A gripping story of sibling loyalty in the last days of medieval Japan. The first novel in a trilogy from the iconic Assassin's Creed universe. Japan, 1868. The Boshin War is about to break out. The Templars have infiltrated the Emperor's closest advisors and push the sovereign to launch an attack against the Tokugawa Shogun, who is supported by the Brotherhood of Assassins. Is the glorious era of the samurai almost over? 16-year-old Atsuko grew up in the affluent areas of the city of Aizu in the shadow of her brother Ibuka. Destined for an arranged marriage, the girl hides a secret: she can wield weaponry just as well as her brother, whose skill with the blade hides an insurmountable fear of combat. When war breaks out, Ibuka must set off to fight alongside his father. Defying the tradition forbidding women from joining the army in order to protect her brother, Atsuko secretly joins up in disguise, desperate to prove her skills. But faced with plots that go far beyond them, will the strength of the siblings' bond prove strong enough?

Ensemble theater is one of the vibrant, meaningful American performance forms today. It's more than art- it's a social movement. Ensemble theater is one of the hottest, most engaging American performance forms today. It's more than art- it's a movement. Performing Communities is an inquiry into a genre of theater that arises from and empowers the grassroots. The book profiles established ensemble groups from inner-city Los Angeles, small-town northern California, African-American South, multicultural southern Texas, low-income central Appalachia, economically struggling South Bronx New York, and cross-continental Native America. This compendium of critical writing about the role these theaters play in building community shows how these artist groups are forged by working in and with their communities over time. Ensemble theater is discovered to be neither alternative nor marginalized, but vanguard, a natural evolution of the movement that propelled regional theater "away from the commercial restraints of New York and toward a theater expressive of the rich diversity of American culture." It is theater that is politically and emotionally charged. It can be cathartic, healing, and has a proven ability to effect social change. The book Performing Communities is a project of the Community Arts Network. It has been created from interviews, analytical essays, and play excerpts from the "Grassroots Theater Ensemble Research Project," an inquiry into American ensemble theaters that have been working in communities for 10 to 35 years. Although originating from a scholarly report, the language has been edited for a popular audience and offers an intimate glimpse into each local ensemble community. The book will appeal to followers of contemporary and popular theater, social change activists, community building specialists, and a public curious about cultural development in the United States.

This collection of twelve new essays examines some of what Jane Austen has become in the two hundred years since her death. Some of the chapters explore adaptations or repurposings of her work while others trace her influence on a surprising variety of different kinds of writing, sometimes even when there is no announced or obvious debt to her. In so doing they also inevitably shed light on Austen herself. Austen is often considered romantic and not often considered political, but both those perceptions are challenged her, as is the idea that she is primarily a writer for and about women. Her books are comic and ironic, but they have been reworked and drawn upon in very different genres and styles. Collectively these essays testify to the extraordinary versatility and resonance of Austen's books.

This book is an exploration of closely related aspects of the historically problematic notion of humour. As the study of humour has been dominated by work in psychology, linguistics, sociology and politics, this may be seen as a ground-clearing exercise to encourage more sustained historical analysis, and provide a fresh perspective on humour and its study.In Part 1, the authorexamine the claim that humour is universal with a genealogy of study reaching back to classical antiquity. Chapter 1 provides an alternative history for the formation of a concept of humour and its derivative, a sense of humour. Chapter 2 surveys the alterations in meaning involved in humour becoming a loan word in other languages. It analyses what might be meant by claiming that humour is universal; and it examines the falsifications involved in the standard genealogical approach to the history of humour theory. In the light of its conclusions, the second essay provides a wide-ranging assessment of the difficulties of treating humour with more historical care. The main topics are contextualisation and intentionality, translation and reception. Within this context, the third essay explores satire and its definition over its long history, dealing with dictionary definition, definition by origin and conceptual implication. In Chapter 5 the author discusses definition by forms of semantic relationship and satire as a definable genre. It ends with attention to satiric definition. In the final essay, the author provides a case study of humour in recent history, an analysis of the important and influential Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister BBC television satires. It illustrates how satiric humour can carry modulated theories of politics into popular culture and get taken as reflections of political reality; and how the actual practice of language use in politics is subject to satire in the programs. Throughout the work humour is used to cast light on wider issues that are frequently discussed independently of its potentially complicating presence.

Details of Consequence examines a trait that is taken for granted and rarely investigated in fin-de-siecle French music: ornamental extravagance. Considering why such composers as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Gabriel Faure, Igor Stravinsky, and Erik Satie, turned their attention to the seemingly innocuous and allegedly superficial phenomenon of ornament at pivotal moments of their careers, this book shows that the range of decorative languages and unusual ways in which ornament is manifest in their works doesn't only suggest a willingness to decorate or render music beautiful. Rather, in keeping with the sorts of changes that decorative expression was undergoing in the work of Eugene Grasset, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and other painters, composers also invested their creative energies in re-imagining ornament, relying on a variety of decorative techniques to emphasize what was new and unprecedented in their treatment of form, meter, rhythm, melody, and texture. Furthermore, abundant displays of ornament in their music served to privilege associations that had been previously condemned in Western philosophy such as femininity, sensuality, exoticism, mystery, and fantasy. Alongside specific visual examples, author Gurminder Kaur Bhogal offers analyses of piano pieces, orchestral music, chamber works, and compositions written for the Ballets Russes to highlight the disorienting effect of musical experiments with ornament. Acknowledging the willingness of listeners to borrow vocabulary from the visual arts when describing decorative music, Bhogal probes the formation of art-music metaphors, and studies the cognitive impetus behind tendencies to posit stylistic parallels. She further illustrates that the rising expressive status of ornament in music and art had broad social and cultural implications as evidenced by its widespread involvement in debates on French identity, style, aesthetics, and progress. Drawing on a range of recent scholarship in the humanities at large, including studies in feminist theory, nationalism, and orientalism, Details of Consequence is an intensely interdisciplinary look at an important facet of fin-de-siecle French music.

In this comprehensive study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson makes a case for the continued significance of Alfred Bester's SF masterwork, exploring its distinctive style, influences, intertextuality, affect, and innovation as well as its extensive metafictional properties. In Stars, Bester established himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Wilson's study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes. The book combines close-readings of the novel with broader concerns about contemporary media, technoculture, and the current state of SF itself. In Wilson's view, SF is a moribund artform, and Stars foresaw the inevitable science fictionalization of our benighted world. With scholarly lucidity and precision, Wilson shows us that Stars pointed the way to what we have (un)become.

This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the technology architecture, physical facility changes and - most importantly - the new media management workflows and business processes to support the entire lifecycle of the IP broadcast facility from an engineering and workflow perspective. Fully updated, this second edition covers the technological evolutions and changes in the media broadcast industry, including the new standards and specifications for live IP production, the SMPTE ST2110 suite of standards, the necessity of protecting against cyber threats and the expansion of cloud services in opening new possibilities. It provides users with the necessary information for planning, organizing, producing and distributing media for the modern broadcast facility. Key features of this text include: Strategies to implement a cost-effective live and file-based production and distribution system. A cohesive, big-picture viewpoint that helps you identify how to overcome the challenges of upgrading your plant. The impact live production is having on the evolution to IP. Case studies serve as recommendations and examples of use. New considerations in engineering and maintenance of IP and file-based systems. Those in the fields of TV, cable, IT engineering and broadcast engineering will find this book an invaluable resource, as will students learning how to set up modern broadcast facilities and the workflows of contemporary broadcasting.

The book proposes a new Cultural Realism and Virtualism design model for cultural and creative products based on Laozi's philosophy and analysis of symbolism, metaphysics, three-layered culture, reverse-triangular cultural space and Zen aesthetics. It studies peoples that speak Austronesian languages and offers a detailed comparison of their homogeneous and heterogeneous cultures of color, clothing, housing, boats, birds, symbols, dance and ancestry, and provides insights into the cultural features of deconstruction and construction of color, style, form, shape and function, to compose cultural and creative products using complex, variable, fuzzy evaluation; and structural variation and color evaluation methods. It then uses case studies to show that the products created with the new model not only fulfilled their purpose, but also successfully entered the markets. This book helps qualify decision-making processes, improve accuracy of design scheme evaluation and enhance efficiency in product development, and as such appeals to those in the cultural and creative industry, researchers, designers and those who are interested in product design.

This book explores contemporary approaches to mobile storytelling, with contributions covering mobile education, news and screen storytelling, creative practice research, and the impact on vulnerable communities and social innovation. With 18 original chapters, Schleser and Xu bring together international media and communication scholars, digital storytellers, filmmakers, musicians, and educators to discuss the significant contributions made by mobile storytelling within academia, culture and society, resulting in a vibrant and interdisciplinary collection that will be a valuable resource to researchers across the arts, humanities and social sciences. This edited collection is a result of the collaboration between Mobile Studies International (MSI) and the Mobile Innovation Network & Association (MINA) at the International Mobile Storytelling Congress (IMSC) at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.

Palmer clearly states that his purpose is to explain 1the ways of critics to theatre practitioners, the ways of theatre to inexperienced reviewers, and the dynamic convergence of theatre and critic to anyone interested in theatre.' . . . The work is a well-written `primer' for writers and it will be useful primarily to performers who object to unfavorable `criticsm' without understanding the nature and purpose of reviewing. Accessible to general readers and undergraduates. Choice Palmer begins with an examination of the theatrical review as a medium for informing and entertaining theatregoers, documenting events of artistic of community importance, and supporting theatre through critical evaluation and publicity. He next comments on how journalistic pressures affect reviewers. Citing brief examples from hundreds of reviews, the author devotes a chapter to each of the elements that needs to be covered in a review, including performers, script, direction, music, and choreography, together with stage and lighting design and other physical aspects of the production. The final chapter develops criteria for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a theatrical review, based on aesthetic standards, the cultural tastes of theatregoers, and the interests of the community. Palmer's experience as both a theatre professional and a journalist gives him an intimate understanding of the antagonism that often develops between reviewers and those who feel themselves to be the target of irresponsible criticism. His book provides a clear perspective on theatrical matters and guidelines that will help to improve standards of reviewing and create an appreciation of the essential relationship between the theatre and its critics.

This collection presents a number of films and television programmes set in the North of England in an investigation of how northern identity imbricates with class, race, gender, rural and urban identities. Heading North considers famous screen images of the North, such as Coronation Street and Kes (1969), but the main purpose is to examine its lesser known facets. From Mitchell and Kenyon's 'Factory Gate' films to recent horror series In the Flesh, the authors analyse how the dominant narrative of the North of England as an 'oppressed region' subordinated to the economically and politically powerful South of England is challenged. The book discusses the relationship between the North of England and the rest of the world and should be of interest to students of British cinema and television, as well as to those broadly interested in its history and culture.

"Ending violent conflict requires societies to take leaps of political imagination. Artistic communities are often uniquely placed to help promote new thinking by enabling people to see things differently. In place of conflict's binary divisions, artists are often charged with exploring the ambiguities and possibilities of the excluded middle. Yet, their role in peacebuilding remains little explored. This excellent and agenda-setting volume provides a ground-breaking look at a range of artistic practices, and the ways in which they have attempted to support peacebuilding - a must-read for all practitioners and policy-makers, and indeed other peacemakers looking for inspiration."Professor Christine Bell, FBA, Professor of Constitutional Law, Assistant Principal (Global Justice), and co-director of the Global Justice Academy, The University of Edinburgh, UK "Peacebuilding and the Arts offers an impressive and impressively comprehensive engagement with the role that visual art, music, literature, film and theatre play in building peaceful and just societies. Without idealizing the role of the arts, the authors explore their potential and limits in a wide range of cases, from Korea, Cambodia, Colombia and Northern Ireland to Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and Israel-Palestine."Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland, Australia, and author of Aesthetics and World Politics and Visual Global Politics "Peacebuilding and the Arts is the first publication to focus critically and comprehensively on the relations between the creative arts and peacebuilding, expanding the conventional boundaries of peacebuilding and conflict transformation to include the artist, actor, poet, novelist, dramatist, musician, dancer and film director. The sections on the visual arts, music, literature, film and theatre, include case studies from very different cultures, contexts and settings but a central theme is that the creative arts can play a unique and crucial role in the building of peaceful and just societies, with the power to transform relationships, heal wounds, and nurture compassion and empathy. Peacebuilding and the Arts is a vital and unique resource which will stimulate critical discussion and further research, but it will also help to refine and reframe our understanding of peacebuilding. While it will undoubtedly become mandatory reading for students of peacebuilding and the arts, its original approach and dynamic exploratory style should attract a much wider interdisciplinary audience."Professor Anna King, Professor of Religious Studies and Social Anthropology and Director of Research, Centre of Religion, Reconciliation and Peace (WCRRP), University of Winchester, UK This volume explores the relationship between peacebuilding and the arts. Through a series of original essays, authors consider some of the ways that different art forms (including film, theatre, music, literature, dance, and other forms of visual art) can contribute to the processes and practices of building peace. This book breaks new ground, by setting out fresh ways of analysing the relationship between peacebuilding and the arts. Divided into five sections on the Visual Arts, Music, Literature, Film and Theatre/Dance, over 20 authors offer conceptual overviews of each art form as well as new case studies from around the globe and critical reflections on how the arts can contribute to peacebuilding. As interest in the topic increases, no other book approaches this complex relationship in the way that Peacebuilding and the Arts does. By bringing together the insights of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of the arts and peacebuilding, this book develops a series of unique, critical perspectives on the interaction of diverse art forms with a range of peacebuilding endeavours.

Explores the uncalculated and incalculable elements in historical re-enactment - unexpected emotions, unplanned developments - and locates them in countries where settlers were trying to establish national identities derived from metropolitan cultures inevitably affected by the land itself and the people who had been there before them.

This book is a comprehensive anthology comprising essays on women film directors, producers and screenwriters from Bollywood, or the popular Hindi film industry. It derives from the major theories of modernity, postmodern feminism, semiotics, cultural production, and gender performativity in globalized times. The collection transcends the traditional approaches of looking at films made by women filmmakers as 'feminist' cinema, and focuses on an extraordinary group of women filmmakers like Ashwini Iyer Tiwari, Bhavani Iyer, Farah Khan, Mira Nair Vijaya Mehta, and Zoya Akthar. The volume will be of interest to academics and theorists of gender and Hindi cinema, as well as anybody interested in contemporary Hindi films in their various manifestations.

Where do we find the dead? Do the dead appear in our dreams? What is it like to play dead? This book is an exciting exploration of the relationship between death and play in performance. Exploring a range of artists and creative disciplines that remember, personify and re-imagine the dead, it playfully unpacks the psychoanalytic concepts of the Death Drive, Desire and the Uncanny as a way of thinking about performance. Embodying the Dead draws on work of Gary Winters and Claire Hind and the various qualities of deadness found in their projects. The authors' work includes live art, theatre, installation, Super 8mm film, walking arts practice and durational performance. This book includes scripts and scores of their performances, original creative texts, interviews with internationally renowned artists and a series of practice-led research tasks to support readers creating their own imaginative performance work. Rich in creative and critical content, this book is ideal for students of drama, theatre and performance studies who have an interest in devised theatre, theatre making, writing for performance and intermedial practice.

Spread Christmas cheer everywhere you go with this joyful spirit clausometer from the iconic movie Elf. * Specifications: 3-inch functional spirit clausometer inspired by the one from Elf * Lights Up: Clausometer detects holiday cheer and lights up in magical Christmas fashion * Magnet Included: Includes a magnet depicting Buddy the elf * Officially Licensed: Authentic collectible ELF and all related characters and elements (c) and (TM) New Line Productions, Inc.

This Palgrave Pivot argues for the significance of allegory in Enlightenment writing. While eighteenth-century allegory has often been dismissed as an inadequate form, both in its time and in later scholarship, this short book reveals how Enlightenment writers adapted allegory to the cultural changes of the time. It examines how these writers analyzed earlier allegories with scientific precision and broke up allegory into parts to combine it with other genres. These experimentations in allegory reflected the effects of empiricism, secularization and a modern aesthetic that were transforming Enlightenment culture. Using a broad range of examples - including classics of the genre, eighteenth-century texts and periodicals - this book argues that the eighteenth century helped make allegory the flexible, protean literary form it is today.

The essays in this book document how the impressive body of literary works and films created by women writers and filmmakers has greatly enriched the Austrian cultural scene since 1945. Their contributions, however, were only marginally recognised during the 1950s and early 1960s and remained hidden within the shadows of the body of art created by their male counterparts in the process of re-establishing Austria's post-World War II cultural identity. The situation changed during the 1970s, when the literary and film texts of the younger generation began to strongly assert feminist views and issues. The texts of contemporary Austrian women writers and filmmakers were directed towards social and ethnic consciousness-raising and are united by their radically new use of language.

- Learn what it takes for editors, cinematographers, directors, producers, lighting technicians, and other filmmakers to work more effectively with visual effects artists on productions, use visual effects as an aid in visual storytelling, reduce production costs, and solve problems created on-set - Achieve a fuller understanding of common types of visual effects and their role in filmmaking; 3D, 2D and 2.5D visual effects; how to support “invisible” visual effects; matchmoving and compositing; the visual effects production timeline; photorealism; and VFX considerations for pre and postproduction - See visual effects concepts brought to life in practical examples drawn from the experiences of industry professionals, and discover how to better integrate visual effects into your own projects

Victor Perez brings together the research and expertise of world-leading color scientists, to create a comprehensive guide for VFX Artists in Color Management. The book explores the latest standards of HDR and ACES workflows, in an easily digestible and widely applicable resource. Its purpose is to make artists confident and familiar with Color Management and its science, to improve the quality of visual effects worldwide. Without assuming any previous knowledge, this self-contained book builds the readers understanding from the ground up, exploring all the elements of the Color Workflow at a scientific level. It covers how to setup a consistent pipeline in relation to other departments, inside and outside visual effects, from camera to screen, so everybody is aligned to the same standards, preserving color qualities, consistency, and maintaining the artistic intent end to end. It also delves into all the integral concepts for color management, ranging from Color Theory to Digital Image Fundamentals, and much more. This book is an invaluable resource for VFX students and professionals who want to be well-informed of the latest HDR and ACES pipelines, as well as those at every level of production, wishing to gain a deeper understanding of managing color in visual effects projects.

This volume reads the global urban environment through mediated sonic practices to put a contemporary spin on acoustic ecology's investigations at the intersection of space, cultures, technology, and the senses. Acoustic ecology is an interdisciplinary framework from the 1970s for documenting, analyzing, and transforming sonic environments: an early model of the cross-boundary thinking and multi-modal practices now common across the digital humanities. With the recent emergence of sound studies and the expansion of "ecological" thinking, there is an increased urgency to re-discover and contemporize the acoustic ecology tradition. This book serves as a comprehensive investigation into the ways in which current scholars working with sound are re-inventing acoustic ecology across diverse fields, drawing on acoustic ecology's focus on sensory experience, place, and applied research, as well as attendance to mediatized practices in sounded space. From sounding out the Anthropocene, to rethinking our auditory media landscapes, to exploring citizenship and community, this volume brings the original acoustic ecology problem set into the contemporary landscape of sound studies.

Virtual Realities presents a ground-breaking application of phenomenology as a critical method to explore the impact of immersive media. Specific case studies examine 360-degree documentary productions about trauma, virtual military simulations, VR exposure therapy for anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder, and the emerging debate about regulating violent content in immersive media gaming. By addressing these texts primarily as experiences, Virtual Realities deploys an analytic and critical methodology that is sensitive to the bodily and cognitive impact of immersive media, especially via the body of an appropriately attentive researcher-critic. Virtual Realities provokes a rethinking of many of the taken-for-granted ideas and assumptions circulating in the field of immersive media. These include concepts of empathy, embodiment, the affective impact of textual and immersive properties on the users' experience, as well as the "gee-whizz" mentality often associated with approaches to the medium. The case studies provide fresh engagement with immersive media such as cinematic VR at a time when dominant attitudes about the technology display an evangelical fascination with VR and other mixed realities as inexorably beneficial. Virtual Realities makes a compelling case for VR-phenomenology to be employed as a methodology by humanities scholars and also in cross-disciplinary applications of immersive media in fields such as psychology, human-computer interaction studies and the health sciences.