The Arts
February 2020
Your Search Results
-
Promoted Content
-
Promoted Content
Literature & Literary StudiesOctober 2025Objects of belief
Material culture and religious writings in late Medieval England
by Joshua Easterling, Fiona Somerset
Objects in late medieval Europe were a means for lay people and clergy to negotiate their access to powers beyond the everyday, in folk practice as well as religious observance. As has been noted by scholars, this period is marked by a profusion of objects granted special importance, imaginary as well as material. These objects prompt reconsideration of cultural and intellectual frameworks, for example of superstition, reform, and heresy, that never quite successfully contain them. Essays in this volume center attention on these things themselves, from puppets to rosaries, as indeed do the written accounts through which they are often mediated. With a focus on England, contributors re-evaluate our understanding of works and authors including Geoffrey Chaucer, Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love, Julian of Norwich, miracles of the Virgin, Edward Hall's Chronicle, the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.
-
Trusted Partner
The ArtsSeptember 2019Queer Objects
by Chris Brickell, Judith Collard
Queer lives give rise to a vast array of objects: the things we fill our houses with, the gifts we share with our friends, the commodities we consume at work and at play, the clothes and accessories we wear, and the analogue and digital technologies we use to communicate with one another. But what makes an object queer? The sixty-three chapters in Queer Objects consider this question in relation to lesbian, gay and transgender communities across time, cultures and space. In this unique international collaboration, well-known and newer writers traverse world history to write about items ranging from ancient Egyptian tomb paintings and Roman artefacts to political placards, snapshots, sex toys and the smartphone. Fabulous, captivating, transgressive.
-
Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2010Arts and Crafts objects
by Imogen Hart, Christopher Breward, Bill Sherman
In this groundbreaking reassessment of the conventional understanding of a cohesive 'Arts and Crafts movement' in Britain, Imogen Hart argues that a sophisticated mode of looking at decorative art developed in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. Bringing to light a significant number of little-known visual and textual sources, Arts and Crafts Objects insists that the history of British design between the 1830s and the 1910s is more complex and interwoven than concepts of clearly differentiated 'movements' allow for. Reinvesting the objects with the original importance ascribed to them by their makers and users, this book places furniture, metalwork, tiles, vases, chintzes, carpets, and wallpaper at the centre of a rigorous reassessment of the concept of 'Arts and Crafts'. The book offers radical new interpretations of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and the homes of William Morris, alongside illuminating analyses of less familiar but equally rich contexts. ;
-
Trusted Partner
The ArtsJanuary 2012Art, ethnography and the life of objects
Paris, c.1925–35
by Julia Kelly, Marsha Meskimmon, Shearer West, Tim Barringer
In the 1920s and 1930s, anthropology and ethnography provided new and striking ways of rethinking what art could be and the forms which it could take. This book examines the impact of these emergent disciplines on the artistic avant-garde in Paris. The reception by European artists of objects arriving from colonial territories in the first half of the twentieth century is generally understood through the artistic appropriation of the forms of African or Oceanic sculpture. The author reveals how anthropological approaches to this intriguing material began to affect the ways in which artists, theorists, critics and curators thought about three-dimensional objects and their changing status as 'art', 'artefacts' or 'ethnographic evidence'. This book analyses texts, photographs and art works that cross disciplinary boundaries, through case studies including the Dakar to Djibouti expedition of 1931-33, the Trocadéro Ethnographic Museum, and the two art periodicals Documents and Minotaure. Through its interdisciplinary and contextual approach, it provides an important corrective to histories of modern art and the European avant-garde. ;
-
Trusted Partner
Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2024Borrowed 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.
-
Trusted Partner
Literature & Literary StudiesJuly 2025Strange matter
Medieval disruptions of time
by Martin Bleisteiner, Jan-Peer Hartmann, Andrew James Johnston
Medieval and early modern texts reflect a fascination with material objects, from ancient heirlooms to ingenious automata. Often imbued with power or beauty, these objects carry an uncanny sense of otherness, their mysterious origins evoking wonder and suggesting temporal and spatial distance. Acting as repositories of temporal alterity, such artefacts bridge the past and present in profound ways. This volume, featuring contributions from experts in literature and art history, explores how texts from these periods use material objects to engage with temporal otherness. From everyday items to marvellous creations, objects challenge distinctions between human and material, natural and cultural. Whether examining the hybrid status of Hector's body in Lydgate's Troy Book or the temporal agency of humble bubbles, the chapters illuminate the vibrant networks connecting people and objects. By highlighting the 'hybridity' of matter, the book offers fresh insights into Bruno Latour's critique of nature-culture divides.
-
Trusted Partner
-
Trusted Partner
-
Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2025Material masculinities
Men and goods in eighteenth-century England
by Ben Jackson
Material Masculinities examines the material and consumer practices of over 1000 men from the middling and upper ranks of eighteenth-century society, c.1650-1850. It draws upon evidence from over 35 archives and museum collections to detail how material objects were integral for men in forming identities and shaping experiences. For men of all social ranks, ages, and geographic locations, material knowledge was imperative for masculine social identities to operate in a commercial society. Before the centralised factory and widespread mass-produced goods, men personalised and repaired their goods; products were shaped by men's attitudes and concerns. Objects were tools in men's identity formation and the exercise of social and gendered power. There was a reciprocal relationship between men and goods in this period; men were active agents of material and commercial change driving product and aesthetic innovation.
-
Business, Economics & LawApril 1905Creating Capital
Money-making as an aim in business
by Fredrick L. Lipman
The object of this paper is to discuss money-making; to examine its prevalence as an aim among people generally and the moral standards which obtain among those who consciously seek to make money.
-
Lifestyle, Sport & LeisureMarch 1905Dogs and All about Them
by Robert Leighton
The popularity of the dog as a companion, as a guardian of property, as an assistant in the pursuit of game, and as the object of a pleasurable hobby, has never been so great as it is at the present time.
-
Technology, Engineering & AgricultureMarch 1905The First Book of Farming
by Charles L. Goodrich
This book is a result of the author's search for these facts and truths as a student and farmer and his endeavor as a teacher to present them in a simple manner to others. The object in presenting the book to the general public is the hope that it may be of assistance to farmers, students and teachers, in their search for the fundamental truths and principles of farming.
-
Trusted Partner
Literature & Literary StudiesJanuary 2013Popular protest in late-medieval Europe
Italy, France and Flanders
by Samuel Kline Cohn
The documents in this stimulating volume span from 1245 to 1424 but focus on the 'contagion of rebellion' from 1355 to 1382 that followed in the wake of the plague. They comprise a diversity of sources and cover a variety of forms of popular protest in different social, political and economic settings. Their authors range across a wide political and intellectual horizon and include revolutionaries, the artistocracy, merchants and representatives from the church. They tell gripping and often gruesome stories of personal and collective violence, anguish, anger, terror, bravery, and foolishness. Of over 200 documents presented here, most have been translated into English for the first time, providing students and scholars with a new opportunity to compare social movements across Europe over two centuries, allowing a re-evaluation of pre-industrial revolts, the Black Death and its consequences for political culture and action. This book will be essential reading for those seeking to better understand popular attitudes and protest in medieval Europe.
-
Trusted Partner
Literature & Literary StudiesApril 2019Borrowed objects and the art of poetry
by Denis Ferhatovic, James Paz, Anke Bernau, David Matthews
-
Trusted Partner
Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2021Women, workplace protest and political identity in England, 1968–85
by Jonathan Moss, Lynn Abrams
-
September 1904Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, and is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature, with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others". The play likely was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime, and still ranks among his most performed, topping the performance list of the Royal Shakespeare Company and its predecessors in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1879. It has inspired many other writers—from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Charles Dickens to James Joyce and Iris Murdoch—and has been described as "the world's most filmed story after Cinderella"
-
The ArtsJanuary 1905The Elements of Drawing
by John Ruskin
Can drawing — sound, honest representation of the world as the eye sees it, not tricks with the pencil or a few "effects" — be learned from a book? One of the most gifted draftsmen, who is also one of the greatest art critics and theorists of all time, answers that question with a decided "Yes." He is John Ruskin, the author of this book, a classic in art education as well as a highly effective text for the student and amateur today. The work is in three parts, cast in the form of letters to a student, successively covering "First Practice," "Sketching from Nature," and "Colour and Composition." Starting with the bare fundamentals (what kind of drawing pen to buy; shading a square evenly), and using the extremely practical method of exercises which the student performs from the very first, Ruskin instructs, advises, guides, counsels, and anticipates problems with sensitivity. The exercises become more difficult, developing greater and greater skills until Ruskin feels his reader is ready for watercolors and finally composition, which he treats in detail as to the laws of principality, repetition, continuity, curvature, radiation, contrast, interchange, consistency, and harmony. All along the way, Ruskin explains, in plain, clear language, the artistic and craftsmanlike reasons behind his practical advice — underlying which, of course, is Ruskin's brilliant philosophy of honest, naturally observed art which has so much affected our aesthetic. Three full-page plates and 48 woodcuts and diagrams (the latter from drawings by the author) show the student what the text describes. An appendix devotes many pages to the art works which may be studied with profit.
