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      • The Arts
        March 1905

        Concerning the Spiritual in Art

        by Wassily Kandinsky

        A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own groundbreaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art. Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts. The first part, called "About General Aesthetic," issues a call for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art. In the second part, "About Painting," Kandinsky discusses the psychology of colors, the language of form and color, and the responsibilities of the artist. An Introduction by the translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, offers additional explanation of Kandinsky's art and theories, while a new Preface by Richard Stratton discusses Kandinsky's career as a whole and the impact of the book. Making the book even more valuable are nine woodcuts by Kandinsky himself that appear at the chapter headings. This English translation of Über das Geistige in der Kunst was a significant contribution to the understanding of nonobjectivism in art. It continues to be a stimulating and necessary reading experience for every artist, art student, and art patron concerned with the direction of 20th-century painting.

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        The Arts
        January 2026

        David Simon's American City

        by Mikkel Jensen

        This book examines the television serials created by influential showrunner David Simon. The book argues that Simon's main theme is the state of the contemporary American city and that all of his serials (barring one about the Iraq War) explore different facets of the metropolis. Each series offers distinctly different visions of the American city, but taken together they represent a sustained and intricate exploration of urban problems in modern America. From deindustrialisation in The Wire and residential segregation in Show Me a Hero to post-Katrina New Orleans in Treme and the transformation of the urban core in The Deuce, David Simon's American city traces the urban through-line in Simon's body of work. Based on sustained analysis of these serials and their engagement with contemporary politics and culture, David Simon's American city offers a compelling examination of one of television's most arresting voices.

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        The Arts
        June 2026

        Borderline bodies in art and visual culture

        Unsettling identity and place since 1800

        by Keren Hammerschlag, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, Tania Anne Cleaves

        Borderline bodies offers original interpretations of visual representations of human bodies as bounded and unbounded, fortified and permeable, mobile and static-subject to borders and able to traverse and challenge them. It also takes as its focus images and objects that might be considered 'borderline' because they sit at the intersection of disciplines or sit outside accepted notions of what constitutes serious 'art.' By mapping the ways human bodies traverse borders and straddle-even dismantle-categories, this volume's essays approach afresh the relationship of bodies to traditional modes of representation, especially in art and medicine, and encourage us to think anew about how we understand the relationship between human corporeality, identity and place. Critical transdisciplinary and transnational analyses of objects and images from a range of geographies shed new light on the themes of: bodies and identity; typologies of the body; racialised bodies; 'normal' and 'abnormal' bodies; encounters between bodies; bodies in transition; bodies and mobility; and the bounded and unbounded human body. The outcome is a fresh approach to depictions of the human body produced for the purposes of artistic and medical education, aesthetic edification, and scientific and professional advancement, which disrupts assumptions about the normative human body perpetuated through Western image-making traditions.

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        The Arts
        May 2026

        Feminist substances

        Plastics in art of the 1960s and 1970s

        by Charlotte Matter

        Numerous women artists engaged with industrial materials such as plastics in the 1960s and 1970s, contrary to what the discourse of the time would have us believe. As Feminist substances shows, their works offered unique approaches to plastics in art, introducing new material meanings through a feminist lens. With a focus on Europe and Latin America, the book discusses the practices of Carla Accardi, Lea Lublin and Alina Szapocznikow, combining close readings of selected artworks with broader considerations of their social contexts. It explores their use of Sicofoil, plexiglass, plastic inflatables, polyester resin and polyurethane foam to address key concerns of feminist thought in relation to social reproduction, motherhood, memory, desire and illness. Beyond commonplaces of plastics as generic bad materials, Feminist substances considers more complex ways of engaging with synthetic matter, taking into account our messy relationships with these controversial materials.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2023

        The politics of male friendship in contemporary American fiction

        by Michael Kalisch

        How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors - including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole - this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today.

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        The Arts
        March 2026

        Contemporary art and ecological transformation in East and Southeast Asia

        by Meiqin Wang

        This anthology, presenting new research from fourteen scholars, delves into the interplay between contemporary art and ecological concerns in East and Southeast Asia. Focused on the concept of artistic remediation, the book unravels the diverse capacities of art to combat systemic anthropogenic destruction to the environment and ecology. At its core, the book articulates the ongoing ecological transformation in art and art history that embraces a paradigm shift in human-nature relationships, emphasizing interconnectedness of all life forms of the Earth. Bridging art studies, activism, and environmental studies, the book examines how artistic practices in the region have engaged with ecocritical reflection, biodiversity advocacy, sustainable practices, and environmental justice, among others. Providing a platform for critical and timely analysis of artistic interventions in the face of existential crises, the book acknowledges diverse voices of scholars who have situated their scholarship in the cultural and artistic specificities of various societies, locales, and communities in the region.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2024

        Borrowed objects and the art of poetry

        Spolia in Old English verse

        by Denis Ferhatovic

        This study examines Exeter riddles, Anglo-Saxon biblical poems (Exodus, Andreas, Judith) and Beowulf in order to uncover the poetics of spolia, an imaginative use of recycled fictional artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. Old English poetry famously lacks an explicit ars poetica. This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts - especially those concerned with translation, transformation and the layering of various pasts - yields a previously unrecognised means for theorising Anglo-Saxon poetic creativity. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry works at the intersections of materiality and poetics, balancing insights from thing theory and related approaches with close readings of passages from Old English texts.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 2022

        Edmund Spenser and the romance of space

        by Tamsin Badcoe

        Edmund Spenser and the romance of space advances the exploration of literary space into new areas, firstly by taking advantage of recent interdisciplinary interests in the spatial qualities of early modern thought and culture, and secondly by reading literature concerning the art of cosmography and navigation alongside imaginative literature with the purpose of identifying shared modes and preoccupations. The book looks to the work of cultural and historical geographers in order to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in the development of geographical knowledge: contexts ultimately employed by the study to achieve a better understanding of the place of Ireland in Spenser's writing. The study also engages with recent ecocritical approaches to literary environments, such as coastlines, wetlands, and islands, thus framing fresh readings of Spenser's handling of mixed genres.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2025

        The right in Latin America

        by Ariel Goldstein

        This book provides an in-depth analysis of the rise and influence of both radical and mainstream right-wing movements across Latin America. Through country-specific case studies, it explores the evolution of these groups and their impact on politics, culture, and governance, highlighting key figures and strategies shaping the political landscape in the region.

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        The Arts
        November 2017

        Empire and Art

        by Renate Dohmen

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        The Arts
        January 2019

        Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers

        Theory, practice and difference

        by Parvati Nair, Julian Gutierrez-Albilla

        This volume examines the films of Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers from the 1930s to the present day. It establishes productive connections between film practices across these geographical areas by identifying common areas of concern on the part of these female filmmakers. Focusing on aesthetic, theoretical and socio-historical analyses, it questions the manifest or latent gender and sexual politics that inform and structure the emerging cinematic productions by women filmmakers in Portugal, Spain, Latin America and the US. With a combination of scholars from the UK, the US, Spain and Latin America, the volume documents and interprets a fascinating corpus of films made by Hispanic and Lusophone women and proposes research strategies and methodologies that can expand our understanding of socio-cultural and psychic constructions of gender and sexual politics. An essential resource to rethink notions of gender identity and subjectivity, it is a unique contribution to Spanish and Latin American Film Studies and Film Studies.

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        The Arts
        December 2007

        The art of poverty

        Irony and ideal in sixteenth-century beggar imagery

        by Tom Nichols

        The art of poverty is the first book in English to analyse depictions of beggars in sixteenth-century European art. Featuring works from Germany, the Low Countries, Britain, France and Italy, it discusses a diverse body of imagery in many different media, from crude woodcuts to monumental church altarpieces. It develops a striking thesis, arguing that these works largely conformed to two paradoxical, though mutually supportive, representational approaches. The earlier chapters follow the emergence of a trenchantly negative approach in Northern art, in which beggars are shown as vagabonds, whose idleness and thievery threatened the values of sixteenth-century society (especially its growing emphasis on the need to work). In the other predominant visual mode, beggars are exalted as examples of sacred purity. In many Italian religious paintings, beggars are morally exalted with reference to sacred texts, and made formally beautiful with reference to revered artistic models. Though these approaches reflect the impact of religious reform, it is shown that, by the end of the century, they happily co-existed within Protestant and Catholic cultures. The final part of the book is concerned with the issue of artistic style and with the growing tendency of the beggar image to mediate and dissolve the didactic traditions through which it had originally been defined. The art of poverty will be of special interest to scholars and students of Renaissance art history, and its progressive approach and cross-disciplinary theme and perspective will also make it vital reading for those concerned with the development of early modern European culture. ;

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        The Arts
        October 2023

        The art of darkness

        by John Robb

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2016

        The American bomb in Britain

        by Ken Young

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 1999

        Democracy in Latin America

        by Geraldine Lievesley

        This book offers an insight into the democratic processes and institutions in Latin and Central America. It analyses the different political systems and the challenges to them from the Left and popular movements. Lievesley questions how far democracy is embedded in Latin and Central American and asks what constitutes citizenship in political cultures which remain highly differentiated in terms of the structures and relations of power. She does this through an evaluation of the two distinct perspectives of democracy: the liberal pacted and the radical participatory models. Established political systems, systems in transition from military to civilian rule and Socialist systems are viewed through the prism of these two models. The inter-relationship between state, military, political parties and popular movements are examined with a view to determining the possibility of the emergence of a new politics, which would be inclusion rather than exclusionary and would pursue social justice. The book will provide a stimulating assessment of the region's politics for undergraduates and will provoke debate for postgraduates.

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