Long ago and without fail, three characters brought delight to audiences: the pantalooned Pierrot; Columbine, ever saucy and adroit; and Harlequin her lover, full of good natured drolleries and amusing tricks. From the legacy left by French pantomime and the Italian commedia dell'arte, this original story in pictures has been fashioned, with a special kind of ending to transcend time. The words, as in all mime, are in the eyes of the listener.

Pierrot, a theatrical stock character known by his distinctive costume of loose white tunic and trousers, is a ubiquitous figure in French art and culture. This richly illustrated book offers an account of Pierrot’s recurrence in painting, printmaking, photography and film, tracing this distinctive type from the art of Antoine Watteau to the cinema of Occupied France. As a visual type, Pierrot thrives at the intersection of theatrical and marketplace practices. From Watteau’s Pierrot (c. 1720) and Édouard Manet’s The Old Musician (1862) to Nadar and Adrien Tournachon’s Pierrot the Photographer (1855) and the landmark film Children of Paradise (1945), Pierrot has given artists a medium through which to explore the marketplace as a form for both social life and creative practice. Simultaneously a human figure and a theatrical mask, Pierrot elicits artistic reflection on the representation of personality in the marketplace.

The travelling players of Litonya have destroyed many lives by manipulating the mystical realm of Tarya, and Mina has discovered her brother is one of their victims. Although she is determined to stop them, her hopes for help from the Council of Muses have been dashed. The only possibility for healing lies in a journey to the heart of Litonya, and into a past long lost to history. When ancient stories give up their forgotten secrets, a path forward begins to appear. But love and talent are pushed to their limits as Mina and her companions come face to face with an enemy who has finally stepped out of the shadows.

Pierrot is one of Alexandre Dumas' stranger tales, a delightful mishmash of humor, adventure, satire, and poignancy. While presented as a children's tale, it has plenty of layers making it a satisfying read for grownups as well.

Jonsson analyzes how Musil explains the foundation of modern theories of subjectivity.

This book, a companion to the author's Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (Princeton, 1978), provides a detailed history of nineteenth-century French pantomime, from the feeries of Jean-Gaspard Deburau at the Theatre des Funambules to the cabaret entertainments of Georges Wague at the height of la Belle Epoque. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

With the Ta-Nehisi Coates-authored Black Panther comic book series (2016); recent films Django Unchained (2012) and The Birth of a Nation (2016); Nate Parker's cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion; and screen adaptations of Marvel's Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018); violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however, that the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries. The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as a heathen and a barbarian, his values-honor, loyalty, love-reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity. Pierrot's The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.