Author: David Castillo File Type: pdf David Castillo takes us on a tour of some horrific materials that have rarely been considered together. He sheds a fantastical new light on the baroque. ---Anthony J. Cascardi, University of California Berkeley Baroque Horrors is a textual archeologists dream, scavenged from obscure chronicles, manuals, minor histories, and lesser-known works of major artists. Castillo finds tales of mutilation, mutation, monstrosity, murder, and mayhem, and delivers them to us with an inimitable flair for the sensational that nonetheless rejects sensationalism because it remains so grounded in historical fact. ---William Egginton, Johns Hopkins University Baroque Horrors is a major contribution to baroque ideology, as well as an exploration of the grotesque, the horrible, the fantastic. Castillo organizes his monograph around the motif of curiosity, refuting the belief that Spain is a country incapable of organized scientific inquiry. ---David Foster, Arizona State University Baroque Horrors turns the current cultural and political conversation from the familiar narrative patterns and self-justifying allegories of abjection to a dialogue on the history of our modern fears and their monstrous offspring. When life and death are severed from nature and history, reality and authenticity may be experienced as spectator sports and staged attractions, as in the real lives captured by reality TV and the authentic cadavers displayed around the world in the Body Worlds exhibitions. Rather than thinking of virtual reality and staged authenticity as recent developments of the postmodern age, Castillo looks back to the Spanish baroque period in search for the roots of the commodification of nature and the horror vacui that accompanies it. Aimed at specialists, students, and readers of early modern literature and culture in the Spanish and Anglophone traditions as well as anyone interested in horror fantasy, Baroque Horrors offers new ways to rethink broad questions of intellectual and political history and relate them to the modern age. David Castillo is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Jacket art Frederick Ruyschs anatomical diorama. Engraving reproduction drawn from life by Cornelius Huyberts. Image from the Zymoglyphic Museum. **

Author: Musō Soseki File Type: epub At once profound, spiritual, and witty, Master of the Three Ways is a remarkable work about human nature, the essence of life, and how to live simply and with awareness. In three hundred and fifty-seven verses, the author, Hung Ying-ming a seventeenth-century Chinese sage explores good and evil, honesty and deception, wisdom and foolishness, and heaven and hell. He draws from the wisdom of the Three Creeds Taoism, Confucianism, and Zen Buddhism to impress upon us that by combining simple elegance with the ordinary, we can make our lives artistic and poetic. This sense, along with a particular understanding of Zen that makes art from the simple in everyday life, has permeated Chinese and Japanese culture to this day. The work is divided into two books. The first generally deals with the art of living in society and the second is concerned with mans solitude and contemplations of nature. These themes repeatedly spill over into each other, creating multiple levels of meaning.