While investigating his mentor's life and death, Michael, a voyeuristic fashion photographer, travels through a Dionysian landscape where sex is daydream, women and horses share the same erotic power, and perversity is the rule. In his search, Michael uses photographs and paintings to visualize the past and thereby expose a family's decadent legacy of sex, lies, and betrayal.
This is a truly interdisciplinary work. Whilst all of the contributions focus upon the central problem of the relationship between literature and the visual arts, they come from contributors working in a large number of different areas. Represented are academics from the worlds of German studies, French studies, English studies, art history and film studies. in literature, etc.
Examining a wide range of works, from Gulliver's Travels to The Hunger Games, Representing the Modern Animal in Culture employs key theoretical apparatuses of Animal Studies to literary texts. Contributors address the multifarious modes of animal representation and the range of human-animal interactions that have emerged in the past 300 years.
In this new study of the novels of John Hawkes, author Lesley Marx has brought to light insights from the three novels Hawkes has published in the last ten years, as well as from his other works. According to Marx, all three of these new novels continue to attest to the fertility of Hawkes's imagination and the fine crafting of his prose. But at least two of the new works - Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade and Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse - also reveal an expansive and transformative vision that celebrates the shifting and fluid possibilities of authority, writing, storytelling, and gender.
For almost a hundred years from the 1860s, the City of London's overseas banks financed the global trade that lay at the core of the British Empire. Foremost among them from the beginning were two start-up ventures: the Standard Bank of South Africa, which soon developed a powerful domestic franchise at the Cape, and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. This book traces their stories in the nineteenth century, their glory days before 1914 - and their remarkable survival in the face of global wars and the collapse of world trade in the first half of the twentieth century. The unravelling of the Empire after 1945 eventually forced Britain's overseas banks to confront a different future. The Standard and the Chartered, alarmed at the expansion of American banking, determined in 1969 on a merger as a way of sustaining the best of the City's overseas traditions. But from the start, Standard Chartered had to grapple with the fading fortunes of its own inherited franchise - badly dented in both Asia and Africa - and with radical changes in the nature of banking. Its British managers, steeped in the past, proved ill-suited to the challenge. By the late 1980s, efforts to expand in Europe and the USA had brought the merged Group to the brink of collapse. Yet it survived - and then pulled off a dramatic recovery. Standard Chartered realigned itself, just in time, with the phenomenal growth of Asia's 'emerging markets', many of them in countries where the Chartered had flourished a century earlier. In the process, the Group was transformed. Trebling its workforce, it brushed aside the global financial crisis of 2008 and by 2012 could look back on a decade of astonishing growth. Recent times have added an eventful postscript to a long and absorbing history. Crossing Continents recounts Standard Chartered's story with a wealth of detail from one of the richest archives available to any commercial bank. The book also affords a rare and compelling perspective on the evolution of international trade and finance, showing how Britain's commercial influence has actually worked in practice around the world over one hundred and fifty years.
George Stubbs is one of the greatest of British eighteenth-century painters, with a deep and unaffected sympathy for country life and the English countryside. This fully illustrated book outlines his career, followed by a catalogue raisonne (the first since Sir Walter Gilbey's short listing of 1898) of all his known works. One of the stickiest labels in the history of British art attached itself to Stubbs as 'Mr Stubbs the horse painter'. Over half of his paintings were of horses, each founded on the pioneering observations assembled (in 1766) in his book The Anatomy of the Horse; but Stubbs's wide-ranging subjects included portraits, conversation pieces and paintings of exotic animals from the Zebra to the Rhinoceros, as well as an extraordinarily sympathetic series of portraits of dogs.
A Whole World of Art offers an international view of art history through 27 beautifully illustrated scenes of great art and artists at different times and places around the world.
This book traces an evolution of equine and equestrian art in the United States over the last two centuries to counter conventional understandings of subjects that are deeply enmeshed in the traditions of elite English and European culture. In focusing on the construction of identity in painting and photography—of Blacks, women, and the animals themselves involved in horseracing, rodeo, and horse show competition—it illuminates the strategic and varying roles visual artists have played in producing cultural understandings of human-animal relationships. As the first book to offer a history of American equine and equestrian imagery, it shrinks the chasm of literature on the subject and illustrates the significance of the genre to the history of American art. This book further connects American equine and equestrian art to historical, theoretical, and philosophical analyses of animals and attests to how the horse endures as a vital, meaningful subject within the art world as well as culture at large. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, American art, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and animal studies.
The Seven Years' War (17561763) was the decisive conflict of the eighteenth century Winston Churchill called it the first world war and the clash which forever changed the course of North American history. Yet compared with other momentous conflicts like the Napoleonic Wars or the First World War, the cultural impact of the Seven Years' War remains woefully understudied. The Culture of the Seven Years' War is the first collection of essays to take a broad interdisciplinary and multinational approach to this important global conflict. Rather than focusing exclusively on political, diplomatic, or military issues, this collection examines the impact of representation, identity, and conceptions and experiences of empire. With essays by notable scholars that address the war's impact in Europe and the Atlantic world, this volume is sure to become essential reading for those interested in the relationship between war, culture, and the arts.
