One of Pierre Michon's most powerful works, this book imagines decisive moments in the lives of five artists of different times and places: Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Antoine Watteau, Claude Lorrain, and Lorentino, a little-remembered disciple of Piero della Francesca. Michon focuses on particular moments when artist and model collide, whether that model is a person or a landscape, inner or outer. In the five separate tales he evokes the full passion of the artist's struggle to capture the world in images even as the world resists capture. Each story is a small masterpiece that transcends national boundaries and earns its place among the essential works of world literature.

Master and servant acts, the cornerstone of English employment law for more than four hundred years, gave largely unsupervised, inferior magistrates wide discretion over employment relations, including the power to whip, fine, and imprison men, women, and children for breach of private contracts with their employers. The English model was adopted, modified, and reinvented in more than a thousand colonial statutes and ordinances regulating the recruitment, retention, and discipline of workers in shops, mines, and factories; on farms, in forests, and on plantations; and at sea. This collection presents the first integrated comparative account of employment law, its enforcement, and its importance throughout the British Empire. Sweeping in its geographic and temporal scope, this volume tests the relationship between enacted law and enforced law in varied settings, with different social and racial structures, different economies, and different constitutional relationships to Britain. Investigations of the enforcement of master and servant law in England, the British Caribbean, India, Africa, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, and colonial America shed new light on the nature of law and legal institutions, the role of inferior courts in compelling performance, and the definition of "free labor" within a multiracial empire. Contributors: David M. Anderson, St. Antony's College, Oxford Michael Anderson, London School of Economics Jerry Bannister, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia M. K. Banton, National Archives of the United Kingdom, London Martin Chanock, La Trobe University, Australia Paul Craven, York University Juanita De Barros, McMaster University Christopher Frank, University of Manitoba Douglas Hay, York University Prabhu P. Mohapatra, Delhi University, India Christopher Munn, University of Hong Kong Michael Quinlan, University of New South Wales Richard Rathbone, University of Wales, Aberystwyth Christopher Tomlins, American Bar Foundation, Chicago Mary Turner, London University

Although life in Tudor was ordered in a strict hierarchy, service was common for all classes, and servants were not necessarily the lowest stratum in society. This book looks at the servant life in the Tudor period. It examines relations between servants and their masters, peering into the bedrooms, kitchens and parlours of the ordinary folk.

From Daniel Defoe’s Family Instructor to William Godwin’s political novel Caleb Williams, literature written for and about servants tells a hitherto untold story about the development of sexual and gender ideologies in the early modern period. This original study explores the complicated relationships between domestic servants and their masters through close readings of such literary and nonliterary eighteenth-century texts. The early modern family was not biologically defined. It included domestic servants who often had strong emotional and intimate ties to their masters and mistresses. Kristina Straub argues that many modern assumptions about sexuality and gender identity have their roots in these affective relationships of the eighteenth-century family. By analyzing a range of popular and literary works—from plays and novels to newspapers and conduct manuals—Straub uncovers the economic, social, and erotic dynamics that influenced the development of these modern identities and ideologies. Highlighting themes important in eighteenth-century studies—gender and sexuality; class, labor, and markets; family relationships; and violence—Straub explores how the common aspects of human experience often intersected within the domestic sphere of master and servant. In examining the interpersonal relationships between the different classes, she offers new ways in which to understand sexuality and gender in the eighteenth century.

Longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature What happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better? Five people, in very different circumstances, from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city, find out the meanings of dislocation, and the desire for more. Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.