Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture
Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-03-07

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 9401200424

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This collection opens with an inquiry into the assumptions and methods of the historical study of culture, comparing the new cultural history with the old. Thirteen essays follow, each defining a problem within a particular culture. In the first section, Biography and Autobiography, three scholars explore historically changing types of self-conception, each reflecting larger cultural meanings; essays included examine Italian Renaissance biographers and the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Mohandas Gandhi. A second group of contributors explore problems raised by the writing of history itself, especially as it relates to a notion of culture. Here examples are drawn from the writings of Thucydides, Jacob Burckhardt, and the art historians Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski. In the third section, Politics, Nationalism, and Culture, the essays explore relationships between cultural creativity and national identity, with case studies focusing on the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, the place of Castile within the national history of Spain, and the impact of World War I on work of Thomas Mann. The final section, Cultural Translation, raises the complex questions of cultural influence and the transmission of traditions over time through studies of Philo of Alexandria's interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, Erasmus' use of Socrates, Jean Bodin's conception of Roman law, and adaptations of the Hebrew Bible for American children.

Voyages and Visions
Voyages and Visions

Author: Jaś Elsner

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 9781861890207

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A much-needed contribution to the expanding interest in the history of travel and travel writing, Voyages and Visions is the first attempt to sketch a cultural history of travel from the sixteenth century to the present day. The essays address the theme of travel as a historical, literary and imaginative process, focusing on significant episodes and encounters in world history. The contributors to this collection include historians of art and of science, anthropologists, literary critics and mainstream cultural historians. Their essays encompass a challenging range of subjects, including the explorations of South America, India and Mexico; mountaineering in the Himalayas; space travel; science fiction; and American post-war travel fiction. Voyages and Visions is truly interdisciplinary, and essential reading for anyone interested in travel writing. With essays by Kasia Boddy, Michael Bravo, Peter Burke, Melissa Calaresu, Jesus Maria Carillo Castillo, Peter Hansen, Edward James, Nigel Leask, Joan-Pau Rubies and Wes Williams.

Visions/revisions
Visions/revisions

Author: Nigel Harkness

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9783039101405

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The essays in this volume contribute diversely towards a revision and a reconceptualization of nineteenth-century France, with many adopting interdisciplinary methodologies attentive to the interplay between literature, history, art, popular and high culture, politics and science.

Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism
Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism

Author: Andrew Milner

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-08-07

Total Pages: 566

ISBN-13: 9004314156

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Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism brings together twenty-six essays charting the development of Andrew Milner’s distinctively Orwellian version of cultural materialism between 1981 and 2015. The essays address three substantive areas: the sociology of literature, cultural materialism and the cultural politics of the New Left, and utopian and science fiction studies. They are bookended by two conversations between Milner and his editor J.R. Burgmann, the first looking back retrospectively on the development of Milner’s thought, the second looking forward prospectively towards the future of academia, the political left and science fiction.

The Power of Culture
The Power of Culture

Author: Richard Wightman Fox

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1993-04

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780226259543

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"We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in sensibility, and 'cultural' history is the rubric under which a massive doubting and refiguring of our most cherished historical assumptions is being conducted. Many historians are coming to suspect that the idea of culture has the power to restore order to the study of the past. Whatever its potency as an organizing theme, there is no doubt about the power of the term 'culture' to evoke and stand for the depth of the re-examination not taking place. At a time of deep intellectual disarray, 'culture' offers a provisional, nominalist version of coherence: whatever the fragmentation of knowledge, however centrifugal the spinning of the scholarly wheel, 'culture'—which (even etymologically) conveys a sense of safe nurture, warm growth, budding or ever-present wholeness—will shelter us. The PC buttons on historians' chests today stand not for 'politically correct' but 'positively cultural.'—from the Introduction More and more scholars are turning to cultural history in order to make sense of the American past. This volume brings together nine original essays by some leading practitioners in the field. The essays aim to exhibit the promise of a cultural approach to understanding the range of American experiences from the seventeenth century to the present. Expanding on the editors' pathbreaking The Culture of Consumption, the contributors to this volume argue for a cultural history that attends closely to language and textuality without losing sight of broad configurations of power that social and political history at its best has always stressed. The authors here freshly examine crucial topics in both private and public life. Taken together, the essays shed new light on the power of culture in the lives of Americans past and present.

Objects in Air
Objects in Air

Author: Margareta Ingrid Christian

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-06-07

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 022676477X

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Introduction. Artworks and their modalities of egress -- Aer, Aurae, Venti: Warburg's aerial forms and historical milieus -- Luftraum: Riegl's vitalist mesology of form -- Saturated forms: Rilke's and Rodin's sculpture of environment -- The "Kinesphere" and the body's other spatial envelopes in Rudolf Laban's Theory of Dance -- Coda. Space as form.

Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity

Author: Jaś Elsner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-03-19

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 1108473075

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Explores the problems for studying art and religion in Eurasia arising from ancestral, colonial and post-colonial biases in historiography.

Byzantine Media Subjects
Byzantine Media Subjects

Author: Glenn A. Peers

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2024-06-15

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1501775049

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Byzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with images—icons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman. The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them, mediating their relationship to time, to nature, to God, and to themselves.

The Cultural Turn
The Cultural Turn

Author: David Chaney

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1134850883

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In the second half of the twentieth century the theme of culture has dominated the human sciences. The forms of contemporary culture demand a radical reappraisal of the terms of description of the modern world. We therefore need to consider our options when culture does not just provide the meaning of experience but is also the terms of that experience. This book reviews these ideas in ways that will be accessible to those new to the field and also stimulating to experts. The three parts of the book: * Review the character and lessons of this "turn to culture" in a number of academic fields. The author demonstrates the socio-intellectual context within which these themes have been generated and documents the main strengths of the paradigm shift. * Explore key themes in contemporary culture. By showing how questions of citizenship and the meaning of places have been colonized under the remit of the culturalist paradigm, a cluster of associated ideas and themes implicit in the paradigm are explicitly tackled. * Examine some of the ways in whcih cultural forms are increasingly seen to dominate social reality. The final chapter explores triumphant culturalism - the postmodern world as the apogee of the turn to culture.