Author: Deborah Philips File Type: pdf The study investigates the cultural production of the visual iconography of popular pleasure grounds from the eighteenth century pleasure garden to the contemporary theme park. Deborah Philips identifies the literary genres, including fairy tale, gothic horror, Egyptiana and the Western which are common to carnival sites, tracing their historical transition across a range of media to become familiar icons of popular culture.Though the bricolage of narratives and imagery found in the contemporary leisure zone has been read by many as emblematic of postmodern culture, the author argues that the clash of genres and stories is less a consequence of postmodern pastiche than it is the result of a history and popular tradition of conventionalised iconography. **About the Author Deborah Philips is Professor of Literature and Cultural History at the University of Brighton. Her publications include Brave New Causes (with Ian Haywood) Writing Well (with Debra Penman and Liz Linington, and Writing Romance Womens Fiction 1945-2005.

Author: Vincent van Gogh File Type: epub In addition to his many remarkable paintings and drawings, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) left behind a fascinating and voluminous body of correspondence. This highly accessible book includes a broad selection of 265 letters, from a total of 820 in existence, that focus on Van Goghs relentless quest to find his destiny, a search that led him to become an artist the close bond with his brother Theo his fraught relationship with his father his innate yearning for recognition and his great love of art and literature. The correspondence not only offers detailed insights into Van Goghs complex inner life, but also re-creates the world in which he lived and the artistic avant-garde that was taking hold in Paris. The letters are accompanied by a general introduction, historic family photographs, and reproductions of87 actual pages ofletters that contain sketches by Van Gogh. Selected from the critically acclaimed 6-volume set of letters published by the Van Gogh Museum in 2009,Ever Yoursis the essential book on Van Goghs letters, which every art and literature lover needs to own.

Author: Timothy Tackett File Type: epub On a June night in 1791, King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette fled Paris in disguise, hoping to escape the mounting turmoil of the French Revolution. They were arrested by a small group of citizens a few miles from the Belgian border and forced to return to Paris. Two years later they would both die at the guillotine. It is this extraordinary story, and the events leading up to and away from it, that Tackett recounts in gripping novelistic style.

Author: Kathryn Brown File Type: pdf 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 Matisses position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artists work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre dartiste 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 arts 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 Matisses 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 Matisses artists books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.*Review Kathryn Brown here explores all aspects of Matisses achievements as a book artist, showing how his engagement with writers became a driving force in his aesthetic development. Moving between visual and literary imperatives, she also provides an informed and subtle presentation of the historical context in which Matisse was working, further enriching our appreciation of the books he designed, particularly during and after the second World War, when he combined drawings, cut-outs and poetry to express a spirit of resolute resistance and resilient cultural identity. Peter Read, Professor of Modern French Literature and Visual Arts, University of Kent, UK Henri Matisse hails from the distinctly French tradition of the painter-poet whose creative output (as well as personal and professional life) was inextricably linked with literature and writers. In Kathryn Browns clear-eyed and discerning study Matisses Poets, the artists collaborative book ventures serve as a fascinating lens through which to examine Matisses relationship to literature and writers. Using the metaphor of the stage, Brown defines Matisses artists books as an effective space where the painter could perform his role not only as illustrator but also as reader, critic, and artist acutely aware of his public image. As such, each chapter in this well-researched and amply illustrated study shows how Matisse self-consciously engaged with literary works by authors as diverse as Stephane Mallarme, Henry de Montherlant, Charles Baudelaire, Pierre de Ronsard, James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, among others, to produce and extend his own pictorial language as well as to position himself as a sophisticated reader of both the literary canon and the avant-garde. Brown therefore rightly places Matisses artists books within a broad matrix of concerns that allows her to go beyond conventional text-image analyses to include the social and political valences of Matisses creative and strategic decisions in his diverse publishing projects. The interdisciplinary framework of Matisses Poets will attract literary critics as well as art historians and scholars of media and book history. Its lucid prose and finely tuned arguments will make it a useful tool for teaching as well as scholarly research. Anna Sigridur Arnar, Professor of Art History, Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA About the Author Kathryn Brown is Lecturer in Art History at Loughborough University, UK. She is the author of Women Readers in French Painting 18701890 (2012).