'I want to know what I am, what I want, what I can do, what is real, what is lovely.'
The post-war British artist Keith Vaughan (1912-77) was not only a supremely accomplished painter; he was an ...impassioned, eloquent writer.Image of a Man is the first book to provide a comprehensive critical reading of Vaughan's extraordinary journal, which spans thirty-eight years and sixty-one volumes to form a major literary work and a fascinating document of changing times.
From close textual analysis of the original manuscripts, this book uncovers the attitudes and arguments that shaped and reshaped Vaughan's identity as a man and as an artist. It reveals a continual process of self-construction through journal-writing, undertaken to navigate the difficulties of conscientious objection, the complications of desire as a gay man, and the challenges of making meaningful art.
By focussing on Vaughan's journal-writing in the context of its many influences and its centrality to his art practice,Image of a Man offers not only a compelling new critical biography of a significant yet underappreciated artist, but also a sustained argument on the constructed nature of the 'artist' persona in early and mid-twentieth-century culture - and the opportunities afforded by journal and diary forms to make such constructions possible.
The role played by women in the evolution of religious art and architecture has been largely neglected. This study of upper-class women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries corrects that ...oversight, uncovering the active role they undertook in choosing designs, materials, and locations for monuments, commissioning repairs and additions to many parish churches, chantry chapels, and almshouses characteristic of the English countryside. Their preferred art, Barbara J. Harris shows, reveals their responses to the religious revolution and signifies their preferred identities.
To this day, women face barriers in entering scientific professions, and in earlier eras the challenges were greater still. But in Botanical Entanglements, Anna Sagal reveals how women’s active ...participation in scientific discourses of the eighteenth century was enabled by the manipulation of social and cultural conventions that have typically been understood as limiting factors. By taking advantage of the intersections between domesticity, femininity, and nature, the writers and artists studied here laid claim to a specific authority on naturalist subjects, ranging from botany to entomology to natural history more broadly.
Botanical Entanglements pairs studies of well-known authors—Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith—with authors and artists who receive less attention in this context—Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Jacson, Elizabeth Blackwell, Henrietta Maria Moriarty, and Mary Delany—to offer a nuanced portrait of the diverse strategies women employed to engage in scientific labor. Using socially acceptable forms of textual production, including popular periodicals, didactic texts, novels, illustrated works, craftwork, and poetry, these women advocated for more substantive and meaningful engagement with the natural world. In parallel, the book also illuminates the emotional and physical intimacies between women, plants, and insects to reveal an early precursor to twenty-first-century theorizing of plant intelligence and human-plant relationships. Recognizing such literary and artistic entanglement facilitates a more profound understanding of the multifaceted relationship between women and the natural world in eighteenth-century England.
Edited and with commentary by Joan Greatrex, this book makes available for the first time in printed form the sermon manuscript, MS Q. 18, which survives in its original home in the medieval ...cathedral library at Worcester. At first glance this small, untidy quarto-size manuscript appears to be merely an unremarkable collection of early fourteenth-century Latin sermons. However, their importance lies in the fact that they appear to be a rare, if not unique, example of working copies of sermons, providing us with a glimpse into daily life in a medieval monastic community.
As one of the people who defined punk’s protest art in the 1970s and 1980s, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) deserves to be much better-known. She produced confrontational album covers for the legendary ...anarchist band Crass and later went on to do the same for Northern indie legends the Charlatans, among others. More recently, her work was recognised the day after Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, when the front page of the Daily Mirror ran her 1989 painting Oh America , which shows the Statue of Liberty, head in hands. This is the first book to critically assess an extensive range of Vaucher’s work. It examines her unique position connecting avant-garde art movements, counterculture, punk and even contemporary street art. While Vaucher rejects all ‘isms’, her work offers a unique take on the history of feminist art.
Shakespeare, Lee Oser argues, is a Christian literary artist who
criticizes and challenges Christians, but who does so on Christian
grounds. Stressing Shakespeare's theological sensitivity, Oser
...places Shakespeare's work in the "radical middle," the dialectical
opening between the sacred and the secular where great writing can
flourish. According to Oser, the radical middle was and remains a
site of cultural originality, as expressed through mimetic works of
art intended for a catholic (small "c") audience. It describes the
conceptual space where Shakespeare was free to engage theological
questions, and where his Christian skepticism could serve his
literary purposes. Oser reviews the rival cases for a Protestant
Shakespeare and for a Catholic Shakespeare, but leaves the issue
open, focusing, instead, on how Shakespeare exploits artistic
resources that are specific to Christianity, including the
classical-Christian rhetorical tradition. The scope of the book
ranges from an introductory survey of the critical field as it now
stands, to individual chapters on A Midsummer Night's Dream,
The Merchant of Venice, the Henriad, Hamlet , and King
Lear . Writing with a deep sense of literary history, Oser
holds that mainstream literary criticism has created a false
picture of Shakespeare by secularizing him and misconstruing the
nature of his art. Through careful study of the plays, Oser
recovers a Shakespeare who is less vulnerable to the winds of
academic and political fashion, and who is a friend to the enduring
project of humanistic education. Christian Humanism in Shakespeare:
A Study in Religion and Literature is both eminently readable and a
work of consequence.
Comprehensive guidance to support those involved in primary education in developing the curriculum to meet the requirements of the new Ofsted (2019) framework.
Henry Daniel, fourteenth-century medical writer, Dominican friar, and contemporary of Chaucer, is one of the most neglected figures to whom we can attribute a substantial body of extant works in ...Middle English. His Liber Uricrisiarum , the earliest known medical text in Middle English, synthesizes authoritative traditions into a new diagnostic encyclopedia characterized by its stylistic verve and intellectual scope.
Drawing on expertise from a range of scholars, this volume examines Daniel’s capacious works and demonstrates their significance to many scholarly conversations, including the history of late medieval medicine. It explains the background for Daniel’s uroscopic and herbal work, describes all known versions of the Liber Uricrisiarum and traces revisions over time, analyses Daniel’s representations of his own medical practice, and demonstrates his influence on later medical and literary writers.
Both a companion to the recently published reading edition of the Liber Uricrisiarum and a work of original scholarship in its own right, this collection promotes a wider understanding of Daniel’s texts and prompts new discoveries about their importance.
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