Just over a century after his death, Walter Pater's critical reputation now stands as high as it has ever been. In the English-speaking world, this has involved recovery from the widespread neglect and indifference which attended his work in the first half of the twentieth century. In Europe, however, enthusiastic disciples such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the German-speaking world and Charles Du Bos in France, helped to fuel a growing awareness of his writings as central to the emergence of modernist literature. Translations of works like Imaginary Portraits, established his distinctive voice as an aesthetic critic and his novel, Marius the Epicurean, was enthusiastically received in Paris in the 1920s and published in Turin on the eve of the Second World War. This collection traces the fortunes of Pater's writings in these three major literatures and their reception in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.
Series Editor: Dr Elinor Shaffer: Institute of Germanic Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Contributors: Stefano Evangelista, University of Bristol Stephen Bann, University of Bristol Benedetta Bini, University of Tuscia Maurizio Ascari, University of Bologna Elisa Bizzotto, University of Venice-Ca'Foscari Emily Eells, University of Paris X-Nanterre Benedicte Coste, Stendhal University, Grenoble Wolfgang Iser Ulrike Stamm, Berlin Martina Lauster, University of Exeter Mihaly Szegedy-Maszak, Eotvos University, Budapest Martin Prochazka, Charles University, Prague Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan Maria Teresa Malafaia, University of Lisbon Jorge Miguel Bastos da Silva, University of Oporto Jacqueline Hurtley, University of Barcelona

Stephen Bann examines the arguments for the centrality of French modernist painting. He begins by focusing particularly on the notion of the modernist break, as it has been interpreted with regard to painters like Manet and Ingres. He argues that a ~curiositya (TM), with its origins in the seventeenth-century world-view can be a valid concept for understanding some aspects of contemporary art that contest the modern, suggesting ways of sidetracking the modern by adopting a lengthier historical view.

An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. In its scope and itnerest it can be compared with Freud's "Totem and Taboo," the subtext Girard refutes with polemic daring, vast erudition, and a persuasiveness that leaves the reader compelled to respond, one way or another.
This is the single fullest summation of Girard's ideas to date, the book by which they will stand or fall. In a dialogue with two psychiatrists (Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort), Girard probes an encyclopedic array of topics, ranging across the entire spectrum of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and cultural production.
Girard's point o departure is what he calles "mimesis," the conflict that arises when human rivals compete to differentiate themselves from each other, yet succeed only in becoming more and more alike. At certain points in the life of a society, according to Girard, this mimetic conflict erupts into a crisis in which all difference dissolves in indiscriminate violence. In primitive societies, such crises were resolved by the "scapegoating mechanism," in which the community, en masse, turned on an unpremeditated victim. The repression of this collective murder and its repetition in ritual sacrifice then formed the foundations of both religion and the restored social order.
How does Christianity, at once the most "sacrificial" of religions and a faith with a non-violent ideology, fit into this scheme? Girard grants Freud's point, in "Totem and Taboo," that Christianity is similar to primitive religion, but only to refute Freud--if Christ is sacrificed, Girard argues, it is not becuase God willed it, but becaus ehuman beings "wanted" it.
The book is not merely, or perhaps not mainly, biblical exegesis, for within its scope fall some of the most vexing problems of social history--the paradox that violance has social efficacy, the function of the scapegoat, the mechanism of anti-semitism.

First published in 1999, this volume examines antiquarianism which had its roots in Renaissance thought and was a popular intellectual and cultural pursuit throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The antiquarian work of collecting, compiling and presenting material which exposed the past was seminal to the formation of social and national identities. These essays evaluate the cultural and poltical implications of antiquarianism in the period 1700-1850. The volume also considers how the antiquarians laid the foundations of later museum culture and the discipline of history. With a preface by Stephen Bann and introduced by Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz, Producing the Past has contributions from Stephen Bending, Alexandrina Buchanan, Susan A. Crane, David Haycock, Maria Grazia Lolla, Heather MacLennan, Martin Myrone, Lucy Peltz, Annegret Pelz, Sam Smiles and Johann Reusch.

First published in 1999, this volume examines antiquarianism which had its roots in Renaissance thought and was a popular intellectual and cultural pursuit throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The antiquarian work of collecting, compiling and presenting material which exposed the past was seminal to the formation of social and national identities. These essays evaluate the cultural and poltical implications of antiquarianism in the period 1700-1850. The volume also considers how the antiquarians laid the foundations of later museum culture and the discipline of history. With a preface by Stephen Bann and introduced by Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz, Producing the Past has contributions from Stephen Bending, Alexandrina Buchanan, Susan A. Crane, David Haycock, Maria Grazia Lolla, Heather MacLennan, Martin Myrone, Lucy Peltz, Annegret Pelz, Sam Smiles and Johann Reusch.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World presents a highly original global theory of culture. Here, in his greatest work, Rene Girard explores the function of violence, mimetic desire and the mechanism of the scapegoat, in the history of society and religion. Girard's vision is a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was one of Scotland's leading twentieth century public intellectuals, and famously one of its most brilliant and combative correspondents. His letters raise issues of particular and widespread interest both within Scotland and further afield. His correspondence with Stephen Bann, the English poet and academic have a very special place in this context. These letters present in a clear and commensurable form the development of his ideas about poetry and art, and increasingly about sculpture and gardening, over this critical five year period of his creative life.

Originally published in 1984, The Clothing of Clio is concerned with the wide variety of ways in which the past was represented in Britain and France in the nineteenth century. This was a period of unprecedented historical-mindedness, in which novelists, poets, painters, collectors, as well as historians, took the past as their subject matter. Dr Bann argues that the concrete vision of the past should be studied across the whole field of representation. He shows that, with the advent of the nineteenth century, there comes into existence a historical poetics - a set of linguistic procedures in the broadest sense employed to communicate and enhance the 'reality' of the past - which can be understood primarily through techniques of rhetorical analysis. This highly original and provocative study will interest a wide range of readers including professional historians and historiographers, as well as any serious reader concerned with the broad cultural issues of nineteenth-century Europe.

The second volume shines a light on the cultural and social changes that took place during the epoch of European Restorations, when the death of the Napoleonic empire existed as a crucial moment for contemporaries. Expanding the transnational approach of Volume I, the chapters focus on the transmutation of ordinary experiences of war into folklore and popular culture, the emergence of grassroots radical politics and conspiracies on the Left and Right, and the relationship between literacy and religion, with new cases included from Spain, Norway and Russia. A wide-ranging and impressive work, this book completes a collection on the history of the European Restorations.

A companion to Midway, this is the second volume of letters of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), the leading Scottish poet, artist, sculptor, and garden designer. His garden at Stonypath, now called Little Sparta has been described as the only truly original garden created since 1945. These letters to and from Finlay's friend, the English poet and scholar Stephen Bann, center on the initial development of the garden near Edinburgh. They cover Finlay's turn away from poetry towards sculpture and garden design and the thinking behind, and consequences of, this development.

Just over a century after his death, Walter Pater's critical reputation now stands as high as it has ever been. In the English-speaking world, this has involved recovery from the widespread neglect and indifference which attended his work in the first half of the twentieth century. In Europe, however, enthusiastic disciples such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the German-speaking world and Charles Du Bos in France, helped to fuel a growing awareness of his writings as central to the emergence of modernist literature. Translations of works like Imaginary Portraits, established his distinctive voice as an aesthetic critic and his novel, Marius the Epicurean, was enthusiastically received in Paris in the 1920s and published in Turin on the eve of the Second World War. This collection traces the fortunes of Pater's writings in these three major literatures and their reception in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

The present renewal of garden art demands a new approach to garden aesthetics. This book considers exceptional creations around the world and proposes new forms of garden experience. Using a variety of critical perspectives, the authors demonstrate a renewal of garden design and new directions for garden aesthetics, analyzing projects by Fernando Chacel (Brazil), Andy Goldsworthy (Great Britain), Charles Jencks (Great Britain), Patricia Johanson (U.S.), Dieter Kienast (Switzerland), Bernard Lassus (France), and Mohammed Shaheer (India). The first half of the volume begins with an argument for a return to John Dewey's focus on "Art as Experience," while the second half concludes with a debate on the respective roles of cognition and the senses, and of science and the visual arts.

Noted literary critic, psychoanalyst, and theorist Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past, " just delivered at the 1992 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury. Kristeva's first essay, "Proust and Time Embodied," takes a broadly psychoanalytical, linguistically sensitive approach to Proust's exploration of time and the operation of memory. Next in "In Search of Madeline," she delves into Proust's concept of the little cake that flooded him with the taste of childhood regained, providing an explanation for Proust's search for the deeper levels of childhood grounded in her psychoanalytic experience. Throughout "Proust and the Sense of Time, " Kristeva draws on Proust's notebooks and manuscripts, pointing out significant variations in the different versions of his work. She examines his early philosophical training and the philosophical trends in Paris at the turn of the century, seeking to explain how he his concept of the primacy of memory and sensation.

With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their "Realistic Manifesto," constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of EI Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman--many of which have never before been available in English--and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.