The Anthropomorphic Lens
The Anthropomorphic Lens

Author: Walter Melion

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 9004275037

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Anthropomorphism – the projection of the human form onto the every aspect of the world – closely relates to early modern notions of analogy and microcosm. What had been construed in Antiquity as a ready metaphor for the order of creation was reworked into a complex system relating the human body to the body of the world. Numerous books and images - cosmological diagrams, illustrated treatises of botany and zoology, maps, alphabets, collections of ornaments, architectural essays – are entirely constructed on the anthropomorphic analogy. Exploring the complexities inherent in such work, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume address how the anthropomorphic model is fraught with contradictions and tensions, between magical and rational, speculative and practical thought. Contributors include Pamela Brekka, Anne-Laure van Bruaene, Ralph Dekoninck, Agnès Guiderdoni, Christopher P. Heuer, Sarah Kyle, Walter S. Melion, Christina Normore, Elizabeth Petcu, Bertrand Prevost, Bret Rothstein, Paul Smith, Miya Tokumitsu, Michel Weemans, and Elke Werner.

Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism
Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism

Author: Christopher Kelen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-10-24

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1000463613

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Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism: Children, Animals, and Poetry investigates a kind of poetry written mainly by adults for children. Many genres, including the picture book, are considered in asking for what purposes ‘animal poetry’ is composed and what function it serves. Critically contextualising anthropomorphism in traditional and contemporary poetic and theoretical discourses, these pages explore the representation of animals through anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, and through affective responses to other-than-human others. Zoomorphism – the routine flipside of anthropomorphism – is crucially involved in the critical unmasking of the taken-for-granted textual strategies dealt with here. With a focus on the ethics entailed in poetic relations between children and animals, and between humans and nonhumans, this book asks important questions about the Anthropocene future and the role in it of literature intended for children. Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism: Children, Animals, and Poetry is a vital resource for students and for scholars in children’s literature.

Imago and Contemplatio in the Visual Arts and Literature (1400–1700)
Imago and Contemplatio in the Visual Arts and Literature (1400–1700)

Author: Stijn Bussels

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-01-22

Total Pages: 541

ISBN-13: 9004682643

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This volume contains twenty-four essays, which, in their subjects and methodology, pay tribute to the scholarship of Walter S. Melion. The contributions are grouped under three categories: “Devotion,” “Art and Image Theory,” and “Vision and Contemplation.” The Devotion section addresses votive practices, theological theory and polemic literature. The Art and Image Theory section focuses on Jesuit image theory, the reflexive dimension of works, and artists’ reflections on the function of images. Finally, the Vision and Contemplation section discusses the ‘early modern eye’ as a tool for thoughtful, prolonged looking to ascertain visual wit, deception, self-assessment and friendship, sacred and profane allegories.

Personification
Personification

Author: Walter Melion

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-03-11

Total Pages: 787

ISBN-13: 9004310436

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Personification, or prosopopeia, the rhetorical figure by which something not human is given a human identity or ‘face’, is readily discernible in early modern texts and images, but the figure’s cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, have rarely elicited sustained scholarly attention. The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, France, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries. Personification is susceptible to an approach that balances semiotic analysis, focusing on meaning effects, and phenomenological analysis, focusing on presence effects produced through bodily performance. This dual approach foregrounds the full scope of prosopopoeic discourse—not just the what, but also the how, not only the signified, but also the signifier.

Moving Spaces and Places
Moving Spaces and Places

Author: Beitske Boonstra

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2022-08-09

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1800712286

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Moving Spaces and Places is a cross-disciplinary collection about movement as a transformative experience, showing how movement changes affect and percept of spaces and place and solidifies space into meaningful places.

Into the White
Into the White

Author: Christopher P. Heuer

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-05-03

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1942130309

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How the far North offered a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination. European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet, as Christopher Heuer explains, between 1500 and 1700, one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North—a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination—offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a “non-site,” spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts—and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art's very legitimacy. In Into the White, Heuer uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates over perception and matter, representation, discovery, and the time of the earth—long before the nineteenth century Romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, he argues, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and impossible to be mastered, something beyond the idea of image itself.

Eye for Detail
Eye for Detail

Author: Florike Egmond

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2021-09-20

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 1780236875

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Image-transforming techniques such as close-up, time lapse, and layering are generally associated with the age of photography, but as Florike Egmond shows in this book, they were already being used half a millennium ago. Exploring the world of natural history drawings from the Renaissance, Eye for Detail shows how the function of identification led to image manipulation techniques that will look uncannily familiar to the modern viewer. Egmond shows how the format of images in nature studies changed dramatically during the Renaissance period, as high-definition naturalistic representation became the rule during a robust output of plant and animal drawings. She examines what visual techniques like magnification can tell us about how early modern Europeans studied and ordered living nature, and she focuses on how attention to visual detail was motivated by an overriding question: the secret of the origins of life. Beautifully and precisely illustrated throughout, this volume serves as an arresting guide to the massive European collections of nature drawings and an absorbing study of natural history art of the sixteenth century.

A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion
A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion

Author: Mikel Burley

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-01-23

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1350098329

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This book is a unique introduction to studying the philosophy of religion, drawing on a wide range of cultures and literary sources in an approach that is both methodologically innovative and expansive in its cross-cultural and multi-religious scope. Employing his expertise in interdisciplinary and Wittgenstein-influenced methods, Mikel Burley draws on works of ethnography and narrative fiction, including Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, to critically engage with existing approaches to the philosophy of religion and advocate a radical, pluralist approach. Breaking away from the standard fixation on a narrow construal of theism, topics discussed include conceptions of compassion in Buddhist ethics, cannibalism in mortuary rituals, divine possession and animal sacrifice in Hindu Goddess worship and animism in indigenous traditions. Original and engaging, Burley's synthesis of philosophical, anthropological and literary elements expands and diversifies the philosophy of religion, providing an essential introduction for anyone interested in studying the radical plurality of forms that religion takes in human life.

Feel My Big Guitar
Feel My Big Guitar

Author: Judson L. Jeffries

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2023-06-23

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 1496845293

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Contributions by Ignatius Calabria, H. Zahra Caldwell, Brian Jude de Lima, Sabatino DiBernardo, William Fulton, Antonio Garfias, Judson L. Jeffries, Tony Kiene, Molly Reinhoudt, Fred Shaheen, and Karen Turman With his signature blend of genres and lyrics that touch on myriad societal issues, the artist Prince (1958–2016) has challenged and captivated the minds and hearts of countless listeners. Feel My Big Guitar: Prince and the Sound He Helped Create is a wide-ranging collection that seeks to place Prince at the center of contemporary musical scholarship, putting him in proper cultural and political context. This edited volume includes a mix of essays and reflections by scholars and fans, as well as interviews with people who worked with and knew Prince personally. Employing a blend of methodologies, contributors offer a body of fresh, intriguing, thought-provoking, and mind-bending work about Prince—an artist whose music exemplified those very characteristics. The volume examines Prince's musical influences, his rivalries (both real and imagined), and instrumental eroticism. It includes enlightening interviews with early mentor Pépe Willie and Gayle Chapman, Prince’s first female bandmate. These personal reflections and interviews grant readers a unique lens through which to view Prince, enriching our overall understanding of the man. Ultimately, Feel My Big Guitar serves as a space for sharing musicological analysis and memories about an artist whose work has touched and inspired so many. Years in the making, this is the first book in an ongoing scholarly project, PrincEnlighteNmenT: A Study of Society through Music, intended to investigate and reveal the full spectrum of Prince’s life and work.