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This is the first book to explore the cultural significance of the color yellow, showing how its psychological and aesthetic value marked and shaped many of the intellectual, political, and artistic currents of late modernity. It contends that yellow functions during this period primarily as a color of stigma and scandal. Yellow stigmatization has had a long history: it goes back to the Middle Ages when Jews and prostitutes were forced to wear yellow signs to emphasize their marginal status. Although scholars have commented on these associations in particular contexts, Sabine Doran offers the first overarching account of how yellow connects disparate cultural phenomena, such as turn-of-the-century decadence (the "yellow nineties"), the rise of mass media ("yellow journalism"), mass immigration from Asia ("the yellow peril"), and mass stigmatization (the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany). The Culture of Yellow combines cultural history with innovative readings of literary texts and visual artworks, providing a multilayered account of the unique role played by the color yellow in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European culture.
Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Through analyses of works by Claudel, Pound, Kafka, Benjamin, Segalen, and Valery, among others, Christopher Bush traces the interweaving of Western modernity's ethnographic and technological imaginaries, in which the cultural effects of technological media assumed "Chinese" forms, even as traditional representations of "the Orient" lived on in modernist-era responses to media. The book also makes a methodological argument, demonstrating new ways of recovering the generally overlooked presence of China in the text of Western modernism.
Self-Translation: Brokering originality in hybrid culture provides critical, historical and interdisciplinary analyses of self-translators and their works. It investigates the challenges which the bilingual oeuvre and the experience of the self-translator pose to conventional definitions of translation and the problematic dichotomies of "original" and "translation", "author" and "translator". Canonical self-translators, such Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Rabindranath Tagore, are here discussed in the context of previously overlooked self-translators, from Japan to South Africa, from the Basque Country to Scotland. This book seeks therefore to offer a portrait of the diverse artistic a...
This volume explores the production of loss in nationalist discourses during the long nineteenth century in the Baltic Sea region – how the notion of loss was charged with emotions in political writings, lectures, novels, paintings, letters and diaries.
A collection of essays written by various scholars critically analyzing the life and works of French author Marcel Proust. Includes analyses of characters, themes, and symbolism in Proust's major works. Also contains an annotated bibliography that can be used for finding further information.
Shakespeare's plays have never had a larger audience than they do in our time. This wide viewing is complemented by modern scholarship, which has verified and elucidated the plays' texts. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's plays continue to be revised. In order to find out how and why he has been rewritten, Ruby Cohn examines modern dramatic offshoots in English, French, and German. Surveying drama intended for the serious theater, the author discusses modern versions of Shakespeare's plays, especially Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest. Although the focus is always on drama, contrast is supplied by fiction stemming from Hamlet and essays inspired by King Lear. The book concludes with an a...
Japonisme, the nineteenth-century fascination for Japanese art, has generated an enormous body of scholarship since the beginning of the twenty-first century, but most of it neglects the women who acquired objects from the Far East and sold them to clients or displayed them in their homes before bequeathing them to museums. The stories of women shopkeepers, collectors, and artists rarely appear in memoirs left by those associated with the japoniste movement. This volume brings to light the culturally important, yet largely forgotten activities of women such as Clémence d'Ennery (1823–1898), who began collecting Japanese and Chinese chimeras in the 1840s, built and decorated a house for th...
Richard McCormick takes a fresh look at the crisis of gender in Weimar Germany through the analysis of selected cultural texts, both literary and film, characterized under the label 'New Objectivity'. The 'New Objectivity' was characterized by a sober and unsentimental embrace of urban modernity, in contract to Expressionism's horror of technology and belief in 'auratic' art. This movement was profoundly gendered - the epitome of the 'New Objectivity' was the 'New Woman' - working, sexually emancipated, and unsentimental. The book traces the crisis of gender identities, both male and female, and reveals how a variety of narratives of the time displaced an assortment of social anxieties onto sexual relations.