightful work of British artist Richard Woods, whose sculptures and installations operate on the boundary between art, architecture and design. Drawing on unpublished interviews with the artist and previously unseen documentation of earlier sculptures and installations, the art historian and independent curator Marco Livingstone charts the development of Woods' work since his days as an art student at the Slade School of Fine Art. The volume is lavishly illustrated and focuses on Woods' building-based projects completed since 2000. Distributed in the US by Ashgate. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Sculpture and the garden.
This collection of 10 essays by history and art scholars from the UK addresses the relationship between sculpture and gardens there since the early eighteenth century. They discuss different types of gardens and how sculpture has "embellished" them. Concentrating on four key landscapes — the Georgian Landscape, Victorian urban park, outdoor spaces of twentieth-century modernism, and late-twentieth century sculpture parks — the essays trace a continuous example of British culture and aspects relating to royalty, gender, public areas, meaning, modernism, and neoclassicism. The volume begins with color photographs of several gardens by Geoffrey James. It originated in a conference held at the U. College Bretton Hall in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 1998. Eyres is the editor of the New Arcadia Journal, UK. Russell is a freelance writer and editor. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Total landscape, theme parks, public space.
Mitrasinovic uses the example of theme parks to explain the properties of privately-owned publicly accessible space, a hybrid form of public space that is emerging in urban environments worldwide. He argues that the process of systematic totalization that brings these two types of spaces together are values, conditions and techniques that extend throughout the social realm. The relationship between theme parks and privately-owned publicly accessible spaces offers insights into the ethos of total landscape, a condition that emerges from convergences of the globally emerging socio-economic systems and that is based on the idea of systematic totality. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Visual culture and decolonisation in Britain.
For editors Faulkner (history of art and design, Manchester Metropolitan U., UK) and Ramamurthy (media and cultural history, U. of Central Lancashire, UK), and presumably their contributors, decolonization means much more than formal constitutional decolonization, instead referring to "the interrelationships and conflicts between those complex historical forces that have been involved with the ongoing deconstruction of empire, and those that have defended colonialism and reconstructed imperialism in new contexts," as well as ongoing cultural processes through which lingering aspects of colonialism and imperialism in the cultural sphere are critiqued or defended. It is the visual aspects of this latter meaning (as they relate to the decolonization of the British Empire) to which the nine historical essays presented attend, although obviously not in isolation from the former. Individual chapters discuss the re-articulation of otherness in feature film images of Africa, photographic representations of Caribbean migrants in England, corporate advertisements concerning large industrializing project in the decolonizing world as a form of "controlling gaze," and the appropriation of colonial imagery in pro-Zionist films, among other topics. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Visualizing medieval medicine and natural history, 1200-1550.
Historians mostly of art but also of medicine and science engage in conversation about how their fields overlap chronologically in about 1200-1550 and geographically from Byzantium to the British Isles. Among the topics they discuss are Latin crusaders and Byzantine herbals, the scientific illustrations in Pico della Mirandola's manuscript of Pliny the Elder's Natural History, and Leonardo da Vinci and botanical illustration. The nine essays are from a conference in 2003 in Kalamazoo. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
