Author: Robert A. Schneider
From public executions to religious processions to political festivities, Toulouse's ceremonial life was remarkably rich in the decades prior to the French Revolution. In an engaging portrait that conveys this provincial city in all its splendor and misery, Robert Schneider explores how Toulouse's civic and community life was represented in the stagings of various ceremonies. His inquiry is based on the unpublished diaries of Pierre Barthes, a Latin tutor who was both a devout Catholic and a monarchist, and who recorded forty years of public activity in ways that reflected the mounting social tensions of his times. By analyzing Barthes's accounts, Schneider demonstrates how the variety of ceremonial forms embodied different ritual dynamics and represented contrasting values. The author focuses most intently on the differences between the solemn religious procession, which was highly participatory and represented local concerns, and the more celebratory festival, which vaunted the monarchy and turned the people into passive spectators. He examines the theatrical nature of often hastily orchestrated religious parades winding through neighborhood streets, then considers the monarchy's use of plazas for staged entertainment, particularly for awe-inspiring displays of fireworks. Schneider argues that the festival proved a successful tool in imposing the symbols of the centralized state on Toulouse's public life, but that both the procession and the festival incorporated powerful ceremonial forms that proved politically useful for the Revolution.
Author: William Uricchio
The works of Shakespeare and Dante or the figures of George Washington and Moses do not often enter into popular conceptions of the silent cinema, yet, between 1907 and 1910, the Vitagraph Company frequently used such material in producing quality films that promulgated respectable culture. William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson situate these films in an era of immigration, labor unrest, and mainstream American xenophobia, in order to explore the cultural views promoted by the films and the ways the audiences--the middle classes as well as workers and immigrants--related to what they saw. The authors associate the production of quality films with a top-down forging of cultural consensus on issues such as patriotism and morality, and reveal the surprising bottom-up negotiations of these films' meanings..Devoting chapters to the literary, historical, and biblical subjects used by Vitagraph, this book draws upon plays, pageants, school textbooks, and even product advertisements to illuminate the conditions of cinematic production and reception. It provides a detailed look at one aspect of the film industry's transformation from despised cheap amusement to the nation's dominant mass medium, while showing how cultural elites engaged in a struggle similar to that of today's American academy over the literary canon and national value systems.Originally published in 1993.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Sally Chivers
Sally Chivers provides a fascinating look at and challenge to how North American popular culture has portrayed old age as a time of disease, decline, and death. Within contemporary Canadian literary and film production, a tradition of articulate central elderly female characters challenges what the aging body has come to signify in a broader cultural context. Rather than seek positive images of aging, which can do their own prescriptive damage, the author focuses on constructive depictions that provide a basis on which to create new stories and readings of growing old. This type of humanities approach to the study of aging promises neither to fixate on nor avoid consideration of the role of the body in the much broader process of getting older. The progression implied in the title from the solitary symbol of The Old Woman toward a community of older women, indicates not a move toward euphemism, but rather an increasing and necessary awareness of the social and cultural dimensions of aging.
Author: Jin'ichi Konishi
This book, which covers the period from preliterate times to the beginning of the tenth century, is the first of five proposed volumes that will give an account of Japanese literature from its beginnings to the death of the modern novelist Mishima.Originally published in .The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Peter S. Wells
The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places--and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience. How Ancient Europeans Saw the World offers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe's pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.
Author: Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay
This book offers a history of the creation of a scholarly study of religion in the Victorian period, highlighting the contributions of six anthropologists who attempted to define religion apart from the polemics of traditional orthodoxy, on the one hand, and of Enlightenment materialism, on the other.
Author: Nancy Berlinger
Medical error is a leading problem of health care in the United States. Each year, more patients die as a result of medical mistakes than are killed by motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS. While most government and regulatory efforts are directed toward reducing and preventing errors, the actions that should follow the injury or death of a patient are still hotly debated. According to Nancy Berlinger, conversations on patient safety are missing several important components: religious voices, traditions, and models. In After Harm, Berlinger draws on sources in theology, ethics, religion, and culture to create a practical and comprehensive approach to addressing the needs of patients, families, and clinicians affected by medical error. She emphasizes the importance of acknowledging fallibility, telling the truth, confronting feelings of guilt and shame, and providing just compensation. After Harm adds important human dimensions to an issue that has profound consequences for patients and health care providers.
Author: Richard H. Millington
Practicing Romance sets out to re-tell the story of Hawthorne's career, arguing that he is best understood as a cultural analyst of extraordinary acuity, ambitious to reshape--in a sense to cure--the community he addresses. Through readings attentive to narrative strategy and alert to the emerging middle-class culture that was his audience, the book defines and describes Hawthornian Romance in a new way: not, in customary fashion, as the definitive instance of a peculiarly American genre, but as a narrative practice designed to expose and restage the covert drama that affiliates us to our community. Hawthorne's fiction thus recovers for its readers, through the interpretive independence it teaches, a freer, more lucid, more critical relation to the community we inhabit, and the cultural engagement romance enacts in turn rescues Hawthorne from the confining marginality that the writer's career had threatened to confer. From the book's distinctive account of his narrative tactics, especially his deployment of the voices and attitudes--authoritarian or democratic, entrapping or freeing--that give shape to his ideological terrain, Hawthorne emerges as a daring reinventor of the novel's cultural role.Originally published in 1992.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.