This accessible book explores the nature and importance of kinaesthesia, considering how action, agency and movement intertwine and are fundamental in feeling embodied in the world. Bringing together psychological, philosophical and cultural perspectives, the book examines the subjective feeling of movement in a cross-disciplinary manner. It discusses kinaesthesia through the framework of embodied cognition and outlines how contemporary discussion in psychology and phenomenology can inform our understanding of everyday experience. The book also sketches a framework for full appreciation of the sense of movement in performance and cultural life, discussing how a sense of movement is central to one’s agency. It is composed in four ‘movements’, aiming to achieve a connected and original argument for why movement matters, an argument exemplified in dance. The first movement explains the science of kinaesthesia and the history of the concept to a discussion of current thought informed by phenomenology and embodied cognition, the second quiet movement reflects on the psychological and philosophical dimensions of the sense of movement, the third movement turns to the culture of movement in dance and walking, and the fourth rests with the pleasures of movement, and emphasizes the social dimensions of movement in gesture and agency. This wide-ranging book is a must-read for all those interested in the psychology of movement, embodied cognition, performance studies and the interaction between psychology and dance. It will also be of interest to students and practitioners of embodied movement and dance practice therapies.

"This accessible book explores the nature and importance of kinaesthesia, considering how action, agency and movement intertwine and are fundamental in feeling embodied in the world"--

Bringing together a multidisciplinary group of scholars, this collection examines the Victorians' profound fascination with automata.

In the present time electronic media are the most powerful factory that influence music culture. They change social functions of music, they affect musical behavior, music taste and aesthetic ideals of the society. The power of film, television and other media is based on the fact that the media trigger complex audiovisual perceptions or they determine the ways of how music evokes extra-musical imaginations. Audiovisual Media and Music Culture struggles to systematize and classify the basic categories of audiovisual communication, it explains music in media as a category of space and time, reveals the laws of the music culture development, the advantages and disadvantages of civilization trends and it also separates value constants from transition episodes.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

The touch and movement senses have a large place in the modern arts. This is widely discussed and celebrated, often enough as if it represents a breakthrough in a primarily visual age. This book turns to history to show just how significant movement and the sense of movement were to pioneers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. It makes this history vivid through a picture of movement in the lives of an extraordinary generation of Russian artists, writers, theatre people and dancers bridging the last years of the tsars and the Revolution. Readers will gain a new perspective on the relation between art and life in the period 1890-1920 in great innovators like the poets Mayakovsky and Andrei Bely, the theatre director Meyerhold, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the young men and women in Russia inspired by her lead, and esoteric figures like Gurdjieff. Movement, and the turn to the body as a source of natural knowledge, was at the centre of idealistic creativity and hopes for a new age, for a 'new man', and this was true both for those who looked forward to the technology of the future and those who looked back to the harmony of Ancient Greece. The book weaves history and analysis into a colourful, thoughtful affirmation of movement in the expressive life.