Studies in Visual Culture – serie

A Host of Devils provides an in-depth account of the background, origin and development of the spirit figure sculptures which emerged during colonial times among the Makonde people of Mozambique.The creation of such works is shown to connect with a regional system of knowledge and practice, within which spirits function as a format for expression. The book describes the ways in which the sculpture emerged, as well as the author's experience of learning how to carve.

A Host of Devils provides an in-depth account of the background, origin and development of the spirit figure sculptures which emerged during colonial times among the Makonde people of Mozambique.The creation of such works is shown to connect with a regional system of knowledge and practice, within which spirits function as a format for expression. The book describes the ways in which the sculpture emerged, as well as the author's experience of learning how to carve.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Arthur Rimbaud, the volatile genius of French poetry, invented a language that captured the energy and visual complexity of the modern world. This book explores some of the technical aspects of this language in relation to the new techniques brought forth by the Impressionist painters such as Monet, Morisot, and Pissarro.

Proust and the Visual is an edited volume of essays written by Proustian specialists, concerned with a rich phenomenological category, the "visual" whose prominent role in the novel is at the heart of its modernity. The "visual" is defined as manifesting in the image not only space, but also time. The "visual" is considered as a category that delineates the conditions of possibility of all visibility and constitutes an integral part of both the progression of the narrator's journey towards becoming a writer and of the unfolding of the novel itself.

By examining the pictorial episodes in the Spanish baroque novella, this book elucidates how writers create pictorial texts, how audiences visualise their words, what consequences they exert on cognition and what actions this process inspires. To interrogate characters’ mental activity, internalisation of text and the effects on memory, this book applies methodologies from cognitive cultural studies, Classical memory treatises and techniques of spiritual visualisation. It breaks new ground by investigating how artistic genres and material culture help us grasp the audience’s aural, material, visual and textual literacies, which equipped the public with cognitive mechanisms to face restrictions in post-Counter-Reformation Spain. The writers examined include prominent representatives of Spanish prose —Cervantes, Lope de Vega, María de Zayas and Luis Vélez de Guevara— as well as Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses and an anonymous group in Córdoba.

This book is a collection of fourteen essays on the Dialogues on Painting, published by the Florentine-born Spanish painter and art theorist Vicente Carducho (1568–1638) in 1633. This was the first treatise in Spanish on the art of painting, written as part of a campaign led by Carducho in collaboration with other prominent painters working in Madrid, to raise the status of the artist from artisan to liberal artist. The treatise provides an overview of the melding of Italian Renaissance art theory and Madrilenian practice in the baroque era. It also offers first-hand insight into collecting in Madrid during this crucial period in the rapid expansion of the capital city. The present collection of essays by art historians and hispanists from the UK, Spain, Germany and the US examines each of the dialogues in detail, furnishing an account of Carducho’s campaign to establish a painting academy and to professionalise the office of the painter; detailing the publication history of the treatise and the interrelationship between painting and poetry; and it cites Carducho’s own painting in relation to the Italian and Spanish traditions within which he operated.

Luis de Morales, known as El Divino because of his intensely religious subject matter, is the most significant and recognisable Spanish painter of the mid-sixteenth century, the high point of the Spanish and Portuguese counter-reformations. He spent almost his entire working life in the Spanish city of Badajoz, not far from the border with Portugal and did not travel outside of a small area around that city, covering both sides of the border. The social, political and cultural environment of Badajoz and its environs is crucial for a thorough understanding of his output. This book provides that context in detail, looking at literature and liturgical theatre, the situation of converted Jews and Muslims, the presence of Erasmianism, Lutheranism and Illuminism (Alumbradismo), devotional writing for lay people and proximity to the Braganca ducal palace in Portugal as a means of explaining this most enigmatic of painters.

This book explores the visual and literary culture of transforming perceptions of children and childhood in France during the long nineteenth century. Charting the developmental period between two moments central to cultural and social understandings of children and childhood, the book’s case studies examine the conceptual and cultural development of children and childhood between the acknowledgement of the child in an Enlightenment context and the avant-garde championing of childhood in the early twentieth century. Recognising this as a crossroads of tradition and modernity, the text demonstrates how artists and writers reflected upon childhood and children as symbolic of both ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, as well as considering the implications for art, society and individual life.

Modern art in Britain during the early twentieth century is a complex and compromised proposition. It has frequently appeared selective in its assimilation (or rejection) of European modernism, with the results proving uneven and sometimes flawed in coherence as well as quality – from an international outlook to a reductive vorticist blast, from an insular ‘English’ modernism to a purist abstraction, from a British neo-romanticism to an earnest accommodation of French surrealism. This book reads critically the context of modernist visual art in the interwar, conceding ultimately to the absence of one representative manifestation in order to account for circuits of ruptures and seizures from which emerge singular instances negotiating the radically new European modernism. The emergence of Ceri Richards as a modernist of remarkable originality in London between the wars poses one such singularity, setting the artist as focus for the present study in critical analysis of a globally trenchant avant-garde and aspects of art in Britain read as tributary to the greater European exchange.

What do we see in our mind’s eye when we read Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu? The Recherche is full of objects behaving strangely, visual perspectives shifting unexpectedly, new dimensions opening within the familiar, and the lines between imagination, memory and perception blurring and collapsing. The present study argues that to see Proust’s universe, the reader must work to visualise the hitherto impossible, testing their cognitive prowess against dense descriptive challenges. Its chapters analyse how Proust’s descriptions of material, space, energy and time guide reader visualisation, demonstrating how clusters of these descriptions have the aggregate effect of expanding the reader’s imagination beyond its habitual conceptual constraints. Seeing Impossible Things ultimately proposes that the unity of the Recherche lies not in an accumulation of meaning in the form of an overarching theory of aesthetics, but in an accumulation of imaginative practice culminating in the novel’s final image.

In this fascinating study of Northwest Coast art, Jonathan Meuli has not only outlined a history of ideas associated with Northwest Coast art objects from pre-Contact time to the present day, but has also examined the ways in which the physical location and contexts in which the objects are produced has helped to determine their meanings. Locating his linear historical narrative within a wider exploration of ethnographic art ideas, which emphasizes links across cultures, Meuli examines the differing attitudes towards Northwest Coast material culture, particularly as these are embodied in oral mythic narratives, collection methods and architectural constructions.

The Art of the Text contributes to the fast-developing dialogue between textual studies and visual culture studies. It focuses on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually and, in essays by researchers in literature, screen and visual studies, the volume explores the visuality of the literary and non-literary text, with a sustained focus on French material of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here not as a state, but as a set of processes of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. By reading visually, the contributors here reactivate the visual-textual relations of canonical texts - from Romanticism to Naturalism, Surrealism to high Modernism; from film to fan literature, television to picture language.