The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 1500-1850
Author: Jane Kromm File Type: pdf The Art of Frenzy presents a masterful analysis of public madness from the Renaissance to the Industrial Age. Frenzy--the most flagrant and political form of madness--is the madness of warrior-heroes, kings, scolds, and the possessed. Its representation incorporates a range of traditional characters and figures, from Hercules and Orlando to Medea and Britannia. Understood as abusive power and belligerence out of control, and described in terms drawn equally from definitions of tyranny and liberty, frenzy has always been articulated with a significant degree of political meaning. Integrating art history with cultural studies, political history, and the history of medicine, Jane Kromm draws on a wide range of mediums and contexts--from asylum sculpture to political broadsheets, medical texts, the imagery of revolution, caricature and medical illustrations--to clarify the importance of this interpretative pattern. **
Author: John Bew
File Type: pdf
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Winston Churchills wartime heroics and larger-than-life personality propelled him to the center of the world stage. To most, he remains Great Britains greatest Prime Minister, his fame and charisma overshadowing those who followed in his footsteps. Yet while he presided over his countrys finest hour, he was not its most consequential leader. In this definitive new biography, John Bew reveals how that designation belongs to Clement Attlee, Churchills successor, who launched a new era of political, economic, and social reform that would forever change Great Britain. Bews thorough and keen examination of Attlee, the former leader of the Labour Party, illuminates how his progressive beliefs shaped his influential domestic and international policy. Alternatively criticized for being too socialist or not radical enough, Attlees quiet tenacity was intrinsic to the success of his party and highly pertinent to British identity overall. In 1948, he established the National Health Service as part of his British New Deal-a comprehensive, universal system of insurance, welfare, and family allowances to be enjoyed by all British citizens. Attlee also initiated key advancements in international relations by supporting the development of both the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and by granting independence to India, Burma, and Ceylon. More controversially, he sanctioned the building of Britains nuclear deterrent in response to the rise of the Soviet Union and the threat of atomic bombs. Clement Attlee The Man Who Made Modern Britain explores his tenure in the years after the war, as he presided over a radical new government in an age of austerity and imperial decline. Bew mines contemporary memoirs, diaries, and press excerpts to present readers with an illuminating and intimate look into Attlees life and career. Attentive to both the man and the political landscape, this comprehensive biography provides new insight into the soul of a leader who transformed his country and by extension the vast empire over which it once ruled. **
Author: Michael Wyatt
File Type: pdf
ReviewEngland is from this vantage point a fulcrum of extraordinary interest, to which Michael Wyatts wonderful book ... introduces us. Italians dInghilterra Book DescriptionDrawing upon a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship, this original study investigates the role played by Italians and Italian culture in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The small but significant Italian presence in Tudor England is explored through readings of documents and texts written in Italian and Latin, many of them appearing here in English translation for the first time. The second half of the book takes up the career of John Florio, language teacher, lexicographer, translator, and courtier--the most important of the Italians in Tudor England.
Author: Serena Ferente
File Type: pdf
Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe examines the norms and practices of collective decision-making across pre-modern European history, east and west, and their influence in shaping both intra- and inter-communal relationships. Bringing together the work of twenty specialist contributors, this volume offers a unique range of case studies from Ancient Greece to the eighteenth century, and explores voting in a range of different contexts with analysis that encompasses constitutional and ecclesiastical history, social and cultural history, the history of material culture and of political thought. Together the case-studies illustrate the influence of ancient models and ideas of voting on medieval and early modern collectivities and document the cultural and conceptual exchange between different spheres in which voting took place. Above all, they foreground voting as a crucial element of Europes common political heritage and raise questions about the contribution of pre-modern cultures of voting to modern political and institutional developments. Offering a wide chronological and geographical scope, Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe is aimed at scholars andstudents of the history of voting and is a fascinating contribution to the key debates that surround voting today. **
Author: Susan Howe
File Type: epub
Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops.The New York SunWith exacting rigor and wit, Howe pulls Dickinson free of all the sterile and stuffy belle-of-Amherst cotton wool and shows the poet in touch with elemental forces of nature, and as a prophet in all her radical zealotry and poetic glory. Her Emily Dickinson is a unique American genius, a demon lover of poetryno neurasthenic spider artist. Howe draws into her discussion Browning, Wuthering Heights, the Civil War, Master, the great Puritan preachers, captivity narratives, Shakespeare, and phantom lovers. As she chases away narrow and reductive feminist readings of the poet, Howe finds instead a radically powerful and true feminism at work in Dickinson, focusing the whole on that heart-stopping poem My Life had stooda Loaded Gun. A remarkable and passionate poet-on-poet engagement, My Emily Dickinson frees a great poet from the fetters of being read as a special female neurotic, and sets her against a fiery open sky where Perception of an object means loosing and losing it...only Mutability certain. My Emily Dickinson won The Before Columbus Foundation Book Award.**
Author: John B. Beer
File Type: pdf
Revolutionary thinking at the end of the eighteenth century prompted major English writers to probe the riddle of human consciousness and the ways in which it might differ from Being in a divine or universal sense. In the first of two studies, John Beer traces this question in writings by Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the impact of their ideas on successors such as Keats, De Quincey, Byron and the Shelleys relevance to later figures such as the Cambridge Apostles and Tennyson is also discussed.
Author: David W. Noble
File Type: pdf
Why do modern people assume that there will be perpetual economic growth? Because, David W. Noble tells us in this provocative study of cultural criticism, such a utopian conviction is the necessary foundation for bourgeois culture. One can imagine the existence of modern middle classes only as long as the capitalist marketplace is expanding. For Noble, the relatedand relevantquestion is, how can the middle classes believe that a finite earth is an environment in which infinite growth is possible? The answer, which Noble so painstakingly charts, is nothing less than a genealogy of the uses and abuses of knowledge that lie at the heart of so many of our political problems today.As far back as Plato and as recently as Alan Greenspan, Noble finds proponents of the idea of a world of independent, rational individuals living in timeless simplicity, escaping from an old world of interdependence and generations. Such notions, although in sync with Newtonian science, have come up against the subsequent conclusions of geology, biology, and the physics of Einstein. In a survey of the responses to this quandary of historians, economists, literary critics, and ecologists, Noble reveals how this confrontation, and its implications for a single global marketplace, has forced certain academic disciplines into unnaturaland untenablepositions.David Nobles work exposes the costnot academic at allof the segregation of the physical sciences from the humanities and social sciences, even as it demonstrates the required movement of the humanities toward the ecological vision of a single, interconnected world.* ***
Author: Jules Verne
File Type: pdf
The Self-Propelled Island is the first unabridged English translation of Jules Vernes original story featuring a famous French string quartet that is abducted by an American businessman and taken to Standard Island to perform for its millionaire inhabitants. The quartet soon discovers that Standard Island is not an island at all, but an immense, futuristic ship possessing all the features of an idyllic haven. Equipped with the most opulent amenities, Standard Island travels the Pacific Ocean, traversing the south archipelagos and stopping at many sister islands for the pleasure of its well-heeled inhabitants. These inhabitants soon meet with the danger, in its various forms, that is inherent in ocean travel. Meanwhile, the French quartet is witness to the rivalry that exists between the two most powerful families onboard, a rivalry that keeps the future of the island balancing on the edge of a knife. First published in English in 1896, the novel was originally censored in translation. Dozens of pages were cut from the story because English translators felt they were too critical of Americans as well as the British. Here, for the first time, readers have the pleasure of reading The Self-Propelled Island as Verne intended it. **Review Were in the midst of a marvelous Verne renaissance. . . . The Self-Propelled Island is a novel of great appeal, especially to Americans by sending northern and southern aristocrats to sea in literally the same boat, it not only features one of Vernes fabulous futuristic vehicles but also unfolds one of his shrewdest, wittiest political satires.Frederick Paul Walter, Verne translator and former vice president of the North American Jules Verne Society (Frederick Paul Walter 2014-09-16) About the Author Jules Verne (18281905), the worlds most translated author, wrote numerous classics of adventure and science fiction, including The Meteor Hunt, Lighthouse at the End of the World, The Golden Volcano, and Magellania, which are all available from the University of Nebraska Press. Marie-Therese Noiset is a professor emerita of French and translation at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has also translated Caught in the Storm by Seydou Badian. Volker Dehs is a German literary critic and leading Jules Verne specialist and biographer.
Author: Alexander Medcalf
File Type: pdf
This book explores the phenomenal resources dedicated to understanding and encouraging passengers to consume travel from 1900 to 1939, analysing how place and travel were presented for sale. Using the Great Western Railway as a chief case study, as well as a range of its competitors both on and off the rails, Alexander Medcalf unravels the complex and ever-changing processes behind corporate sales communications. This volume analyses exactly how the company pictured passengers in the countryside, at the seaside, in the urban landscape and in the companys vehicles. This thematic approach brings transport and business history thoroughly in line with tourism and leisure history as well as studies in visual culture. **About the Author Alexander Medcalf is Research Fellow for the Department of History at the University of York, UK.