Champ Fleury

Champ Fleury

Author: Geoffroy Tory

Publisher: New York : Kraus Reprint Corporation

Published: 1967

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13:

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Waxworks

Waxworks

Author: Michelle E. Bloom

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780816639311

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London, 1921. The world's greatest wax sculptor watches in horror as flames consume his museum and melt his uncannily lifelike creations. Twelve years later, he opens a wax museum in New York. Crippled, disfigured, and driven mad by the fire, he resorts to body snatching and murder to populate his displays, preserving the bodies in wax. "In a thousand years you will be as lovely as you are now, " he assures one victim. In The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), director Michael Curtiz perfectly captures the macabre essence of realistic wax figures that have excited the darker aspects of the public's imagination ever since Madame Tussaud established her famous museum in London in 1802. Artists, too, have been fascinated by wax sculptures, seeing in them--and in the unique properties of wax itself--an eerie metaphoric power with which to address sexual anxiety, fears of mortality, and other morbid subjects. In Waxworks, Michelle E. Bloom explores the motif of the wax figure in European and American literature and art. In particular, she connects the myth of Pygmalion to the obsession with wax statues of women in the nineteenth-century fetishization of prostitutes and female corpses and as depicted in such "wax fictions" as Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Filmmakers, too, have sought inspiration from wax museums, and Bloom analyzes works from the silent era to such waxwork-themed Hollywood horror films as Mad Love (1935) and House of Wax (1953). Bringing her discussion to the present, Bloom examines the work of contemporary artists who use the medium of wax in ways never imagined by Madame Tussaud. As extravagant new wax museums open in Las Vegas, Times Square, and Paris, Waxworksoffers a provocative cultural history of this enduring--and disturbing--art form.


The Prosthetic Tongue

The Prosthetic Tongue

Author: Katie Chenoweth

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2019-11-01

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0812251490

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Of all the cultural "revolutions" brought about by the development of printing technology during the sixteenth century, perhaps the most remarkable but least understood is the purported rise of European vernacular languages. It is generally accepted that the invention of printing constitutes an event in the history of language that has profoundly shaped modernity, and yet the exact nature of this transformation—the mechanics of the event—has remained curiously unexamined. In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and the vernacular as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains, from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy, and poetics. Under François I, the king known in his own time as the "Father of Letters," both printing and vernacular language emerged as major cultural and political forces. Beginning in 1529, French underwent a remarkable transformation, as printers and writers began to reimagine their mother tongue as mechanically reproducible. The first accent marks appeared in French texts, the first French grammar books and dictionaries were published, phonetic spelling reforms were debated, modern Roman typefaces replaced gothic scripts, and French was codified as a legal idiom. This was, Chenoweth argues, a veritable "new media" moment, in which the print medium served as the underlying material apparatus and conceptual framework for a revolutionary reinvention of the vernacular. Rather than tell the story of the origin of the modern French language, however, she seeks to destabilize this very notion of "origin" by situating the cultural formation of French in a scene of media technology and reproducibility. No less than the paper book issuing from sixteenth-century printing presses, the modern French language is a product of the age of mechanical reproduction.


Cartographic Humanism

Cartographic Humanism

Author: Katharina N. Piechocki

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-09-13

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 022664121X

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Piechocki calls for an examination of the idea of Europe as a geographical concept, tracing its development in the 15th and 16th centuries. What is “Europe,” and when did it come to be? In the Renaissance, the term “Europe” circulated widely. But as Katharina N. Piechocki argues in this compelling book, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe’s boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent’s formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. As Piechocki shows, this tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used not only to represent but, more importantly, also to shape and promote an image of Europe quite unparalleled in previous centuries. Engaging with poets, historians, and mapmakers, Piechocki resists an easy categorization of the continent, scrutinizing Europe as an unexamined category that demands a much more careful and nuanced investigation than scholars of early modernity have hitherto undertaken. Unprecedented in its geographic scope, Cartographic Humanism is the first book to chart new itineraries across Europe as it brings France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal into a lively, interdisciplinary dialogue.


Image of the People

Image of the People

Author: T. J. Clark

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9780520217454

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In this pioneering study, Clark looked at the inextricable links between modern art and history.


Advances in Historical Orthography, c. 1500–1800

Advances in Historical Orthography, c. 1500–1800

Author: Marco Condorelli

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 110864094X

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The early modern period is a key historical era for the standardisation of languages in Europe, in which orthographies played an important role. This book traces the development of European spelling systems in the early modern era, and is unique in bringing together several strands of historical research, across a diverse range of Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, including Polish, German, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Czech, Croatian and English. Whilst each chapter includes a case study on a particular language or script, the volume in general follows a broad thread of discussion based on models and methods relevant to many languages, showing how empirical approaches can be applied across languages to enrich the field of historical orthography as a whole. The first volume to diachronically explore the standardization of spelling systems from a cross-linguistic perspective, this is an invaluable resource for specialists and those interested in historical European studies more broadly.


Queer Philologies

Queer Philologies

Author: Jeffrey Masten

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-06-10

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0812293177

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For Jeffrey Masten, the history of sexuality and the history of language are intimately related. In Queer Philologies, he studies particular terms that illuminate the history of sexuality in Shakespeare's time and analyzes the methods we have used to study sex and gender in literary and cultural history. Building on the work of theorists and historians who have, following Foucault, investigated the importance of words like "homosexual," "sodomy," and "tribade" in a variety of cultures and historical periods, Masten argues that just as the history of sexuality requires the history of language, so too does philology, "the love of the word," require the analytical lens provided by the study of sexuality. Masten unpacks the etymology, circulation, transformation, and constitutive power of key words within the early modern discourse of sex and gender—terms such as "conversation" and "intercourse," "fundament" and "foundation," "friend" and "boy"—that described bodies, pleasures, emotions, sexual acts, even (to the extent possible in this period) sexual identities. Analyzing the continuities as well as differences between Shakespeare's language and our own, he offers up a queer lexicon in which the letter "Q" is perhaps the queerest character of all.