There is a gap in knowledge about artistic careers--few people fully understand the economics and sociology of the visual and performing arts. The public impression of the lives of artists are distorted because typically only the very successful get attention. Society generalizes based on those people who are statistical exceptions, not by looking at average careers, let alone those who discontinue their pursuit of arts professions. For emerging young artists, it is essential to know the histories of the different performing and visual arts, and their training and craft traditions. Additionally, understanding the role of informal learning, differences in types of institutions, approaches to teaching-learning, and the subsequent likely career impact is important. While some have hailed the advances in the arts as a result of new technology, changes in the finances of performers are greatly impacted by the digital world. Many have commented on the greying audiences for classical music and opera, but the characteristics of the younger generations who appear to want to view, listen, and interact with visual and performance art differently may be even more impactful.

This biographical dictionary of some 3,000 photographers (and workers in related trades), active in a vast area of North America before 1866, is based on extensive research and enhanced by some 240 illustrations, most of which are published here for the first time. The territory covered extends from central Canada through Mexico and includes the United States from the Mississippi River west to, but not including, the Rocky Mountain states. Together, this volume and its predecessor, Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840-1865, comprise an exhaustive survey of early photographers in North America and Central America, excluding the eastern United States and eastern Canada. This work is distinguished by the large number of entries, by the appealing narratives that cover both professional and private lives of the subjects, and by the painstaking documentation. It will be an essential reference work for historians, libraries, and museums, as well as for collectors of and dealers in early American photography. In addition to photographers, the book includes photographic printers, retouchers, and colorists, and manufacturers and sellers of photographic apparatus and stock. Because creators of moving panoramas and optical amusements such as dioramas and magic lantern performances often fashioned their works after photographs, the people behind those exhibitions are also discussed.

These essays explore some of the most significant current issues concerning the terrain of the Gothic perspective, offering a variety of possible answers to the crucial question: What is Gothic? The collection begins by addressing general issues about the locations and structure of Gothic; this is followed by various considerations of Gothic as a specific historical phenomenon, linked with specific aspects of British, American, and European society; and, finally, by an exploration of Gothic writing during recent decades.

In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are. For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms—Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow—enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America—housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy—now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between “serious” and “popular,” between “high” and “low” culture came to dominate America’s expressive arts. “If there is a tragedy in this development,” Lawrence Levine comments, “it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period—and many have still not regained—their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.” In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.

This collection brings together key writings which convey the breadth of what is understood to be Gothic, and the ways in which it has produced, reinforced, and undermined received ideas about literature and culture. In addition to its interests in the late eighteenth-century origins of the form, this collection anthologizes path-breaking essays on most aspects of gothic production, including some of its nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century manifestations across a broad range of cultural media.

Tempests After Shakespeare shows how the 'rewriting' of Shakespeare's play serves as an interpretative grid through which to read three movements - postcoloniality, postpatriarchy, and postmodernism - via the Tempest characters of Caliban, Miranda/Sycorax and Prospero, as they vie for the ownership of meaning at the end of the twentieth century. Covering texts in three languages, from four continents and in the last four decades, this study imaginatively explores the collapse of empire and the emergence of independent nation-states; the advent of feminism and other sexual liberation movements that challenged patriarchy; and the varied critiques of representation that make up the 'postmodern condition'.

The only collection to concentrate on the European Gothic - writing in English, French, German, Russian and Spanish. Charts the rich process of cross-fertilisation, especially regarding Anglo-French exchanges in the development of the Gothic novel. Emphasises the importance of the impact of translation on the development of the Gothic novel. Uses a variety of critical perspectives to reassess the work of authors such as Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Maturin, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Jan Potocki, Balzac, Dostoevesky, Gaston Leroux and Djuna Barnes. Offers a fresh way of thinking about Gothic lineages and histories.