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The story of how the country house, historically a site of violent disruption, came to symbolize English stability during the eighteenth century. Country houses are quintessentially English, not only architecturally but also in that they embody national values of continuity and insularity. The English country house, however, has more often been the site of violent disruption than continuous peace. So how is it that the country how came to represent an uncomplicated, nostalgic vision of English history? This book explores the evolution of the country house, beginning with the Reformation and Civil War, and shows how the political events of the eighteenth century, which culminated in the reaction against the French Revolution, led to country houses being recast as symbols of England's political stability.

Upending our perception of employment, a surprising investigation into the mystical nature of our daily toil. Dreamwork is a book about the ideas, dreams, dreads, and ideals we have about work. Its central argument is this: Although we depend on the idea of work for our identity as humans, we feel we must disguise from ourselves the fact that we do not know what work is. There is no example of work that nobody might, under some circumstances, do for fun. All work is imaginary--which is not to say that it is simply illusory, but rather that, to count as work, it must be imagined to be work. In other words, a large part of what we mean by working is this work of imagining. Work is therefore essentially mystical--just the opposite of what it is taken to be by all of us spending our days at desks, behind cash registers, and in factories. Delving into this complex mythos, Dreamwork looks in turn at worries about whether or not work is hard; the importance of places of work; the meanings of hobbies, holidays, and sabbaths; and the history of dreams of redeeming work.

A compelling survey of contemporary radical art in Brazil. Today Is Always Yesterday explores the historical constructs underlying contemporary art in Brazil. Michael Asbury argues that art can activate as well as illustrate history. The colors of the Brazilian flag structure the book's five chapters as Asbury explores artists' vital role in unraveling Brazil's core myths and its projected image as a racial melting pot. Richly illustrated, this book presents a compelling account of contemporary debates in Brazilian art.

A biography of the revolutionary philosopher and psychiatrist. Doctor, militant, essayist, ambassador, teacher, journalist, pan-Africanist, Frantz Fanon sought to decolonize mid-twentieth-century culture as he embodied a new kind of intellectual. Born in colonial Martinique, he fought for France during World War II but later renounced his citizenship and fought in the Algerian War of Independence. This book emphasizes Fanon's gift for self-invention and performance as it follows his short but extraordinary life and explores how his pioneering work in psychiatry influenced his revolutionary philosophy.

The first extended history of the Chinese picture-scroll. The Chinese picture-scroll, a long, horizontal painting or calligraphic work, has been China's pre-eminent aesthetic form throughout the last two millennia. This first history of the picture-scroll explores its extraordinary longevity and adaptability to social, political, and technological change. The book describes what the picture-scroll demands of a viewer, how China's artists grappled with its cultural power, and how collectors and connoisseurs left their marks on scrolls for later generations to judge.

Both a history and a contemporary analysis, an illuminating investigation of the defining economic concern of our time. The last year has seen the return of inflation as a preoccupation of political decision-makers, economists, and the general public. After two decades of wondering why inflation was so low, despite vast economic stimulus, economists were surprised by the recent surge in price increases. Despite disagreement about what exactly is happening in the economy, there is unanimity in one belief: slowing growth to control inflation. To focus on inflation's return, Paul Mattick looks at both the past and present, placing current events in the context of capitalism's history. Exploring the nature of money itself, he provides a concise, jargon-free understanding of recent inflation as well as official efforts to control it, illuminating the state of our contemporary economy.

An accessible biography of the celebrated early Netherlandish painter, now in paperback. In his lifetime the early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch was famous for his phantasmagoric images, and today his name is synonymous with the infernal. The creator of expansive tableaus of fantastic and hellish scenes--where any devil not dancing is too busy eating human souls--he has been as equally misunderstood by history as his paintings have. In this book, Nils Büttner draws on a wealth of historical documents--not to mention Bosch's paintings--to offer a fresh and insightful look at one of history's most peculiar artists on the five-hundredth anniversary of his death. Bosch's paintings have elicited a number of responses over the centuries. Some have tried to explain them as alchemical symbolism, others as coded messages of a secret cult, and still others have tried to psychoanalyze them. Some have placed Bosch among the Adamites, others among the Cathars, and others among the Brethren of the Free Spirit, seeing in his paintings an occult life of free love, strange rituals, mysterious drugs, and witchcraft. As Büttner shows, Bosch was--if anything--a hardworking painter, commissioned by aristocrats and courtesans, as all painters of his time were. Analyzing his life and paintings against the backdrop of contemporary Dutch culture and society, Büttner offers one of the clearest biographical sketches to date alongside beautiful reproductions of some of Bosch's most important work. The result is a smart but accessible introduction to a unique artist whose work transcends genre.

The never-before-told story of the extraordinary women behind a trailblazing British magazine. During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal The Yellow Book. For the first time, and drawing on original research, Jad Adams describes the lives and work of these vibrant and passionate women, from well-connected and fashionable aristocrats to the desperately poor. He narrates the challenges they faced in a literary marketplace, and within a society that overwhelmingly favored men, showing how they were pioneers of a new style, living lives of lurid adventure and romance, as well as experiencing poverty, squalor, disease, and unwanted pregnancy.

In 1985 Boria Sax inherited an area of forest in New York State that had been purchased by his Russian Jewish Communist grandparents as a buffer against what they felt was a hostile world. For Sax, in the years following, the woodland came to represent a link with those who lived and had lived there, including Native Americans, settlers, bears, deer, turtles, and migrating birds. In this personal and eloquent account, Sax explores the meanings and cultural history of forests from prehistory to the present, taking in Gilgamesh, Virgil, Dante, the Gawain poet, medieval alchemists, the Brothers Grimm, the Hudson River painters, Latin American folklore, contemporary African novelists and much more. Combining lyricism with contemporary scholarship, this book opens new emotional, intellectual, and environmental perspectives on the storied history of the forest.

The first anthology of women's writing about walking, edited by Wanderers author Kerri Andrews.

An accessible introduction to the life of this most-venerated saint. This book is an accessible biography of Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan religious order and one of the most venerated figures in Christianity. In it, Michael F. Cusato explores how Francis and his early brothers embraced a life of poverty in solidarity with the lowest ranks of society, preaching a message of justice and dignity for all. He examines how and why Francis's vision ultimately expanded to embrace non-Christians and Muslims in particular following Francis's celebrated encounter with the Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil in 1219. Finally, Cusato considers the clash between Francis and newer members of his Order, his reception of the stigmata, and his final years defending his vision among his own brothers, all while living as an exemplar of the gospel life.

An investigation of representations and ideals of manhood in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy.

Aldus Manutius is perhaps the greatest figure in the history of the printed book: in Venice, Europe's capital of printing, he invented the italic type and issued more first editions of the classics than anyone before or since, as well as Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the most beautiful and mysterious printed book of the Italian Renaissance.0This is the first monograph in English on Aldus Manutius in over forty years. It shows how Aldus redefined the role of a book printer, from mere manual labourer to learned publisher. As a consequence Aldus participated in the same debates as contemporaries such as Leonardo da Vinci and Erasmus of Rotterdam, making this book an insight into their world too.

"In a world flooded with images designed to create memories, validate perceptions and influence others, botanical illustration is about creating technically accurate depictions of plants. Reproductions of centuries-old botanical illustrations frequently adorn greetings cards, pottery and advertising, to promote heritage or generate income, yet their art is scientific: its purpose is to record, display and transmit scientific data. The Beauty of the Flower shows us how scientific botanical illustrations are collaborations among artists, scientists and publishers. It explores the evolution and interchanges of these illustrations since the mid-fifteenth century, the ways in which they have been used to communicate scientific ideas about plants and how views of botanical imagery change. Featuring unique images rarely seen outside of specialist literature this book reveals the fascinating stories behind these remarkable illustrations." --

Now in paperback, a significant new collection of concrete poetry that redefines what this unique literary movement means today. Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology is the first overview of concrete poetry in many years. Selective yet wide-ranging, this anthology re-evaluates the movement, singling out its most distinctive and influential works. Nancy Perloff, the curator of an important Concrete Poetry exhibition at the Getty Research Institute, includes examples from the little-known Japanese concretists and the Wiener Gruppe--groups that, together with the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos and the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, have engaged with the most subtle possibilities of language itself--while also incorporating key poems by Eugen Gomringer, Dieter Roth, Henri Chopin, and others and including contemporary contributions by Cia Rinne and Susan Howe. Perloff's anthology presents individual poems, reproduced in their original languages, together with lively commentaries that explicate and contextualize the work, allowing readers to discover the intricacy of poems that some have dismissed as simple, even trivial, texts. This substantial new collection redefines what the concrete poetry movement means today.

"From the pleasures of mending to the problems of fast fashion, an intimate look at the creativity, community, and deep meaning sewed into every stitch. Tens of millions of people sew for necessity or pleasure every day, yet the craft is surprisingly under-appreciated. The Point of the Needle redresses the balance: this is a book that argues for sewing's place in our lives. It celebrates not only sewing's recent resurgence but sewists' creativity, well-being, and community. Barbara Burman chronicles new voices of people who sew today, by hand or machine, to explore what they sew, what motivates them, what they value, and why they mend things, revealing insights into sewing's more intimate stories. In our age of superfast fashion with its environmental and social injustices, this eloquent book makes a passionate case for identity, diversity, resilience, and memory--what people create for themselves as they stitch and make"-

From two leading scholars, a thrilling and rich investigation of the life and work of Dante Alighieri. Numerous books have attempted to chronicle the life of Dante Alighieri, yet essential questions remain unanswered. How did a self-taught Florentine become the celebrated author of the Divine Comedy? Was his exile from Florence so extraordinary? How did Dante make himself the main protagonist in his works, in a literary context that advised against it? And why has his life interested so many readers? In Dante's New Lives, eminent scholars Elisa Brilli and Giuliano Milani answer these questions and many more. Their account reappraises Dante's life and work by assessing archival and literary evidence and examining the most recent scholarship. The book is a model of interdisciplinary biography, as fascinating as it is rigorous.

Once upon a time: the forgotten female fabulists whose heroines flipped the fairy tale script. People often associate fairy tales with Disney films and with the male authors from whom Disney often drew inspiration--notably Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen. In these portrayals, the princess is a passive, compliant figure. By contrast, The Lost Princess shows that classic fairy tales such as "Cinderella," "Rapunzel," and "Beauty and the Beast" have a much richer, more complex history than Disney's saccharine depictions. Anne E. Duggan recovers the voices of women writers such as Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier, and Charlotte-Rose de La Force, who penned popular tales about ogre-killing, pregnant, cross-dressing, dynamic heroines who saved the day. This new history will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about the lost, plucky heroines of historic fairy tales.

An iconoclastic celebration of canned, packaged, and preserved foods. By turns a scientific, feminist, and economic critique, this book gleefully attacks received wisdom about the dangers of processed food. Anastacia Marx de Salcedo argues that, in fact, most processed foods are relatively healthy and that their consumption is an undisputed boon to women's equality--since the burdens of cooking disproportionately fall on women. In de Salcedo's account, processed foods take too much blame for the negative effects of modern sedentary life, and alternative food systems are doomed to economic dysfunction. Ultimately, de Salcedo embraces the preserved foods in her pantry and encourages the reader to do the same.

Spanning geographies, cultures, and the ages, a moving journey into the physical facts and metaphysical mysteries of how the living care for the dead. Death is universal. It will meet us all. But it's also a practical problem--what do we do with dead bodies? Vibeke Maria and Andreas Viestad live by a cemetery and are daily spectators of its routines, and their fascination with burials has led them to dig deep to examine our relationship with the dead. Taking us on a journey around the world and into the past, the Viestads explore how the deceased are honored and cared for, cremated, and buried. From archaeological sites in Spain, Israel, and Russia to environmentally friendly burials in the United States and Ghana's fantasy coffins, and from cremations without fire to the new industry turning our dearly departed's ashes into diamonds, this empathetic and enthralling book is for anyone who knows their turn is coming, but who'd like a good book for the journey.

An intimate history of the crooner in popular music from the 1950s to the present. In this book, Alex Coles explores the history of the crooner--someone who sings close to the mic in a soft style--in popular music from the 1950s to the present. Each chapter focuses on how one song by one artist contributes to the image of the crooner in the popular imagination. The book describes the rich diversity of crooners throughout music history, including artists in disco, rock, hip-hop, and more such as Frank Sinatra, Scott Walker, Barry White, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Tom Waits, Grace Jones, Ian McCulloch, Nick Cave, and Nas. Ultimately, Coles shows how the crooner continues to connect listeners with their hidden feelings.

An exploration of the life and works of German artist Albrecht Dürer and his self-obsession. The Italian Renaissance birthed the modern sense of self, and no artist from the period compares with Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) in terms of the almost obsessive interest he displayed in his own life. Dürer's works are filled with personal details from his day-to-day, his dreams, and his escapades. In this brief biography, David Ekserdjian explores Dürer's life and times--his studies, travels, and influences--as well as his paintings, drawings, and prints. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Renaissance or Northern European art.

A wide-ranging meditation on belonging and citizenship through the story of two squirrel species in Britain. Squirrel Nation is a history of Britain's two species of squirrel over the past two hundred years: the much-loved, though rare, red squirrel and the less-desirable, though more populous, grey squirrel. A common resident of British gardens and parks, the grey squirrel was introduced from North America in the late nineteenth century and remains something of a foreign interloper. By examining this species' rapid spread across Britain, Peter Coates explores timely issues of belonging, nationalism, and citizenship in Britain today. Ultimately, though people are swift to draw distinctions between British squirrels and squirrels in Britain, Squirrel Nation shows that Britain's two squirrel species have much more in common than at first appears.

Beautifully illustrated with images of Dorothea Tanning's artwork and more, the first--and definitive--study of this important artist's life and creative output. Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) has for decades been known primarily as a Surrealist, but Exquisite Dreams shows how the work of this passionate, dynamic, and voraciously curious artist is impossible to categorize. Tanning's lesser-known but equally powerful sculptures, abstract paintings, and films are explored here, and her writings, biography, and art are examined in the contexts of twentieth-century developments in advertising, fashion, popular culture, and art in New York and Paris. Using new archival sources and analyses of Tanning's work in a variety of media, Amy Lyford broadens our understanding of the artist and illuminates her stunning diversity and achievement. This richly illustrated book is an important contribution to the history of women artists, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as the history of Surrealism.

A beautifully illustrated guide to the diverse traditions of stained glass art throughout history. The Illuminated Window is a unique journey through stained-glass installations across history. From the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries, we find in windows stories of conflict, commemoration, devotion, and celebration. Virginia Chieffo Raguin is our guide through the cathedrals of Chartres, Canterbury, and Cologne as well as Paris's Sainte-Chapelle, Swiss guildhalls, Iran's Pink Mosque, Harvard Memorial Hall, Tiffany's chapel for the World Exposition, Frank Lloyd Wright's houses, and more. In her telling, stained glass relies on more than a single maker but on the relationship between the physical site, the patron's aims, the work's legibility for the spectator, and the prevailing style of the era. This is a fascinating and beautifully illustrated volume for anyone interested in stained-glass works.

The story of our deep and multifaceted connections to geological matter--the very bedrock of our lives. From small beach pebbles to huge megaliths, stones have been revered, collected, enhanced, sculpted, or engraved for practical and artistic purposes throughout the ages. They have been used to delineate boundaries and to build homes and shelters and utilized for cooking, games, and competitions. This surprising and fascinating compendium of stone facts, myths, and stories reveals the impact and importance of stones in our history and culture. Cally Oldershaw introduces the science in an accessible way and covers the aesthetic appeal of stones, their practical uses, and metaphysical properties. With an eclectic mix of examples from the Stone Age to the present, Stones engagingly excavates the story of this essential matter.

A rogues' gallery of the worst leaders in military history.