This ground-breaking book presents a critical study of pictorial narrative in nineteenth-century European painting. Covering works from France, Germany, Britain, Italy and elsewhere, it traces the ways in which immensely popular artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme, Karl von Piloty and William Quiller Orchardson used unique visual strategies to tell thrilling and engaging stories. Regardless of genre, content or national context, these paintings share a fundamental modern narrative mode. Unlike traditional art, they do not rely on textual sources; nor do they tell stories through the human body alone. Instead, they experiment with objects, spaces, cause-and-effect relations and open-ended ambiguity, prompting viewers and reviewers to read for clues in order to weave their own elaborate tales.

Explores the little art communities and their aesthetic products in the early twentieth centuryHistoricizes and theorizes the role and function of the little art community as a geo-social formationComparative, place-based study of three semiperipheral (non-metropolitan) sites New readings of major authors Jeffers, O'Neill, and LawrenceInterdisciplinary methodology based in primary source analysisChallenges a center-periphery model of modernist activity and literary-aesthetic production and instead emphasizes a network-based, collaborative modelThis book is first to historicise and theorise the significance of the early twentieth-century little art colony as a uniquely modern social formation within a global network of modernist activity and production. Alongside a historical overview of the emergence of three critical sites of modernist activity - the little art colonies of Carmel, Provincetown and Taos - the book offers new critical readings of major authors associated with those places: Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O'Neill and D. H. Lawrence. Geneva M. Gano tracks the radical thought and aesthetic innovation that emerged from these villages, revealing a surprisingly dynamic circulation of persons, objects and ideas between the country and the city and producing modernisms that were cosmopolitan in character yet also site-specific.

A Companion to Modern Art presents a series of original essays by international and interdisciplinary authors who offer a comprehensive overview of the origins and evolution of artistic works, movements, approaches, influences, and legacies of Modern Art. Presents a contemporary debate and dialogue rather than a seamless consensus on Modern Art Aims for reader accessibility by highlighting a plurality of approaches and voices in the field Presents Modern Art’s foundational philosophic ideas and practices, as well as the complexities of key artists such as Cezanne and Picasso, and those who straddled the modern and contemporary Looks at the historical reception of Modern Art, in addition to the latest insights of art historians, curators, and critics to artists, educators, and more

This volume examines dynamic interactions between the calculative and speculative practices of commerce and the fruitfulness, variability, materiality, liveliness and risks of nature. It does so in diverse environments caught up in new trading relationships forged on and through frontiers for agriculture, forestry, mining and fishing. Historical resource frontiers are understood in terms of commercial knowledge systems organized as projects to transform landscapes and environments. The book asks: how were environments traded, and with what environmental and landscape consequences? How have environments been engineered, standardized and transformed within past trading systems? What have been the successes and failures of economic knowledge in dealing with resource production in complex environments? It considers cases from northern Europe, North and South America, Central Africa and New Zealand in the period between 1750 and 1990, and the contributors reflect on the effects of transnational commodity chains, competing economic knowledge systems, environmental ignorance and learning, and resource exploitation. In each case they identify tensions, blind spots, and environmental learning that plagued commercial projects on frontiers.

"Even after the end of modernism and postmodernism, the grandiose fantasies of artifice and self-reference that have informed so much modernist literature still resonate in the "social constructivism" of current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can perform or construct "identities" or social roles without external constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redefining aesthetic modernity's conception of and relation to nature and therefore its relation to reality. He shows how nature, no longer the idealized, maternally coded Utopia of the Romantics, becomes the trace of specific political, sexual, and technological traumas. The book's four chapters center on the representation of nature in German prose and-especially-poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, and Alfred Doblin from the years 1900 to 1945, while making reference to other literatures as well." "Powell's term "the Technological Unconscious" refers to a point of intersection between psychoanalysis and social and scientific theories of modernism and also to the philosophical mediation between history and nature, a motif important from Kant to Adorno. Powell critiques the tendency toward jargon of an often merely rhetorical "theory," while continuing to develop the philosophical and conceptual inheritance of Continental traditions. He analyzes in connection with the works treated the conceptions of subject and system in the theories of Adorno, Luhmann, and Lacan and their relation to their complement, nature. The Technological Unconscious is thus an important polemical intervention both in the debates over interdisciplinarity and in those between eclectic "culturalist" theories such as New Historicism and postcolonialism on the one hand and systems theory and psychoanalysis on the other." --Book Jacket.

Looking at suburbs as places of creativity gives rise to novel and thought-provoking narratives that typically run counter to the idea that suburbs are sites of "ordinary," "mundane," and "everyday" practices. Far from being geographies of "nowhere" – dull, materialistic, and monotone – suburbs are unpacked as being heterogeneous and historically layered places of living, work, and creation. Situating creativity in place and time, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres displaces mainstream understandings of creativity and widespread stereotypes commonly associated with the suburbs. Contributors explore the particular forms of creativity that suburbs elicit both in the process of their making, materialization, and community construction, and in the myriad ways in which suburbs are inhabited and experienced. They highlight accounts of suburbs as places that give people the space and latitude to shape individual and collective identities through creative practices at odds with mainstream culture, and often remote from the classic agglomeration "assets" associated with inner cities. Anchored in historical and geographical research, this volume highlights how and in what forms creativity should be understood in the suburbs, why and when creativity can be found, and how the notion of suburban creativity overthrows ingrained and dominant normative viewpoints. Rather than seeing creativity arise despite its suburban location, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres illuminates the emancipatory potential of suburbs for creativity.

This edited collection develops the Strong Program’s contribution to the sociological study of the arts and places it in conversation with other cultural perspectives in the field. Presenting some of the newest and most original research by both renowned figures and early career scholars, the volume marks a new stage in the development of the cultural sociology of art and music. The chapters in Part 1 set new agendas by reflecting on the field’s history, presenting theoretical innovations, and suggesting future directions for research. Part 2 explores aesthetic issues and challenges in the creation, experience, and interpretation of art and music. Part 3 focuses on the material environments and social settings where people engage with art and music. In Part 4, the contributors examine controversies about music and contestation over artistic matters, whether in the public sphere, in the American judicial system, or in an emerging academic discipline. The editor’s introduction and Ron Eyerman's afterword place the chapters in context and reflect on their collective contribution to meaning-centered sociology.