Art after the Hipster

Art after the Hipster
Author: Wes Hill
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2017-10-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319685783

This book examines the complexities of the hipster through the lens of art history and cultural theory, from Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur to the contemporary “creative” borne from creative industries policies. It claims that the recent ubiquity of hipster culture has led many artists to confront their own significance, responding to the mass artification of contemporary life by de-emphasising the formal and textual deconstructions so central to the legacies of modern and postmodern art. In the era of creative digital technologies, long held characteristics of art such as individual expression, innovation, and alternative lifestyle are now features of a flooded and fast-paced global marketplace. Against the idea that artists, like hipsters, are the “foot soldiers of capitalism”, the institutionalized networks that make up the contemporary art world are working to portray a view of art that is less a discerning exercise in innovative form-making than a social platform—a forum for populist aesthetic pleasures or socio-political causes. It is in this sense that the concept of the hipster is caught up in age-old debates about the relation between ethics and aesthetics, examined here in terms of the dynamics of global contemporary art.

Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics

Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics
Author: Theresa M. Kelley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 1988-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521343984

This book offers a fresh understanding of the role of aesthetics in Wordsworth's major poetry and prose. Arguing that Wordsworth presents sublimity and beauty as strata in the mind's aesthetic retrieval, Professor Kelley's 1988 text proposes geological precedents for this aesthetic model and evaluates its differences from the models developed by Burke, Kant and Hegel. This study sheds light on Wordworth and Romanticism in several ways. It establishes key differences between his aesthetics and that of Burke, Kant and other predecessors; it offers an insightful understanding of the aesthetic nature of Wordsworth's poetic achievement; and it grounds its close, rhetorical analysis of texts and figures in relevant historical and political contexts.

Collecting and Appreciating

Collecting and Appreciating
Author: Simone Francescato
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2010
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9783034301633

The traditional borders between the arts have been eroded to reveal new connections and create new links between art forms. Cultural Interactions is intended to provide a forum for this activity. It will publish monographs, edited collections and volumes of primary material on points of crossover such as those between literature and the visual arts or photography and fiction, music and theatre, sculpture and historiography.

Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde

Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde
Author: David Cottington
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2022-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300166737

An authoritative re-definition of the social, cultural and visual history of the emergence of the "avant-garde" in Paris and London Over the past fifty years, the term "avant-garde" has come to shape discussions of European culture and modernity, ubiquitously taken for granted but rarely defined. This ground-breaking book develops an original and searching methodology that fundamentally reconfigures the social, cultural, and visual context of the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in Paris and London before 1915, bringing the material history of its formation into clearer and more detailed focus than ever before. Drawing on a wealth of disciplinary evidence, from socio-economics to histories of sexuality, bohemia, consumerism, politics, and popular culture, David Cottington explores the different models of cultural collectivity in, and presumed hierarchies between, these two focal cities, while identifying points of ideological influence and difference between them. He reveals the avant-garde to be at once complicit with, resistant to, and a product of the modernizing forces of professionalization, challenging the conventional wisdom on this moment of cultural formation and offering the means to reset the terms of avant-garde studies.

The Routledge Companion to Adaptation

The Routledge Companion to Adaptation
Author: Dennis Cutchins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 644
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 131742655X

The Routledge Companion to Adaptation offers a broad range of scholarship from this growing, interdisciplinary field. With a basis in source-oriented studies, such as novel-to-stage and stage-to-film adaptations, this volume also seeks to highlight the new and innovative aspects of adaptation studies, ranging from theatre and dance to radio, television and new media. It is divided into five sections: Mapping, which presents a variety of perspectives on the scope and development of adaptation studies; Historiography, which investigates the ways in which adaptation engages with – and disrupts – history; Identity, which considers texts and practices in adaptation as sites of multiple and fluid identity formations; Reception, which examines the role played by an audience, considering the unpredictable relationships between adaptations and those who experience them; Technology, which focuses on the effects of ongoing technological advances and shifts on specific adaptations, and on the wider field of adaptation. An emphasis on adaptation-as-practice establishes methods of investigation that move beyond a purely comparative case study model. The Routledge Companion to Adaptation celebrates the complexity and diversity of adaptation studies, mapping the field across genres and disciplines.

Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal

Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal
Author: Rachel Fell McDermott
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 023112919X

Annually during the months of autumn, Bengal hosts three interlinked festivals to honor its most important goddesses: Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri. While each of these deities possesses a distinct iconography, myth, and character, they are all martial. Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri often demand blood sacrifice as part of their worship and offer material and spiritual benefits to their votaries. Richly represented in straw, clay, paint, and decoration, they are similarly displayed in elaborately festooned temples, thronged by thousands of admirers. The first book to recount the history of these festivals and their revelry, rivalry, and nostalgic power, this volume marks an unprecedented achievement in the mapping of a major public event. Rachel Fell McDermott describes the festivals' origins and growth under British rule. She identifies their iconographic conventions and carnivalesque qualities and their relationship to the fierce, Tantric sides of ritual practice. McDermott confronts controversies over the tradition of blood sacrifice and the status-seekers who compete for symbolic capital. Expanding her narrative, she takes readers beyond Bengal's borders to trace the transformation of the goddesses and their festivals across the world. McDermott's work underscores the role of holidays in cultural memory, specifically the Bengali evocation of an ideal, culturally rich past. Under the thrall of the goddess, the social, political, economic, and religious identity of Bengalis takes shape.

Theorizing Adaptation

Theorizing Adaptation
Author: Kamilla Elliott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2020-05-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0197511201

From intertextuality to postmodern cultural studies, narratology to affect theory, poststructuralism to metamodernism, and postcolonialism to ecocriticism, humanities adaptation studies has engaged with a host of contemporary theories. Yet theorizing adaptation has been declared behind the theoretical times compared to other fields and charged with theoretical incorrectness by scholars from all theoretical camps. In this thorough and groundbreaking study, author Kamilla Elliott works to explain and redress the problem of theorizing adaptation. She offers the first cross-disciplinary history of theorizing adaptation in the humanities, extending back to the sixteenth century, revealing that until the late eighteenth century, adaptation was valued for its contributions to cultural progress, before its eventual — and ongoing — marginalization by humanities theories. The second half of the book offers ways to redress the troubled relationship between theorization and adaptation. Ultimately, Theorizing Adaptation proffers shared ground upon which adaptation scholars can debate productively across disciplinary, cultural, and theoretical borders.

The Street of Wonderful Possibilities

The Street of Wonderful Possibilities
Author: Devon Cox
Publisher: Aurum
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0711274533

A beautifully illustrated art history and cultural biography, The Street of Wonderful Possibilities focuses on one of the most influential artistic quarters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – London’s Tite Street, where a staggering amount of talent thrived, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde and John Singer Sargent. For Wilde, the street was full of ‘wonderful possibilities’, while for Whistler it was ‘the birthplace of art’, where a new brand of aestheticism was nurtured in his controversial White House. Modern masterpieces in art and literature flowed from the studios and houses of Tite Street, but this bohemian enclave had a dark side as well. Here Whistler was bankrupted, Frank Miles was sent to an asylum, Wilde was imprisoned, and Peter Warlock was gassed to death. Throughout its turbulent existence, Tite Street mirrored the world around it. From the Aesthetic movement and its challenge to Victorian values, through the Edwardian struggle for women’s suffrage, to the bombs of the Blitz in the 1940s, it remained home to innumerable artists and writers, socialites and suffragettes, musicians and madmen. The Street of Wonderful Possibilities reveals this complex history, tying together private and professional lives to form a colourful tapestry of art and intrigue, illuminating their relationships to each other, to Tite Street and to a rapidly modernising London at the fin de siècle.

Women Writers in Renaissance England

Women Writers in Renaissance England
Author: Randall Martin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2014-07-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317862910

Of all the new developments in literary theory, feminism has proved to be the most widely influential, leading to an expansion of the traditional English canon in all periods of study. This book aims to make the work of Renaissance women writers in English better known to general and academic readers so as to strengthen the case for their future inclusion in the Renaissance literary canon. This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about women as writers within the period and suggests potential intertextual connections with works by well-known male authors of the same time. Individual authors and works are given concise introductions, with both modern and historical critical analysis, setting them in a theoretical and historicised context. All texts are made readily accessible through modern spelling and punctuation, on-the-page annotation and headnotes. The substantial, up-to-date bibliography provides a source for further study and research.

Matisse’s Poets

Matisse’s Poets
Author: Kathryn Brown
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2017-09-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1501326856

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.