This is the history of the relationship between mass produced visual media and religion in the United States. It is a journey from the 1780s to the present - from early evangelical tracts to teenage witches and televangelists, and from illustrated books to contemporary cinema. David Morgan explores the cultural marketplace of public representation, showing how American religionists have made special use of visual media to instruct the public, to practice devotion and ritual, and to form children and converts. Examples include: studying Jesus as an American idol Jewish kitchens and Christian Parlors Billy Sunday and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the anti-slavery movement. This unique perspective reveals the importance of visual media to the construction and practice of sectarian and national community in a nation of immigrants old and new, and the tensions between the assimilation and the preservation of ethnic and racial identities. As well as the contribution of visual media to the religious life of Christians and Jews, Morgan shows how images have informed the perceptions and practices of other religions in America, including New Age, Buddhist and Hindu spirituality, and Mormonism, Native American Religions and the Occult.

The Lure of the Image shows how a close study of camera movement challenges key assumptions underlying a wide range of debates within cinema and media studies. Highlighting the shifting intersection of point of view and camera position, Daniel Morgan draws on a range of theoretical arguments and detailed analyses across cinemas to reimagine the relation between spectator and camera—and between camera and film world. With sustained accounts of how the camera moves in films by Fritz Lang, Guru Dutt, Max Ophuls, and Terrence Malick and in contemporary digital technologies, The Lure of the Image exposes the persistent fantasy that we move with the camera within the world of the film and examines the ways that filmmakers have exploited this fantasy. In so doing, Morgan provides a more flexible account of camera movement, one that enables a fuller understanding of the political and ethical stakes entailed by this key component of cinematic style.

This volume tackles the subject of illustration, technically, metaphorically and historically in nineteenth-century periodicals, displaying the ubiquity of the visual in the press: the articles cover material illustration, graphics, and design and metaphorical use of images in the letterpress, offering specific examples and theoretical approaches.

Always fascinated in his poetry by the nature of color and light and the power of the image, Bonnefoy continues to pursue these themes in his discussion of the lure and truth of representation. He sees the painter as a poet whose language is visual, and he seeks to find out what visual artists can teach those who work with words.

The Weight of Images explores the ways in which media images can train their viewers’ bodies. Proposing a shift away from an understanding of spectatorship as being constituted by acts of the mind, this book favours a theorization of relations between bodies and images as visceral, affective engagements that shape our body image - with close attention to one particularly charged bodily characteristic in contemporary western culture: fat. The first mapping of the ways in which fat, gendered bodies are represented across a variety of media forms and genres, from reality television to Hollywood movies, from TV sitcoms to documentaries, from print magazine and news media to online pornography, The Weight of Images contends that media images of fat bodies are never only about fat; rather, they are about our relation to corporeal vulnerability overall. A ground-breaking volume, engaging with a rich variety of media and cultural texts, whilst examining the possibilities of critical auto-ethnography to unravel how body images take shape affectively between bodies and images, this book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, media, cultural and gender studies, with interests in embodiment and affect.

This collection of case studies investigates the significance and function of national identity. The authors see national consciousness in terms of the circumstances in which it arose, and in terms of the meaning which it had for a specific group or individual. Representations of the nation could serve to legitimize or support specific political or social agendas, or to provide people with a point of fixity amidst changing circumstances. The articles in this volume trace these aspects of national consciousness in the case of a single country: The Netherlands.

This is the first book to provide a full and coherent introduction to the photography of Victorian Scotland. The material has been structured and the topics organised, with appropriate illustrations, as both a readable narrative and a foundation text for