Paul R Davis – författare

"Bah! Humbug!" and "God bless us, every one!" are phrases that have resounded through the years, instantly recognizable as exclamations from Scrooge and Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens's beloved Christmas Carol. Told and retold to generations of children and adults, A Christmas Carol has been adapted, revised, condensed, added to, and modernized more than any other work in English literature. In this engaging and delightfully illustrated book, Paul Davis explores the various British and American versions of this work--on stage, film, radio, and television and in literature, cartoons, and comic books--showing how these interpretations have reflected the changing cultural perspectives of successive eras. According to Davis, six periods have shaped this cultural history, each contributing to the evolving culture-text of A Christmas Carol that is what we remember of all its parodies, piracies, and retellings. Dickens's original story, written in 1843, provided proof that urbanization had not destroyed Christmas and that the old country traditions could flourish in the new cities. By the 1870s, A Christmas Carol had become secular scripture, read as a retelling of the biblical Christmas story. The sophisticated decade preceding World War I treated the work for the first time as a story for children. In the Depression era, while the British reaffirmed a traditional Carol, Americans interpreted Scrooge's transformation as the triumph of a new business ethic of service and sharing. The Scrooge of the 1960s became a  Freudian figure tormented by his past, who conjured up Marley as a way of calling for help and who turned on to Christmas and tuned into joys he had denied himself. Now, when our focus in on hunger and homelessness rather than joy in the streets, Scrooge is again a social figure placed in the center of unsettling economic realities.

A revealing look at ancient art in the Menil Collection that addresses the problem of objects lacking archaeological contextThis innovative anthology discusses a diversity of ancient Mediterranean objects—a Mesopotamian votive figure, a Egyptian relief from the New Kingdom, and a Greek Geometric fawn among them—in the Menil Collection and three other US museums. It offers new models for understanding works from antiquity that lack archaeological context. Essays by 13 authors written with the layperson in mind employ a creative mixture of iconography, technical studies, and modern provenance research to gain insight into the meaning of the objects themselves and  what they can teach us more broadly aboutarchaeology, art history, and collecting practices. They take on complex issues of cultural heritage, legality, and taste to bring to life works that are often consigned to either the imperial past or a conceptual limbo. Essays on related groups or single objects introduce fresh frameworks to engage with the multilayered history these objects represent.The eight object biographies on ancient artifacts in the Menil are the first in-depth studies published on the collection. Essays by seven university professors probe works in their areas of expertise, while those by seven curators lay bare one object biography; frame provenance studies at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Getty Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and survey war’s effect on ancient works. The editors’ introduction and an epilogue responding to the other 13 texts review theoretical and practical issues in the study of artifacts lacking archaeological findspots (provenience). Recommended for programs and libraries in museum studies, archaeology, and art history; art and heritage law programs; and readers fascinated by cold-case detective work on the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean.Distributed for the Menil Collection

In this fully illustrated book, Paul Davis guides the reader to some of the most awe-inspiring and romantic castles in Wales and describes their construction and history. Reprint; first published in 2007.