Edward Weston (1886–1958) was one of the most celebrated photographers of the twentieth century. Jean Charlot (1898–1979), a classically trained French artist best known for his murals, woodcuts, and paintings celebrating Mexican culture, played a key role as a participant and chronicler of the Mexican Renaissance. This book, based on letters that Weston and Charlot exchanged from the early 1920s until Weston’s death in 1958, documents a friendship that says as much about art—about photography and fresco, practice, criticism, and history—as it does about the intersection of a number of fascinating characters, the ups and downs of the correspondents’ daily lives, the pursuit of their dreams and aspirations, and the support and encouragement they gave each other. Lew Andrews crafts a multivalent narrative that reconfigures our understanding of Weston, Charlot, and their era, shedding new light on specific events and artwork. While giving us rare insight into the everyday life of these artists, this work also supplies an important chapter in the history of twentieth-century art and photography, seen close up and from the inside.

Since the nineteenth century, children's literature has been adapted for both the stage and the screen. As the twentieth century progressed, children's books provided the material for an increasing range of new media, from radio to computer games, from television to cinema blockbuster. Although such adaptations are now recognised as a significant part of the culture of childhood and popular culture in general, little has been written about the range of products and experiences that they generate. This book brings together writers whose work offers contrasting perspectives on the process of adaptation and the varying transformations - social, historical and ideological - that take place when a text moves from the page to another medium. Linking all these contributions is an interest in the changing definition of children's literature and its target audience within an increasingly media-rich society.

Focusing on pictorial, literary, screen, and operatic representations of Juana of Castile, this is the first interdisciplinary book that incorporates both sides of the coin (history and myth; fact and fiction) that shaped the enigmatic image of this much maligned Spanish queen. Even though the fictional reinvention of Juana of Castile has been the subject of sporadic articles, this is the first time that an English-language reader has access to a book that takes an in-depth look at the panorama of literary, pictorial, musical, and cinematic recreations of this historical character. The editors' aim is to incorporate works of authors from different countries (Spain, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, France) and an entire spectrum of literary genres (narrative, poetry, theater, essay), as well as opera and the visual arts. --From publisher's description.

From the time when archaeologists first began to discover the civilization's spectacular ruins, Mexico's Mayan past has been a boundless source of inspiration, ideas, and iconography for the modernist imagination. This study examines the ways artists, architects, filmmakers, photographers, and other producers of visual culture in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and beyond have mined Mayan history and imagery. Beginning his study in the mid-nineteenth century, with the first mechanically reproduced and mass distributed images of the Mayan ruins, and ending with recent works that address this history of representation, Lerner argues that Maya modernism is the product of an ongoing pan-American modernism characterized by a continuing series of reinterpretations, collaborations, and exchanges in which Yucatecans, Mexicans and foreigners, mestizos, Mayas, and others all participate and are free to endorse, misunderstand, reinterpret, or reject each other's ideas.

This book analyzes the initial engagement with Hollywood by key Latin American writers and intellectuals during the first few decades of the 20th century. The film metropolis presented an ambiguous, multivalent sign for established figures like Horacio Quiroga, Alejo Carpentier and Mário de Andrade, as well as less renowned writers like the Mexican Carlos Noriega Hope, the Chilean Vera Zouroff and the Cuban Guillermo Villarronda. Hollywood’s arrival on the scene placed such writers in a bind, as many felt compelled to emulate the "artistry" of a medium dominated by a nation posing a symbolic affront to Latin American cultural and linguistic autonomy as well as the region’s geopolitical sovereignty. The film industry thus occupied a crucial site of conflict and reconciliation between aesthetics and politics.