Discrete inquiries into 15 forms of the Arthurian legends produced over the last century explore how they have altered the tradition. They consider works from the US and Europe, and those aimed at popular and elite audiences. The overall conclusion is that the "Arthurian revival" is an ongoing event, and has become multivalent, multinational, and multimedia. Originally published in 1992.

Stephen Kern has discovered in Pre-Raphaelite and impressionist art a recurring pattern for arranging the sexes: a profiled man gazing at a woman who looks away from him and toward the viewer, while she ponders an apparent offer. Kern draws on such images to challenge the claim of some feminist critics and historians that gazing men monopolize subjectivity and turn women into sex objects. So intent are these writers on viewing women as victims, who in fact reveal a commanding subjectivity. Compared with the eyes of men, women's eyes are more visible, consider more varied thoughts, and convey more profound, if not more intense, emotions.

An authoritative and highly original survey of European art and literature, Eyes of Love also challenges another widely held belief - that a double standard has clearly governed how society judged the sexes. Kern supports these startling interpretations of Renoir, Manet, Degas, Rossetti, Gauguin, Millais, Hunt, Burne-Jones, and Tissot with every evidence from novels by Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Dickens, C. Bronte, Gaskell, Eliot, Hardy, and H. James.

This third volume of the Series on the Colonial Economy of NSW (1788-1835) researches the formation, operation and use of labour in the numerous Government Business Enterprises. This volume supplements the studies on the Colonial Economy and the other most important economic driver - the commissariat. The economic history of NSW and essentially that of early Australia is set out in this series.

Parks, maps, and mapping technologies like the GPS are objects of visual and material culture that rely on the interplay of text, context, image, and space to guide our interpretations of the world around us. LOCATING VISUAL-MATERIAL RHETORICS: THE MAP, THE MILL, AND THE GPS examines in depth, and in several contemporary settings, how visual and material discursive artifacts, when understood as rhetorical, shape our understanding of the unique cultural moments that these artifacts set out to represent. Using three cases that involve an exploration of the corporeal influence of the green spaces and commemorative sculptures at the Lowell Mills National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts; the cartographic texts produced by GPS devices; and two maps involved in a federal court case about marine mammal protection, this book explores and tests the value of what Propen calls "visual-material rhetorics," or a visual rhetoric more expressly attuned to studies of space, the body, and materiality. Grounding all three cases is a theoretical approach that combines Michel Foucault's theory of heterotopias with Carole Blair's theory of material rhetoric. Such an approach brings Foucault's important work on spatiality into conversation with visual-material rhetorics to show how we benefit from conceptualizing rhetorical objects as not merely textual in the traditional sense but also as both visual and material-as spatial. Together, the cases in this book demonstrate how visual-material rhetorics illuminate the contexts that shape our various lived and embodied experiences and how visual-material rhetorics function in the service of advocacy. AMY D. PROPEN is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota. Her research on visual rhetoric, critical cartographies, and rhetoric as advocacy has appeared in journals and edited collections, including Technical Communication Quarterly, Written Communication, ACME: An International E-Journal of Critical Geographies, and Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. She is co-author, with Mary Lay Schuster, of Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom: Persuasive Practices in Domestic Violence and Child Protection Cases.

Bill Viola began producing video works in the early 1970s, and since then has captivated audiences with his poignant and beautifully wrought interpretations of human experience. He is today considered among the most celebrated proponents of the medium of video art. This is the first monograph to chart Viola's career in full, covering his education in New York, his earliest major films of mirages in the Sahara desert and of hospital medical imagery, his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York 1997 and his recent installations in Venice, New York, Tokyo, London and Berlin. Hanhardt outlines the key visual, literary and spiritual influences on Viola's work and his changing approach to the medium of film in response to technological advancement. Woven into the discussion are illustrations of Viola's most significant works, including Information (1973), The Passing, (1991), The Greeting (1995), Going Forth by Day (2002) and Martyrs, the 2014 film commissioned for St Paul's Cathedral in London, as well as reproductions of Viola's sketches and notebooks that bring his working process to life. Supplemented by a select chronology, bibliography and list of public collections, Bill Viola offers a rare and fascinating account of one of contemporary art's most powerful creative minds.

Gathering oral stories and visual art from both sides of the Atlantic, Istwa across the Water stitches together fragmented parts of the African diaspora. Toni Pressley-Sanon challenges the tendency to read history linearly and recovers the submerged histories of Haiti through alternative methods rooted in the island's spiritual and cultural traditions. Using the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, this book takes parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region-from where many Haitians are descended-as Haiti's twinned sites of cultural production. It draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite's idea of tidalectics, the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves, as a way to look at cultural exchange. Above all, it searches out the places where history and memory intersect, expressed by the Kreyol term istwa, offering a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.

First published in 1993 Interviews-Artists is a body of thirty seven recorded conversations made since 1988. In considering their work, often in the context of a current exhibition, artists discuss their ideas in formation and the factors which have informed their development. Read together, another picture emerges of unexpected links between the makers, in the expression of their concerns, in the work and with the world beyond, that forms a unique and coherent overview of the developing art of our time.

Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) is one of the most celebrated painters of her generation, coming to prominence in the mid-1990s in the wake of the so-called 'culture wars' and the art world's controversial embrace of identity-politics and multiculturalism. In this in-depth look at her oeuvre, Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith unpacks the complexities of her richly layered paintings, examining themes such as identity, race, displacement and the ecological environment, which Gallagher has explored throughout her work. The author takes the reader from Gallagher's early years - looking at her formative influences - through her engagement, from the late 1990s on, with the inherited modernist forms of the monochrome and the grid and with the violence and division at the root of modernism itself. Also explored are her phantasmagoric explorations of oceanic life, which draw on the discoveries of natural science, the traumatic history of the Atlantic slave trade and the speculative fictions of Afrofuturism. For anyone interested in contemporary art and the ways particular artists are expanding its borders, in form and content, this is essential reading.

For the past decade, creativity has been extolled as a virtue in education, business, and the media. Creativity and Beyond offers a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary tour of cultures past and present to examine the different ways people have conceived of "creativity" and how the common understanding of creativity is changing in the current flux of global culture. The book demonstrates linkages among disciplines and cultures through the use of many illuminating examples -- Egyptian pyramids, Chinese philosophy, Michelangelo, jazz, the United Nations, genetic engineering. Weiner analyzes the ways in which understanding creativity is tied to broader contemporary patterns, including intellectual concerns with postmodernism; trends in the arts; the changing status of women; the power of the electronic media; multiculturalism; developments in psychology, science, and technology; and the dramatic political, economic, and social transformations of our age.

Artistic expression in the Middle East is experiencing something of a renaissance. Domestic patronage is flourishing, and an impressive array of new museums and art fairs across the region is helping to stimulate international interest in an increasingly influential movement. Art of the Middle East is an accessible overview of modern and contemporary art of the Middle East and Arab world from 1945 to the present, with an emphasis on artists active today. This new revised and expanded edition features the work of 12 additional artists, as well as a consideration of the impact of the revolutions of the so-called Arab spring, which erupted across the region in 2011. The featured works are divided into seven themed sections - including literature, portraiture and the body, and politics, conflict and war - while extended captions provide an engaging commentary on each artwork and the artist behind its creation. Lavishly illustrated throughout, this landmark publication is an authoritative guide to a challenging and exciting body of work.

The Facet of Black Culture is a very unique book that talks about culture of the black people, the birth of a person to his final departure to our ancestors and how his property will be shared if he or she has any. This book begins with the brief history of some ethnic groups in Africa, particularly Ghana. In this chapter you will learn how some of the ethnic groups moved from their original geographical locations to present-day Ghana after which you will move to the next chapter, which talks about birth and naming ceremony in Africa. Chapter 2 basically talks about how naming ceremonies are performed in some parts of Africa. One will also learn about the first religion in Africa in this book; the features and beliefs of the traditional religion are found in this book. Marriage is the dream of every young man and woman in Africa; how marriage rites are performed Africa can also be found this book. The meals and preparations, the art and craft, music and dance, celebrations and festivals, death and funeral rites among black people are all tactically discussed in The Facet of Black Culture.

This brand new full-colour art book reveals in sumptuous detail more than 100 paintings based on The Lord of the Rings by acclaimed Dutch artist, Cor Blok, many of which appear here for the first time. Fifty years ago, shortly after The Lord of the Rings was first published, Cor Blok read the work and was completely captivated by its invention and epic storytelling. The breadth of imagination and powerful imagery inspired the young Dutch artist, and this spark of enthusiasm, coupled with his desire to create art that resembled a historical artefact in its own right, led to the creation of more than 100 paintings. Following an exhibition at the Hague in 1961, JRR Tolkien's publisher, Rayner Unwin, sent him five pictures. Tolkien was so taken with them that he met and corresponded with the artist and even bought some paintings for himself. The series bears comparison with the Bayeux Tapestry, in which each tells an epic and complex story in deceptively simple style, but beneath this simplicity lies a compelling and powerful language of form that becomes more effective as the sequence of paintings unfolds. The full-colour paintings in this new book are presented in story order so that the reader can enjoy them as the artist intended. They are accompanied by extracts from The Lord of the Rings and the artist also provides an extensive introduction illuminating the creation of the series and notes to accompany some of the major compositions. Many of the paintings appear for the very first time. Readers will find Cor Blok's work refreshing, provocative, charming and wholly memorable - the bold and expressive style that he created stands as a unique achievement in the history of fantasy illustration. Rarely has an artist captured the essence of a writer's work in such singular fashion; the author found much to admire in Cor Blok's work, and what higher accolade is there?