Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.

The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1842.

First published in 1895, this book recounts the author's 1893 expedition to the Tafilet oasis in Morocco, one of the largest oases in the world. Previously largely inaccessible (before the invention of the motor car it was at least 10 days' journey south of Fez across the Atlas mountains and the Sahara), Harris took advantage of the Sultan of Morocco Mulai el Hassen's decision to pay a visit to the oasis during the autumn of that year. Throughout the book the author describes in great detail the places he visited and the people he met along the way. There are detailed descriptions of Marrakesh and the villages of the Atlas Mountains, as well as ruminations on the differences between the Arabs and the Berber tribes, and the situation of the Jews. Crossing the desert, Harris reached the Sultan's camp at the edge of the oasis, and there follows a detailed description of the activities of the Sultan and his retinue, their dealings with the troublesome tribes of the area, and accounts of the history, geography and people of Tafilet. The book concludes with the author's return journey to the north, and an account of the events following the Sultan's own return from the oasis and his subsequent death. Painting as it does a vivid picture of the state of Morocco at the very end of the 19th century, Walter B. Harris's Tafilet is sure to be of great interest to all those fascinated by the history of this unique and diverse North African country.