"Pygmalion and the Image" is a poem form The Earthly Paradise by William Morris which is a lengthy collection of retellings of various myths and legends from Greece and Scandinavia. The poem is exceptionally balanced in all its parts. Over all the other versions, its superiority is not because of the manner narration but stems from its greater spirituality, a more refined feeling rather than a more refined form. Before the appearance of "Pygmalion and the Image," each narrator of the legend had resided mainly on the physical side, sensuous according to his temperament, of the tale. It's the only poem from the collection for the illustration of which Burne-Jones actually executed a complete series of pictures; and though the finished paintings are four in number, and the original designs, were twelve, the numerically smaller set is complete in the best sense. Not only does it illustrate fully the text and spirit of Morris's poem, but each picture in it, though finished with the loving care and elaboration which Burne-Jones lavished on his paintings, fails of its full significance unless considered in its relation to the series of which it forms a part." The illustrations consist: The Heart Desires; The Hand Refrains; The Godhead Fires; The Soul Attains

"Examines the work of eighteenth-century sculptor Ignaz Gèunther within the context of Bavarian Rococo art and Counter-Reformation religious visual culture"--Provided by publisher.

Sci-fi luminary Stanley G. Weinbaum first broke through with the hugely influential story "A Martian Odyssey," one of the first to depict an alien being in a somewhat sympathetic light. Written in 1935, the short tale "Pygmalion's Spectacles" is no less innovative: it centers around the implications of a technology that's surprisingly close to what we now call virtual reality.

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. While Watch and Ward has long been dismissed as an early apprentice work, it marks an important stage in James's development as a fiction writer, building upon the stories he wrote during the late 1860s and pointing, at the same time, to the works he would write during the ensuing decade and which would secure his reputation, including 'Daisy Miller', The American and The Portrait of a Lady. Extensive explanatory notes enable modern readers to understand the novel's historical, cultural and literary references.

Pygmalion's sculpture, which the gods endowed with life, marks, according to this book, perhaps the first instance in Western art of an image that exists on its own terms, rather than simply imitating something else. Stoichita delivers this image and its avatars from the shadow cast by art that merely replicates reality.