The authors explore the complex, many-faceted visual culture of the French Revolution, which took place in a period characterised by the creation of a new visual language steeped in metaphor, symbol and allegory.
Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society. In her lavishly illustrated and gracefully written book, Joan B. Landes explores this paradox within the workings of revolutionary visual culture and traces the interaction between pictorial and textual political arguments. Landes highlights the widespread circulation of images of the female body, notwithstanding the political leadership's suspicions of the dangers of feminine influence and the seductions of visual imagery. The use of caricatures and allegories contributed to the destruction of the masculinized images of hierarchic absolutism and to forging new roles for men and women in both the intimate and public arenas. Landes tells the fascinating story of how the depiction of the nation as a desirable female body worked to eroticize patriotism and to bind male subjects to the nation-state. Despite their political subordination, women too were invited to identify with the project of nationalism. Recent views of the French Revolution have emphasized linguistic concerns; in contrast, Landes stresses the role of visual cognition in fashioning ideas of nationalism and citizenship. Her book demonstrates as well that the image is often a site of contestation, as individual viewers may respond to it in unexpected, even subversive, ways.
The Visual Culture of Violence after the French Revolution traces four sites of spectatorship that exemplified the visual culture of violence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, offering a new account of the significance of violent spectacle to the birth of modernity. Considerations of the execution scaffold, salon painting, print culture and the fait divers, and waxworks displays establish the centrality of spectatorial violence to experiences of selfhood in the wake of the French Revolution. Shedding critical light on previously neglected aspects of art and visual culture of the post-Revolutionary period, The Visual Culture of Violence after the French Revolution demonstrates how violent spectacle at this moment was profoundly shaped by shifting social attitudes, contemporary political practices, and rapidly accelerated technological developments. By attending to the formal and historical specificity of violent spectacle after the Revolution, Graybill affirms the historical contingency through which the visual culture of violence in the modern era has emerged. The Visual Culture of Violence after the French Revolution will be broadly relevant to scholars of art, media and visual studies, and particularly to historians of the French Revolution and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. The book's concern with the representation of violence makes it of interest to scholars working in a variety of fields beyond its historical period, especially in art, literature, history, media and culture studies.
A comprehensive history of data visualization—its origins, rise, and effects on the ways we think about and solve problems. With complex information everywhere, graphics have become indispensable to our daily lives. Navigation apps show real-time, interactive traffic data. A color-coded map of exit polls details election balloting down to the county level. Charts communicate stock market trends, government spending, and the dangers of epidemics. A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication tells the story of how graphics left the exclusive confines of scientific research and became ubiquitous. As data visualization spread, it changed the way we think. Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer take us back to the beginnings of graphic communication in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Dutch cartographer Michael Florent van Langren created the first chart of statistical data, which showed estimates of the distance from Rome to Toledo. By 1786 William Playfair had invented the line graph and bar chart to explain trade imports and exports. In the nineteenth century, the “golden age” of data display, graphics found new uses in tracking disease outbreaks and understanding social issues. Friendly and Wainer make the case that the explosion in graphical communication both reinforced and was advanced by a cognitive revolution: visual thinking. Across disciplines, people realized that information could be conveyed more effectively by visual displays than by words or tables of numbers. Through stories and illustrations, A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication details the 400-year evolution of an intellectual framework that has become essential to both science and society at large.
Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present offers a sophisticated yet accessible interpretation of modern Chinese history through visual imagery. With rich illustrations and a companion website, it is an ideal textbook for college-level courses on modern Chinese history and on modern visual culture. The introduction provides a methodological framework and historical overview, while the chronologically arranged chapters use engaging case studies to explore important themes. Topics include: Qing court ritual, rebellion and war, urban/rural relations, art and architecture, sports, the Chinese diaspora, state politics, film propaganda and censorship, youth in the Cultural Revolution, environmentalism, and Internet culture. Companion website: http://visualizingmodernchina.org
In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view.Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of "universal" rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue.In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as "the People" when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution.
A look at how the modern woman was envisioned in postrevolutionary Mexican popular culture and how she figured in contestations over Mexican national identity.
Revolutions is a unique collection of rare photographs documenting some of the most important revolutionary upheavals, from the 1871 Paris Commune to the Zapatista rebellion of the 1990s.
Visualizing with Text uncovers the rich palette of text elements usable in visualizations from simple labels through to documents. Using a multidisciplinary research effort spanning across fields including visualization, typography, and cartography, it builds a solid foundation for the design space of text in visualization. The book illustrates many new kinds of visualizations, including microtext lines, skim formatting, and typographic sets that solve some of the shortcomings of well-known visualization techniques. Key features: More than 240 illustrations to aid inspiration of new visualizations Eight new approaches to data visualization leveraging text Quick reference guide for visualization with text Builds a solid foundation extending current visualization theory Bridges between visualization, typography, text analytics, and natural language processing The author website, including teaching exercises and interactive demos and code, can be found here. Designers, developers, and academics can use this book as a reference and inspiration for new approaches to visualization in any application that uses text.