Axel Munthe
Axel Munthe

Author: Bengt Jangfeldt

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2008-03-30

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0857710680

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Axel Munthe: The Road to San Michele' tells for the first time the riveting life-story of an extraordinary individual, who came to define the times he lived in. The precociously bright son of a Swedish pharmacist, Axel Munthe worked under Jean Martin Charcot, and in 1880, became the youngest doctor in French history. By the 1890s, he was world-famous for his healing powers, believed by some to be supernatural. He moved in the most colourful and exalted circles of fin de siecle Europe, counting amongst his friends Henry James, Howard Carter, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Count Zeppelin. Though physician to the Swedish court, where he became the lover of the Crown Princess Victoria, Munthe was more at home with nature than with people. He travelled through remotest Lapland, as well as across Europe, and his great love was animals, whom he went to great lengths to protect. In 1929 he published 'The Story of San Michele', an account of his life, shot through with his love for Italy and Capri, where he built a bird sanctuary and the house of his dreams, the Villa San Michele. The book became an international best seller, translated into 40 languages, and has become one of the classics of the last century. Bengt Jangfeldt is the first person to have gone through Munthe's diaries, letters and notebooks to produce this definitive account of one of 20th Century Europe's most vibrant figures. Written with the verve and exuberance of its subject, 'Axel Munthe: The Road to San Michele' evokes a lost time, a life of passions, and a man who believed in every sense in the power of dreams.

Elective Affinities
Elective Affinities

Author: Catriona MacLeod

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9042026197

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Preliminary Material -- Introduction /Catriona MacLeod -- Summaries -- Consulting the Manual: Word and Image in Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés /Michael R. Taylor -- Living and Dying in the Limelight: Performing the Self in Frida Kahlo's Diary and Paintings /Adriana Dragomir -- Imbrication de l'image, du texte et de la musique dans un corpus de prières énigmatiques à la Vierge /Laurence Wuidar -- The Künstlerroman as Romantic Arabesque: Parody, Collaboration, and the Making of The Modern Vasari (1854) /Cordula Grewe -- The “Inscapes” of Louis le Brocquy /Karen E. Brown -- American Scenery/Canadian Scenery: Conflicting Views of Indigenes in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Portrayals of the American Continent /Robert Grant -- Cartoonists as Matchmakers: The Vibrant Relationship of Text and Image in the Work of Lynda Barry /Miriam Harris -- The Truth of the Word, the Falsity of the Image: Transmetropolitan's Critique of the Society of the Spectacle /Steen Christiansen -- Le magazine français Vu (1928-40): Naissance de l'information visuelle et utopie de la substitution de l'image photographique au texte écrit /Danielle Leenaerts -- From Ekphrasis to History: Verbal Transformations of the Display of Picture Galleries--Wilhelm Heinse and Friedrich Schlegel /Hubert Locher -- Modernizing History and Historicizing Modernity: Baudelaire and Baudelairean Representations of Contemporaneity /Lauren S. Weingarden -- Serial Künstler: Portrait of the Artist as a Malefactor /Valentin Nussbaum -- Hypnotic Performance and the Falsity of Appearances: The Aesthetics of Medical Spectatorship and Axel Munthe's Critique of Jean-Martin Charcot /Jonathan Marshall -- New Light and Old Shadows: Industrial Illumination and its Imaginaire /Susana Oliveira -- Illustrating the Shadow of Doubt: Henry James, Blindness, and “The Real Thing” /Jennifer A. Greenhill -- Picturing Paradise: Baudelaire's “L'Invitation au voyage” /Eric T. Haskell -- The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov /Julia Friedman -- Aby Warburg as Reader of Gottfried Semper: Reflections on the Cosmic Character of Ornament /Spyros Papapetros -- John Heartfield's Insects and the “Idea” of Natural History /Cristina Cuevas-Wolf -- The Photographic Thought of Latina/o Literature and Cultural Critique /María DeGuzmán -- Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, Fassbinder: Découpage Aesthetics on the Divide /Susan Nurmi-Schomers -- (Ideo-)Logical Alliances between Image and Script: Calligraphic Reconfigurations in Contemporary Chinese Art /Birgit Mersmann -- Contributors -- Index.

Anatomy of Restlessness
Anatomy of Restlessness

Author: Bruce Chatwin

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1997-08-01

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 110150319X

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Although he is best known for his luminous reports from the farthest-flung corners of the earth, Bruce Chatwin possessed a literary sensibility that reached beyond the travel narrative to span a world of topics—from art and antiques to archaeology and architecture. This spirited collection of previously neglected or unpublished essays, articles, short stories, travel sketches, and criticism represents every aspect and period of Chatwin’s career as it reveals an abiding theme in his work: his fascination with, and hunger for, the peripatetic existence. While Chatwin’s poignant search for a suitable place to “hang his hat,” his compelling arguments for the nomadic “alternative,” his revealing fictional accounts of exile and the exotic, and his wickedly en pointe social history of Capri prove him to be an excellent observer of social and cultural mores, Chatwin’s own restlessness, his yearning to be on the move, glimmers beneath every surface of this dazzling body of work.

The Untold Story of the Talking Book
The Untold Story of the Talking Book

Author: Matthew Rubery

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-11-14

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0674974530

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A history of audiobooks, from entertainment & rehabilitation for blinded World War I soldiers to a twenty-first-century competitive industry. Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out of that familiar account are nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Recounting the fascinating history of audio-recorded literature, Matthew Rubery traces the path of innovation from Edison’s recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for his tinfoil phonograph in 1877, to the first novel-length talking books made for blinded World War I veterans, to today’s billion-dollar audiobook industry. The Untold Story of the Talking Book focuses on the social impact of audiobooks, not just the technological history, in telling a story of surprising and impassioned conflicts: from controversies over which books the Library of Congress selected to become talking books—yes to Kipling, no to Flaubert—to debates about what defines a reader. Delving into the vexed relationship between spoken and printed texts, Rubery argues that storytelling can be just as engaging with the ears as with the eyes, and that audiobooks deserve to be taken seriously. They are not mere derivatives of printed books but their own form of entertainment. We have come a long way from the era of sound recorded on wax cylinders, when people imagined one day hearing entire novels on mini-phonographs tucked inside their hats. Rubery tells the untold story of this incredible evolution and, in doing so, breaks from convention by treating audiobooks as a distinctively modern art form that has profoundly influenced the way we read. Praise for The Untold Story of the Talking Book “If audiobooks are relatively new to your world, you might wonder where they came from and where they’re going. And for general fans of the intersection of culture and technology, The Untold Story of the Talking Book is a fascinating read.” —Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times “[Rubery] explores 150 years of the audio format with an imminently accessible style, touching upon a wide range of interconnected topics . . . Through careful investigation of the co-development of formats within the publishing industry, Rubery shines a light on overlooked pioneers of audio . . . Rubery’s work succeeds in providing evidence to ‘move beyond the reductive debate’ on whether audiobooks really count as reading, and establishes the format’s rightful place in the literary family.” —Mary Burkey, Booklist (starred review)