Using the mirror as their motif, the Michauds pair traditional Islamic art miniatures, some of which date back several centuries, with their own photographs of the Middle East ... Through their pairings, the photographers provoke a fascinating interplay between past and present, between art and identity ... The photographs cover a period of nearly half a century, while the miniatures accompanying them reach back some eight hundred years. Geographically, the ensemble of both stretch from Morocco in the west to China in the east, embracing the heart of the Muslim world. Further enriching the timeless feel of both photographs and painted miniatures are extracts from the Koran and The Thousand and One Nights, as well as beautiful examples of Arab calligraphy"--Front and back flaps.

In Reflecting Mirrors, East and West Enrico Boccaccini investigates the transcultural phenomenon of advice literature for rulers, commonly referred to as Mirrors for Princes, by bringing together, for the first time, texts from multiple literary traditions.

How did English dramatists portray the neighboring domain of France and its history in their plays? The study examines a selection of Shakespearean and other history plays, the French tragedies of George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe's revealing historical tragedy The Massacre at Paris, and several literary and nonliterary historical texts. The result is a unique and timely contribution to our understanding of how cultural differences influenced the historical perspectives of English dramatists as well as how Renaissance plays shaped, and were shaped by, their historical material. Drawing on the insights of cultural studies, historiography, and ethnography, this study re-examines the historical representation of a neglected yet influential part of early modern Europe and the paradoxical relationship between English writers and their French subject matter. Although information about France and French history was becoming increasingly available in England at the end of the sixteenth century, for English writers France remained a distant land, its history and people misunderstood and misrepresented.

A compelling memoir of a gay man thoroughly familiar with the Japanese homosexual underground, a man anxious for his own health and unsure of the relationship he has left behind in the U.S.

" ... Using the mirror as their motif, photographer-poets Roland and Sabrina Michaud pair traditional Chinese artworks with their own photographs taken over a period of nearly twenty years ..."--Back cover.

The Persian Mirror explores France's preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu's Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle of the Persian ambassador's visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.