These essays engage with the connection between aesthetics and radical politics. Moving beyond Marxist approaches, they explore culture from other radical positions—anarchist, autonomist, and ecological—revealing an exhilarating break with earlier cultural critique.
American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse
More than just collections, museums are powerful engines of persuasion. This book reveals how their contents and displays influence visitors as effectively as any speech or advertisement, uncovering their profound cultural roles and power.
Images of Conflict
Striking aerial views of war and its scarred landscapes are the focus of this unique book. For the first time, military historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists explore the history and technology of military aerial photography to reassess the landscapes of conflict.
This wide-ranging collection breaks new ground in feminist film theory, offering close analyses of films from Hitchcock to 21st-century horror. Praised as a “splendid contribution,” it lends readers ‘new eyes’. “Should be required reading for students and scholars.”
Longing, Weakness and Temptation
This book explores the universal themes of longing, weakness, and temptation by comparing literary works influenced by biblical and classic texts. It shows how the source text speaks through the new work and how the new work forces new meanings from the source.
Frederick Kiesler
This book uncovers the fascinating story of Frederick Kiesler’s ground-breaking Art of This Century gallery, designed for Peggy Guggenheim. It analyzes their fraught collaboration and restores Kiesler to his place in art and architecture history.
The Idea of the City
An important and timely work with depth and breadth. International scholars explore the city in literature, history, and film from the medieval period to the present. With a truly global focus, this is a fascinating snapshot of literary urban studies.
The Gentleman, the Virtuoso, the Inquirer
Explore the world of Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa, a scientific collector in early modern Spain. His cabinet of curiosities, garden, and library reveal a ‘virtuoso’ immersed in the wonders of nature, furthering the ideal of factuality in the Scientific Revolution.
To understand users, one must understand their emotional responses to buying, using, and owning products. This book explores the emotions in human-product relationships and offers techniques to utilise these insights in design practice.
The Arts and Youth at Risk
“Philosophically complex and pragmatically provocative,” this book interrogates arts-based interventions for “at risk” youth. International experts explore the positive outcomes and ethical challenges of working with marginalised communities.
This critical and historical anthology looks at 1968, bringing together scholars, critics, and media-makers. Their work engages the period’s international activism through close readings of cultural production, from mass media to avant-garde practices.
These provocative essays explore the uneasy relationship between religion and film in the works of masters like Bergman, Tarkovsky, and del Toro. This spiritual and critical journey challenges us to think more forcefully about the values that shape our lives.
Words and Images on the Screen
Word has been a primordial companion to cinema from its beginnings. This volume offers a collection of essays that question the role of words and images in moving pictures, covering their interconnectedness through in-depth case studies and general surveys.
This anthology examines iconic films and the visionary auteurs who introduced new ways of seeing that shifted US culture. A unique collection with a diversity of genres and theoretical approaches, this indispensable text is accessible to scholars and lay readers.
Postcolonial Artist
Irish Travellers have had little input into how they are represented. This book redresses this imbalance, exploring the Traveller experience through the musical oeuvre of artist Johnny Doran to outline the importance of cultural hybridity in postcolonial Ireland.
This collection explores the Berlin Wall in language, literature, and visual media. Essays discuss its portrayal as a dividing and uniting boundary, its continued existence in the minds of Germans, and how controversial the division of Germany remains.
Showing the World to the World
This book explores the socio-political themes that marked French cinema of the 1990s and 2000s. It examines how these “political fictions” contribute to a new realism through in-depth discussions of films from *La Haine* to lesser-known works.
Challenging traditional film musicology, this book approaches the film score from practical to theoretical perspectives. Essays explore films from art-house to mainstream, and include interviews with influential composers Trevor Jones and Michael Nyman.
This volume addresses the representation of warfare, assessing the veracity of war images and their impact. War images may trigger horror or paradoxically attain sublimity, blurring the narrow margin between ethics and aesthetics, information, and propaganda.
Neo-Romantic Landscapes
This reappraisal of Powell and Pressburger’s films challenges their status as ‘un-British’ outsiders. Focusing on the use of landscape, it connects their wartime cinema to Neo-Romantic painting, resituating them firmly in British visual art traditions.