Karnak

Karnak
Author: Elizabeth Blyth
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2006-10-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134136684

The first publication in English to provide an in-depth examination including illustrations of the historical developments of the famous temple site Karnak, from its early shrine to the greatest state temple of Ancient Eygpt's mighty empire.

Magic

Magic
Author: Jamie Sutcliffe
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262543036

The first accessible reader on magic’s generative relationship with contemporary art practice. From the hexing of presidents to a renewed interest in herbalism and atavistic forms of self-care, magic has furnished the contemporary imagination with mysterious and often disorienting bodies of arcane thought and practice. This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians, and theorists that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary art’s varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic. Dispensing with simple narratives of reenchantment, Magic illustrates the intricate ways in which we have to some extent always been captivated by the allure of the numinous. It demonstrates how magical culture’s tendencies toward secrecy, occlusion, and encryption might provide contemporary artists with strategies of remedial communality, a renewed faith in the invocational power of personal testimony, and a poetics of practice that could boldly question our political circumstances, from the crisis of climate collapse to the strictures of socially sanctioned techniques of medical and psychiatric care. Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a “magical-critical” thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present.

The Sublime

The Sublime
Author: Philip Shaw
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2007-01-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134493185

Often labelled as ‘indescribable’, the sublime is a term that has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists. Usually related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines. Offering historical overviews and explanations, Philip Shaw looks at: the legacy of the earliest, classical theories of the sublime through the romantic to the postmodern and avant-garde sublimity the major theorists of the sublime such as Kant, Burke, Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan and Zizek, offering critical introductions to each the significance of the concept through a range of literary readings including the Old and New testaments, Homer, Milton and writing from the romantic era how the concept of the sublime has affected other art forms such as painting and film, from abstract expressionism to David Lynch’s neo-noir. This remarkably clear study of what is, in essence, a term which evades definition, is essential reading for students of literature, critical and cultural theory.

Painting

Painting
Author: Terry R. Myers
Publisher: Documents of Contemporary Art
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780854881888

Essential writings thatconsider the diverse meanings of contemporary painting since its postconceptualrevival.

Whitechapel Noise

Whitechapel Noise
Author: Vivi Lachs
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2018-05-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0814343562

New perspectives on Anglo-Jewish history via the poetry and song of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London from 1884 to 1914. Archive material from the London Yiddish press, songbooks, and satirical writing offers a window into an untold cultural life of the Yiddish East End. Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884–1914 by Vivi Lachs positions London’s Yiddish popular culture in historical perspective within Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetics, and music-hall culture, and shows its relationship to the transnational Yiddish-speaking world. Layers of cultural references in the Yiddish texts are closely analyzed and quoted to draw out the complex yet intimate histories they contain, offering new perspectives on Anglo-Jewish historiography in three main areas: politics, sex, and religion. The acculturation of Jewish immigrants to English life is an important part of the development of their social culture, as well as to the history of London. In part one of the book, Lachs presents an overview of daily immigrant life in London, its relationship to the Anglo-Jewish establishment, and the development of a popular Yiddish theatre and press, establishing a context from which these popular texts came. The author then analyzes the poems and songs, revealing the hidden social histories of the people writing and performing them. For example, how Morris Winchevsky’s London poetry shows various attempts to engage the Jewish immigrant worker in specific London activism and political debate. Lachs explores how themes of marriage, relationships, and sexual exploitation appear regularly in music-hall songs, alluding to the changing nature of sexual roles in the immigrant London community influenced by the cultural mores of their new location. On the theme of religion, Lachs examines how ideas from Jewish texts and practice were used and manipulated by the socialist poets to advance ideas about class, equality, and revolution; and satirical writings offer glimpses into how the practice of religion and growing secularization was changing immigrants’ daily lives in the encounter with modernity. The detailed and nuanced analysis found in Whitechapel Noiseoffers a new reading of Anglo-Jewish, London, and immigrant history. It is a must-read for Jewish and Anglo-Jewish historians and those interested in Yiddish, London, and migration studies.

Whitechapel Gods

Whitechapel Gods
Author: S.M. Peters
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2008-02-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780451461933

A thrilling new Steampunk fantasy from a talented debut author TWO GODS-ONE CHANCE FOR MANKIND In Victorian London, the Whitechapel section is a mechanized, steam-driven hell, cut off and ruled by two mysterious, mechanical gods-Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock. Some years have passed since the Great Uprising, when humans rose up to fight against the machines, but a few brave veterans of the Uprising have formed their own Resistance-and are gathering for another attack. For now they have a secret weapon that may finally free them-or kill them all...

Appropriation

Appropriation
Author: David Evans
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2009
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262550709

"Many influential artists today draw on a legacy of 'stealing' images and forms from other makers. The term appropriation is particularly associated with the 'Pictures' generation, centred [sic] on New York in the 1980s; this anthology provides a far wider context. Historically, it reappraises a diverse lineage of precedents - from the Dadaist readymade to Situationist détournement - while contemporary 'art after appropriation' is considered from multiple perspectives within a global context." --back cover.

Colour

Colour
Author: David Batchelor
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Writings on color from modernism to the present, with contributions writers from Baudelaire to Baudrillard, surveying art from Paul Gauguin to Rachel Whiteread.

The Whitechapel Demon

The Whitechapel Demon
Author: Josh Reynolds
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2013-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9781940344041

Formed during the reign of Elizabeth I, the post of the Royal Occultist was created to safeguard the British Empire against threats occult, otherworldly, infernal and divine. It is now 1920, and the title and offices have fallen to Charles St. Cyprian. Accompanied by his apprentice Ebe Gallowglass, they defend the battered empire from the forces of darkness. In the wake of a seance gone wrong, a monstrous killer is summoned from the depths of nightmare by a deadly murder-cult. The entity hunts its prey with inhuman tenacity even as its worshippers stop at nothing to bring the entity into its full power... It's up to St. Cyprian and Gallowglass to stop the bloodthirsty horror before another notch is added to its gory tally, but will they become the next victims of the horror guised as London's most famous killer? In the tradition of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Josh Reynolds presents the Adventures of the Royal Occultist. Join Charles St. Cyprian and Ebe Gallowglass as they race to halt the workings of a sinister secret society and put an end to the monstrous manifestation in THE WHITECHAPEL DEMON!

Beauty

Beauty
Author: Dave Beech
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2009
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9780262512381

Key texts on beauty and its revival in contemporary art.