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It is broadly recognized that black style had a clear and profound influence on the history of dress in the twentieth century, with black culture and fashion having long been defined as 'cool'. Yet despite this high profile, in-depth explorations of the culture and history of style and dress in the African diaspora are a relatively recent area of enquiry. The Birth of Cool asserts that 'cool' is seen as an arbiter of presence, and relates how both iconic and 'ordinary' black individuals and groups have marked out their lives through the styling of their bodies. Focusing on counter- and sub-cultural contexts, this book investigates the role of dress in the creation and assertion of black iden...
The relation of the visual arts to Vladimir Nabokov's work is the subject of this in-depth and detailed study of one of the most significant facets of this modern master's oeuvre.
This book is the definitive guide to Victorian poetry, which its author approaches in the light of modern critical concerns and contemporary contexts. Valentine Cunningham exhibits encyclopedic knowledge of the poetry produced in this period and offers dazzling close readings of a number of well-known poems Draws on the work of major Victorian poets and their works as well as many of the less well-known poets and poems Reads poems and poets in the light of both Victorian and modern critical concerns Places poetry in its personal, aesthetic, historical, and ideological context Organized in terms of the Victorian anxieties of self, body, and melancholy Argues that rhyming/repetition is the major formal feature of Victorian poetry Highlights the Victorian obsession with small subjects in small poems Shows how Victorian poetry attempts to engage with the modern subject and how its modernity segues into modernism and postmodernism
Sound experimentation by avant-garde theatre artists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is an important but ignored aspect of theatre history. Curtin explores how artists engaged with the sonic conditions of modernity through dramatic form, characterization, staging, technology, performance style, and other forms of interaction.
'A book that no serious student should be without... refreshingly sane.' Jeremy Siepmann, Classical Music 'An immensely valuable and well-researched book.' Stephen Haylett, BBC Music Magazine 'Intermittently engrossing...' Susan Bradshaw, Musical Times.
This book traces a genealogy of political dandyism in literature. Dandies abstain from worldly affairs, and politics in particular. As an enigmatic figure, or a being of great eccentricity, it was the dandy that haunted the literary and cultural imagination of the nineteenth century. In fact, the dandy is often seen as a quintessential nineteenth-century figure. It was surprising, then, when at the beginning of the twenty-first century this figure returned from the past to an unexpected place: the very heart of European politics. Various so-called populist leaders were seen as political dandies. But how could that figure that was once known for its aversion towards politics all of a sudden become the protagonist of a new political paradigm? Or was the dandy perhaps always already part of a political imagination? This study charts the emergence of this political paradigm. From the dandy’s first appearance to his latest resurrection, from Charles Baudelaire to Jean-François Lyotard, from dandy-insects to a dandy-Christ, this book follows his various guises and disguises.
Decadent Poetics explores the complex and vexed topic of decadent literature's formal characteristics and interrogates previously held assumptions around the nature of decadent form. Writers studied include Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as A.E. Housman, Arthur Machen and Hubert Crackanthorpe.
Based on close readings of five Victorian novels, Hallum presents an original study of the interaction between popular fiction, the marriage market and the aesthetic movement. She uses the texts to trace the development of aestheticism, examining the differences between the authors, including their approach, style and gender.
Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture considers the visual languages, politics, and poetics of personal appearance. Dandyism has been most closely associated with influential caucasian Western men-about-town, epitomized by the 19th century style-setting of Oscar Wilde and by Tom Wolfe's white suits. The essays collected here, however, examine the spectacle and workings of dandyism to reveal that these were not the only dandies. On the contrary, art historians, literary and cultural historians, and anthropologists identify unrecognized dandies flourishing among early 19th century Native Americans, in Soviet Latvia, in Africa, throughout the African-American diaspora, among women, an...
Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Brin...