The haiku poem, in many ways, is the ancient equivalent of today's digital camera. See, write, capture. Anything at all. Beauty, horror, passion and death. Anything we see or feel or sense or know. In seventeen sounds we can describe virtually all that life can manifest. In this collection of very modern haiku Scott Mulhern has pointed his pen at a vast array of persons, places, conditions and things.

Rug Art-RESCUED FROM OBLIVION is a delightful tale of discovery, but a sad reflection on the lack of preservation of North America's most endangered art form that has literally and figuratively been "tramped on" for much too long. Abandoned for more than half a century in the basement of a damp and mould filled former New Glasgow, Nova Scotia rug pattern factory, a determined research team found amazing pen and ink rug art created by an artist who is said to have studied in the same New York art class with noted folk artist Norman Rockwell. Under a leaking sewage pipe in that same factory they unearthed amazing hand cut Mystery stencils that are now rewriting the arts heritage . Their discovery heralds the oldest known commercial designs recovered in Canada, and possibly in North America and a unique pattern printing system hitherto unknown. The searchers found, and rescued from imminent oblivion some 550 pieces of original pen and ink art created by the 1892 factory founder John Garrett and his son Frank. In acquiring remnants of the oldest known rug pattern factory in the world (1892) they also unearthed three unique hand-carved full size rug pattern blocks and a mass of records of early pattern designs from across North America. An intriguing bonus was the salvaging of some 300 hand cut stencils created by a talented unknown artist. Measuring only 3x5" in size-each contained two rug pattern designs. Designated the MYSTERY PATTERNS preliminary research indicates they are the oldest Canadian rug designs ever discovered and possibly the oldest in the world.

A collection of paintings and poetry by illustrator Vikki Yeates. Vikki has painted many hares over the years; they have become a happy obsession! This book brings most of them together in one volume, together with the poetry which often features in her paintings. She uses the Automatic Writing technique to scratch stories and poems into the artwork. It is not always possible to read the poems in their entirety, as the writing often continues off of the page, or certain areas are obscured by the paint. So this book is also a record of four of her poems/prose: 'Mad March Hares', 'Spirit', 'Moonlight Hares' and 'The Crow and the Moon'. The latter is the first poem Vikki wrote using this method - and does not feature any hares!

Taking the dichotomy of nonprofit "high culture" and for-profit "popular culture" into consideration, this volume assesses the relationship between social purpose in the arts and industrial organization. DiMaggio brings together some of the best works in several disciplines that focus on the significance of the nonprofit form for our cultural industries, the ways in which nonprofit arts organizations are financed, and the constraints that patterns of funding place on the missions that artists and trustees may wish to pursue. Showing how the production and distribution of art are organized in the United States, the book delineates the differing roles of nonprofit organizations, proprietary firms, and government agencies. In doing so, it brings to the surface some of the special tensions that beset arts management and policy, the way the arts are changing or are likely to change, and the policy alternatives "high culture" faces.

This book is a compilation of scholarly articles on a wide variety of subjects pertaining to the cultures of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. "Nordic Experiences" discusses music, art, literature, folkore, and the social fabric of past and present to offer the reader a many-faceted image of what the term Scandinavia stands for today.

There are now some 12-13 million people of Nordic descent living in the United States, and their culture has played a part in shaping the American experience. The cultural contacts and exchanges between the United States and the Nordic countries, thanks in large part to immigration, remains strong and varied, adding a significant dimension to the close ties that have existed for many years. This book is a celebration of Nordic culture and its harmonious and enduring relationship with the United States. As such, it will be of considerable interest to scholars and students alike of Scandinavian or European civilization.

We live in a world of the image. In many ways, images have replaced words as the defining aspect of cultural identity, whilst at the same time they have become part of our global culture. The rapidly developing discipline of visual cultural studies has become the key ares for examining the issues of our age. This book explains issues and concepts such as psychoanalysis, cultural theory, psotmodernism, queer theory, gender studies and narrative theory. The major theorists are all covered as the authors look at the significance of the visual in the works of Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard and Guattari. Taking up a range of themes such as spectatorship, pleasure, power, doubles, hallucination and the frame, the book explains them within the context of these theoretical developments.

The concept of the user is not a well-established sociological concept even though the

This volume of the Golden Age of Illustration Series contains Hans Christian Andersen's most famous tale 'The Little Mermaid', first published in May of 1837. This classic fairy tale has been continuously in print in different editions since its first publication, with many, many, different artists illustrating the story over the years. This edition features a beautiful collection of the best of that art, taken from the likes of Arthur Rackham, W. Heath Robinson, Harry Clarke, Honor Appleton, Anne Anderson, Edmund Dulac, Mable Lucie Attwell, among others. This series of books celebrates the Golden Age of Illustration. During this period, the popularity, abundance and - most importantly - the unprecedented upsurge in the quality of illustrated works marked an astounding change in the way that publishers, artists and the general public came to view this hitherto insufficiently esteemed art form. The Golden Age of Illustration Series, has sourced the rare original editions of these books and reproduced the beautiful art work in order to build a unique collection of illustrated fairy tales.

Scheherazade's Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book's metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature--from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book's complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations.

Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers' approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights' radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.

Philip F. Kennedy is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, and General Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature series at NYU Press.

Marina Warner is Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and Fellow of the British Academy. Her most recent book, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, has won several awards, including the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the Shaykh Zayed Book Award.

This is a concise and accessible introduction into the concept of objectification, one of the most frequently recurring terms in both academic and media debates on the gendered politics of contemporary culture, and core to critiquing the social positions of sex and sexism. Objectification is an issue of media representation and everyday experiences alike. Central to theories of film spectatorship, beauty fashion and sex, objectification is connected to the harassment and discrimination of women, to the sexualization of culture and the pressing presence of body norms within media. This concise guidebook traces the history of the term's emergence and its use in a variety of contexts such as debates about sexualization and the male gaze, and its mobilization in connection with the body, selfies and pornography, as well as in feminist activism. It will be an essential introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students in Gender Studies, Media Studies, Sociology, Cultural Studies or Visual Arts.

In scripture, Jesus promises a future that potentially infuses all texts: "my words will not pass away" (Matt 24:28). This book argues that texts - even literary texts - have an eschatology, too, a part in God's purpose for the cosmos. They, with all creation, move toward participation in the new creation, in the Trinity's expanding, creative love. This eschatological future for texts impacts how we understand meaning making, from the level of semiology to that of hermeneutics. This book tells the story of how readers participate in the future of the word, the eschatology of texts. If texts have a future in the kingdom of God, then readers' engagements with them-everything from preservation and utterance to translation, criticism, and call and response-can cultivate those futures in the love of the Trinity. Kriner explores how the fallenness and failures of texts, alongside readers' own failures, while seeming to challenge the future of the word, ultimately point to reading as a posture of reconciliation, in which reader and text meet in the Maranatha of all text.

This fascinating new study is about cultural change and continuities. At the core of the book are discrete literary studies of Scotland and Shakespeare, Walter Scott, R.L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, the modern Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and more recent cultural and literary phenomena. The central theme of literature and popular 'representation' recontextualises literary analysis in a broader, multi-faceted picture involving all the arts and the changing sense of what 'the popular' might be in a modern nation. New technologies alter forms of cultural production and the book charts a way through these forms, from oral poetry and song to the novel, and includes studies of paintings, classical music, socialist drama, TV, film and comic books. The international context for mass media cultural production is examined as the story of the intrinsic curiosity of the imagination and the intensely local aspect of Scotland's cultural self-representation unfolds.

This text formally appraises the innovative ways new media artists engage urban ecology. Highlighting the role of artists as agents of technological change, the work reviews new modes of seeing, representing and connecting within the urban setting. The book describes how technology can be exploited in order to create artworks that transcend the technology's original purpose, thus expanding the language of environmental engagement whilst also demonstrating a clear understanding of the societal issues and values being addressed. Features: assesses how data from smart cities may be used to create artworks that can recast residents' understanding of urban space; examines transformations of urban space through the reimagining of urban information; discusses the engagement of urban residents with street art, including collaborative community art projects and public digital media installations; presents perspectives from a diverse range of practicing artists, architects, urban planners and critical theorists.