Author: Jack Fruchtman Jr. File Type: epub This concise, insightful study explores the sources and impact of one of the early republics most influential minds.An Englishman by birth, an American by choice and necessity, Thomas Paine advocated ideas about rights, equality, democracy, and liberty that were far advanced beyond those of his American compatriots. His seminal works, Common Sense and the Rights of Man, were rallying cries for the American and French Revolutions. More than any other eighteenth-century political writer and activist, Paine defies easy categorization. A man of contrasts and contradictions, Paine was as much a believer in the power of reason as he was in a benevolent deity. He was at once liberal and conservative, a Quaker who was not a pacifist, and an inherently gifted writer who was convinced he was always right.Jack Fruchtman Jr. analyzes Paines radical thought both in the context of his time and as a blueprint for the future development of republican government. His systematic approach identifies the themes of signal importance to Paines political thought, demonstrating especially how crucial religion and God were to the development and expression of his political ideals.

Author: Suzanne Aspden File Type: pdf Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera houses physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera houses spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera houses landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contextsfrom the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the Old world to the New. One of the books most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environmentsthat is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how operas spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions. **ReviewThis volume goes beyond the old and prevalent Marxian interpretation of the place of the opera house as an expression of centralized power, instead exploring the more nuanced possibility of a network of competing powers at play. Original and thought-provoking, these essays offer a multitude of new and fresh perspectives on the situatedness of opera.--Pierpaolo Polzonetti, author of Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution About the Author Suzanne Aspden is associate professor of music at the University of Oxford and fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. She is the author or editor of two previous books, and is a former editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.

Author: Dominique Goblet File Type: pdf Pretending Is Lying is a memoir unlike any other. The first book to appear in English by the acclaimed Belgian artist Dominique Goblet, it is at once an intimate account of love and familial dysfunction and an audacious experiment in graphic storytelling. In a series of dazzling fragments--skipping through time, and from raw, slashing color to delicate black and white--Goblet examines the most important relationships in her life with her partner, Guy-Marc with her daughter, Nikita with her alcoholic, well-meaning father and with her abusive mother. More than a decade in the making, the result is an unnerving comedy of paternal dysfunction, an achingly ambivalent love story (with asides on the Beach Boys), and a searing account of childhood trauma--a dizzying, unforgettable view of a life in progress and a tour de force of the art of comics--

Author: Michal Peled Ginsburg File Type: pdf What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. Through close readings of short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, the author shows how the subjectivities of sitter, painter, and viewer are produced in relation to representations shaped by particular interests and power relations, often determined by gender as well as by class. She focuses on the power that can accrue to the painter from the act of representation (often at the expense of the portraits subject), while also exploring how and why this act may threaten the portrait painters sense of self. Analyzing the viewers relation to the portrait, she demonstrates how portrait stories problematize the very act of seeing and with it the way subjectivity is constructed in the field of vision. ** What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. Through close readings of short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, the author shows how the subjectivities of sitter, painter, and viewer are produced in relation to representations shaped by particular interests and power relations, often determined by gender as well as by class. She focuses on the power that can accrue to the painter from the act of representation (often at the expense of the portraits subject), while also exploring how and why this act may threaten the portrait painters sense of self. Analyzing the viewers relation to the portrait, she demonstrates how portrait stories problematize the very act of seeing and with it the way subjectivity is constructed in the field of vision. **