Winner of the 1996 Gaspar Perez de Villegra Award from the Historical Society of New Mexico Mabel Dodge Luhan, hostess and visionary, made Taos, New Mexico, a center for artists and utopians when she moved there in 1917 and began inviting friends to visit her. Now available in paperback, Utopian Vistas is a chronicle of the house Luhan built in Taos and the poets, painters, photographers, film-makers, writers, educators, and visionaries whose lives and works were affected by the house and its environs. Lois Rudnick weaves a complex tapestry depicting American countercultures in New Mexico from the 1920s to the 1990s. "Should be required reading for art historians,film historians, ex-Beats and hippies, their children and grandchildren, and anyone interested in the possibility of making an imperfect America perfect at last."--Karal Ann Marling

This volume contains the essays presented at the workshop 'Visualizing Utopia' held in May 2005, organized by Mary Kemperink and Willemien Roenhorst. The essays presented here discuss utopian thinking from 1890 until 1930. From the end of the eighteenth century, this utopian thinking developed from what can be called 'classic' utopianism into 'modern' utopianism. Utopianism unmarked by temporality made way for a tale situated in time - future time. Thus what was first regarded as merely a thought experiment gradually assumed the character of a real political programme. In their view of the new world and new people, writers, artists, architects, social reformers, cultural critics, politicians, etc., would often draw on representations already present in the culture. These could be biblical representations, such as those of the Apocalypse, Christ the Saviour and earthly paradise, or ancient myths, such as those of the Age of Gold, Arcadia, the sun-drenched world of Gnosticism and the Wagnerian mythological universe. The workshop concentrated on the following two aspects: the way in which the future Utopia and the path that would lead to its realization was given shape in the artistic field as well as in the non-artistic field, and the question to which culturally rooted concepts these representations were related. This double line of approach created the opportunity for specialized researchers from different disciplines - history, cultural history, art history, history of architecture, literary history - to discuss utopianism as it manifested itself in Europe and the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

The first truly global history of work, an upbeat assessment from the age of the hunter-gatherer to the present day "Beginning in the hunting-and-gathering past, this long view of work shows how little has changed over millennia. Progressing through the rise of cities, wages and markets for labour, it traces a perennial cycle of injustice and resistance--and the age-old desire for more."--The Economist, "Best Books of 2021" "Absolutely fascinating. . . . Lucassen's own compassion shines through this magisterial book."--Christina Patterson, The Guardian We work because we have to, but also because we like it: from hunting-gathering more than 700,000 years ago to the present era of zoom meetings, humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs. Jan Lucassen provides an inclusive history of humanity's busy labor throughout the ages. Spanning China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Lucassen looks at the ways in which humanity organizes work: in the household, the tribe, the city, and the state. He examines how labor is split between men, women, and children; the watershed moment of the invention of money; the collective action of workers; and the impact of migration, slavery, and the idea of leisure. From peasant farmers in the first agrarian societies to the precarious existence of today's gig workers, this surprising account of both cooperation and subordination at work throws essential light on the opportunities we face today.

Spiritual Shakespeares is the first book to explore the scope for reading Shakespeare spiritually in the light of contemporary theory and current world events. Ewan Fernie has brought together an exciting cast of critics in order to respond to the ‘religious turn’ in recent literary theory and to the spiritualized politics of terrorism and the ‘War on Terror’. Exploring a genuinely new perspective within Shakespeare Studies, the volume suggests that experiencing the spiritual intensities of the plays could lead us back to dramatic intensity as such. It tests spirituality from a political perspective, as well as subjecting politics to an unusual spiritual critique. Amongst its controversial and provocative arguments is the idea that a consideration of spirituality might point the way forward for materialist criticism. Reaching across and beyond literary studies to offer challenging and powerful contributions from leading scholars, this book offers unique readings of some very familiar plays.

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Taking a thematic approach, this new companion provides an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and international study of American literary journalism. From the work of Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman to that of Joan Didion and Dorothy Parker, literary journalism is a genre that both reveals and shapes American history and identity. This volume not only calls attention to literary journalism as a distinctive genre but also provides a critical foundation for future scholarship. It brings together cutting-edge research from literary journalism scholars, examining historical perspectives; themes, venues, and genres across time; theoretical approaches and disciplinary intersections; and new directions for scholarly inquiry. Provoking reconsideration and inquiry, while providing new historical interpretations, this companion recognizes, interacts with, and honors the tradition and legacies of American literary journalism scholarship. Engaging the work of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, African American studies, gender studies, visual studies, media studies, and American studies, in addition to journalism and literary studies, this book is perfect for students and scholars of those disciplines.

Referred to in his time as “the Pretender” and “the sphinx of the Tuileries,” Louis Napoléon Bonaparte—the nephew of Emperor Napoleon I of France and himself ruler of the Second Empire (1852–1870)—so managed the manufacture of his public image and the masking of his private self that he is, ultimately, unknowable to this day. From the mysterious circumstances of his conception in 1807 to the strange events of his downfall in 1870 and death in 1873, he lived, loved, and reigned in an extraordinary aura of myth and fantasy under the shadow of his more famous uncle. Taking a highly innovative approach to this intriguing historical figure, David Baguley entertains sources in a mélange of media and forms—pictures, performances, spectacles, rituals, music, fiction, poems, plays, architecture, fashion, as well as Louis Napoléon’s own writings—to explore how the ruler was represented, invented, and interpreted by detractors and defenders alike. The dynamic process by which the legend of Napoleon III was elaborately fabricated and then vigorously dismantled unfolds under Baguley’s hand not chronologically but by generic categories, reflecting the author’s underlying conviction that history and literary depictments are not as incompatible as is often assumed. Baguley examines works by, among many others, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Émile Zola, Honoré Daumier, Jacques Offenbach, Gustave Flaubert, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning that range from history and biography to romanticized versions of the Emperor’s feats to parody, caricature, and satire. With its conspiratorial origins, its rising and dramatically falling action, its schemes, scandals, and tragic denouement, the Second Empire appears designed to inspire writers and artists. Napoleon III, Baguley observes, could well have been the central character, or temperament, in a naturalist novel. While most historians consider Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 1851 to be his boldest endeavor, Baguley shows in this expansive and eloquent work that his most extravagant venture was to found a second Napoleonic empire, and he illustrates not only the power of the name and the image but also the precariousness of the Emperor’s reliance upon them. For Napoleon III, dissimulation was his natural state; opportunist or utopian reformer, or something in between, he must remain one of history’s most elusive and controversial figures, ever resisting final assessment.