The first of Chekhov's full-length dramas, Ivanov treads a fine line between broad comedy and tragic melodrama.

Peter Christensen describes working for the parks service maintaining trails and warden patrol stations in national parks. It's a job that involves patrolling remote wilderness on horseback, and long days in the saddle give way to wry contemplations on human nature and the beauty of the natural world. While working in the backcountry, Christensen found himself insulated not only from the intrusions of highway noise but also from the stress of modern life. As a result, his thoughtful stories about life in the mountains of Alberta are often poignant, sometimes tragic, but always a great read.

The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.

Articles centred on the use made by European nations of medieval texts and other artefacts to define their history and origins. The 19th century was a time of fierce national competition for the "ownership" of medieval documents and the legitimation of national histories. This volume contains papers dealing with the attempts of French scholars to claim English documents (and vice versa), as also of disputes between Scandinavian and British scholars, and Dutch, German and Italian scholars. Regionalism is also a repeated topic, with claims made for the autonomy of Frisia within the Netherlands, and Languedoc within France. Other papers deal with the rediscovery of medieval music, with early American attempts to redirect the course of 20th century poetry by appeal to medieval precedent, and with the continuing vitality of Dante's Divina Commedia (especially the Inferno) in the light of 20th century experience. The volume as a whole sheds new light on the whole process of appropriating history, which remains a vital and contentioustopic, both inside and outside the academic world. CONTRIBUTORS: MARK BURDE, MAGNUS FJALLDAL, ALPITA DE JONG, ANNETTE KREUZIGER-HERR, NILS HOLGER PETERSEN, RACHEL DRESSLER, KARL FUGELS, WILLIAM QUINN, PETER CHRISTENSEN

The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.

The history of the Middle East is traditionally structured around the rise and fall of dynasties and states. The widely perceived view is that after the glories of an earlier golden age the region went into a steady and prolonged decline: populations decreased, ancient cities decayed and nomadism spread at the expense of civilized culture. In this pioneering text Peter Christensen challenges this story of decline. Long out of print but now reissued with a new introduction by the author, this important work is both a foundational text in the environmental history of the Middle East and a pioneering reassessment of traditional ideas about the historical processes of Iran and the Middle East region.

Architecturalized Asia explores built environments and visual narratives in Asia via cartography, icons, and symbols in different historical settings. It grows out of a three-year project focusing on cultural exchange in the making of Asia’s boundaries as well as its architectural styles and achievements. The book consists of three sections. In Mapping Asia: Architectural Symbols from Medieval to Early Modern Periods, authors examine icons and symbols in maps and textual descriptions and other early evidence about Asian architecture. The second section, Conjugating Asia: The Long-Nineteenth Century and Its Impetus, explores the construction of the field of Asian architecture and the political imagination of Asian built environments in the nineteenth century. The third section, Manifesting Asia: Building the Continent with Architecture, addresses the physical realization of “Asian” geographic ideas within a set of specific local and regional contexts in the twentieth century. Regions and conditions covered in Architecturalized Asia include French Indochina, Iran, post-Soviet Central Asia, Japanese landscape, and the construction of the Afro-Asian built environment.